Civil War Humor

Preface

[ ix ] Preface It is probably safe to say that more books have been published about the Civil War than any other subject in American history. So I was surprised a few years ago while looking over the bounty of books on all kinds of arcane topics at a bookstore in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that I saw nothing on humor of the Civil War. Although no expert on that conflict, as a literary historian who had spent most of his professional career writing about American humor, I did know that quite a bit of humor had been published. I knew, too, that much had been written about the major humorists of that period—Charles Farrar Browne (“Artemus Ward”), David Ross Locke (“Petroleum V. Nasby”), Robert Henry Newell (“Orpheus C. Kerr”), and Charles H. Smith (“Bill Arp”)—but what about the thousands of stories, songs, cartoons, and visual humor of many kinds? I owned Sylvia G. L. Dannett’s A Treasury of Civil War Humor (1963), primarily a good anthology with introductory comments to different genres, including pictorial envelopes and comic valentines, all of it in a format that features the graphics to good advantage, albeit black and white. I ordered Paul Zall’s Blue and Gray Laughing (1996), a chronological arrangement of brief stories and illustrations, most of them from periodicals. Zall does cite his sources, but at times inaccurately, and silently edits some. Facing retirement, I decided that I would add yet another Civil War book to the shelf. Years earlier, when I was writing a book on nineteenth-century New England humor, I got used to people asking, with some irony, maybe sarcasm, “Oh, there was some?” Somehow, though, I did not anticipate the same response when I said I was writing a book on Civil War humor. This time the question seemed not so much ironic, but doubtful about how war could be humorous. Well, there was a great deal of Civil War humor in many forms, but the point is not that this war, or any war, is laughable, but that humor provides a way of dealing with something so literally and figuratively devastating, even horrific, in so many ways. And that is what this book is about. [ x ] PRefACe Anyone who writes a serious book about any kind of humor has to consider the most basic question on the subject: “What is ‘humor’?” which is another way of asking “What is humorous?” Any answer is complicated, because the responses to humor are at the same time intellectual, emotional, and even physiological, and so theories abound in several academic disciplines. Humor is something that makes us react not necessarily with laughter, maybe only a smile, but we do react because we see something that strikes us as amusing, funny, however we might express it. (“Risible” is a fine word, but not in common enough usage.) In any case, somehow we sense that we “get it,” that we recognize what the author, speaker, or artist wants us to see as humorous. Two other, rather different, responses interest me here, though, because in this book I want to go from “getting” Civil War humor to “understanding” something about it and its role in the culture at the time,andthatismorecomplex.Foronething,wemaywellgetwhatthe author intended as humorous but not think it so at all; we might frown rather than smile. Much in Civil War humor is racist, for example, even when that is not intended, but there is much to be learned about the past, and maybe the present, too, for all that. Another very different response is that we do not get at all what is intended as humorous, even though where it was published, a caption, or something about the format signals that it is. Then we neither smile nor frown, but scratch our head. In either case, in order first to get the humor and then to understand something about it, that humor needs to be explained, analyzed. Ah, “But when you analyze humor,” we humor scholars are told archly, “it is no longer humorous!” (Implied is that we have no sense of humor. Which may be true; see the story below.) And yet, to analyze is exactly what anyone does, very quickly and therefore unconsciously, for anything to be humorous, such as a cartoon, a scene in a movie or sitcom, a joke. We get it and think it is funny; we get it and do not think it is; or we just do not get it, period...