Project MUSE®: Studies in American Humor - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in American Humor.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USSeries 4, Vol. 1 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in American HumorTWOProject MUSE®Studies in American Humor2333-99340095-280XLatest articles in Studies in American Humor. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Due Credit; or, Humor in the Gilded Age
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972183
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Perhaps the Gilded Age codified the idea that the business of the United States is not democracy, never mind a strong defense of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. In fact, as Calvin Coolidge put it to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925, the business of the US is, well, business.1 Or, to be fair, it is the business of "the people"—a populace concerned with production, consumption, investment, and prosperity, which is to say all the tricks and trades of the American dream.Perhaps.It is, of course, not insignificant that Coolidge made this comment at the midpoint of the Roaring Twenties and that he himself was born into the era of industrial revolution and presided over an economy in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallIntroduction: Due Credit; or, Humor in the Gilded Age2025-10-23text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Due Credit; or, Humor in the Gilded Age2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®605432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Marietta Holley's Samantha Allen: Humorous Housewife, Satiric Suffragette
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972184
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Marietta Holley has the distinction of being one of the most commercially successful American comic writers, enjoying a career of more than forty years during which she published more than twenty books. Among women writing comic material in the nineteenth century, only Sara Parton as "Fanny Fern" matches the popularity of Holley's character Samantha Allen. Moreover, only Sam Clemens as "Mark Twain" matches Holley during the Gilded Age as a premier comic writer, yet twenty-first century scholarship has mostly ignored her. Despite Holley in her day being called "the female Mark Twain," no one has undertaken an extensive comparison of the two authors.1 A basic fact unites them, however: like Sam Clemens, Holley
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallMarietta Holley's Samantha Allen: Humorous Housewife, Satiric Suffragette2025-10-23text/htmlen-USMarietta Holley's Samantha Allen: Humorous Housewife, Satiric Suffragette2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®930462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Dear God, Let Us Praise Mark Twain's Satanic Sense of Humor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972185
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We cannot take this lightly: everyone has a devil inside. The humor in the works of Mark Twain is nothing if not a muddle of right and wrong, good and evil, life worlds and dream worlds, angels and demons. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December 1905 at a party hosted by Colonel George Harvey, owner and editor of the North American Review, Twain delivered a speech. The speech, according to reports, was melancholic, severe, and hilarious. The great humorist spoke "in his characteristic, inimitable drawl," freewheeling from aphorism to anecdote and back again, so much so that "the men and women present laughed until their laughter turned into groans."1 He quipped about old age. He hailed "senile
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallDear God, Let Us Praise Mark Twain's Satanic Sense of Humor2025-10-23text/htmlen-USDear God, Let Us Praise Mark Twain's Satanic Sense of Humor2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®984742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Ushers of a New Era: The Gilded Age Humorist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972186
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This article examines the figure of the humorous lecturer and interactions between lecturers and Midwestern small-town audiences during the Gilded Age. My inspiration for this study was cartoonist Art Young's descriptions in his memoirs of traveling humorists' visits to his town in rural Wisconsin that he and his neighbors eagerly awaited. His comments highlight the role that these visitors played in helping the nation get over what Young calls "the Puritan ban against laughter."1 My aim here is to place humorous lecturers in a larger cultural and historical context and to explore how they shaped and were shaped by late nineteenth-century society.The jokes printed in newspapers and magazines that middle-class
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallUshers of a New Era: The Gilded Age Humorist2025-10-23text/htmlen-USUshers of a New Era: The Gilded Age Humorist2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®624002026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23"Mr. Seward's Real Estate Transactions": Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972187
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"All Washington is laughing about our unfortunate purchases of territory," began a January 1868 letter in the Daily Alta California penned by correspondent Mark Twain.1 Samuel Clemens wrote and published this letter and several others in the winter of 1867–68, when he was living and working in Washington, DC, initially as the personal secretary for a Nevada senator. While there, Clemens learned the ways of Washington, its rules and misrule, seeing the crush of lobbyists, cabinet intrigue, congressional business, and witnessing how the legislative sausage was made. Twain's phrase "unfortunate purchases of territory" refers to a spate of efforts—most of them unsuccessful—at international territorial acquisition by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmall"Mr. Seward's Real Estate Transactions": Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era2025-10-23text/htmlen-US"Mr. Seward's Real Estate Transactions": Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®901822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23When Comedy Goes Wrong by Christopher J. Gilbert (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972188
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In When Comedy Goes Wrong, Christopher J. Gilbert sets his critical sights on the disturbing turn that the culture of comedy in the United Stated has taken since the 1990s, as the comic spirit has largely ceased to be a regenerative celebration of our shared fallibility and foolishness and has instead focused on delineating in-groups and out-groups, meting out rhetorical abuse on perceived antagonists, and emboldening rather than critiquing the sense of righteous certitude held by any one comic. Gilbert's central thesis is that egoism is at the heart of problematic comedy. He argues that comic performances that remind us we are all, by nature, continually mistaken in our self-perception and absurd in our arrogant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallWhen Comedy Goes Wrong by Christopher J. Gilbert (review)2025-10-23text/htmlen-USWhen Comedy Goes Wrong by Christopher J. Gilbert (review)2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®103612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance by Artel Great (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972189
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In The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance, Artel Great explores the careers, relationships, and significance of the comedians of the self-titled Black Pack of the 1980s and early 1990s—Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Paul Mooney. In a deep analysis of their work that draws on meticulous research, Great argues that the comedians of the Black Pack "subversively engaged humor and satire to champion Black lives" and that "their work promoted a resistant brand of comedy that, to varying degrees, poked holes in the nation's conventional racial and political narratives" (2). The introduction provides a necessary history of Black resistance humor from its origins in American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallThe Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance by Artel Great (review)2025-10-23text/htmlen-USThe Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance by Artel Great (review)2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®105362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Sass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity by J Finley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972190
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J Finley's Sass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Black women's expressive culture by theorizing "sass" not as a stereotype but as a dynamic and embodied genre of discourse with profound political implications. The book situates itself within contemporary cultural discourse by opening with two potent examples of this phenomenon: the now-iconic cutting eye roll of Jada Pinkett Smith in response to Chris Rock's joke at the 2022 Academy Awards and the jubilant, collective chanting of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP" at the now-erased Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street NW in downtown Washington, DC. In light of these cultural touchstones, Finley
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallSass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity by J Finley (review)2025-10-23text/htmlen-USSass: Black Women's Humor and Humanity by J Finley (review)2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®95302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Humor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor by Salvatore Attardo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972191
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Salvartore Attardo's Humor 2.0 tackles the challenging topic of internet humor. The topic is challenging not so much because internet humor is difficult to comprehend but rather because it is fast changing, ever evolving, and expansive enough that it is difficult to nail down. Attardo offers a timeline of internet humor for those who might not be experiencing it in real time. This book thus serves as at once an accessible introduction to humor studies and an account of the historical, social, and cultural developments that underwrite so much of the humor that exists online. Broken into four parts, Humor 2.0 covers the origins of internet humor as well as the theoretical foundations that connect it to comic appeals
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallHumor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor by Salvatore Attardo (review)2025-10-23text/htmlen-USHumor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor by Salvatore Attardo (review)2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®79402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23Post-Comedy by Alfie Bown (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972192
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In this brief, provocative book, Alfie Bown takes seriously a question often asked flippantly or indignantly: "What if we really can't take jokes anymore?" (1). The "we" in question here includes, for the most part, progressives who are sensitive to the emotional harm that may befall members of marginalized identity groups when they are made the subject of jokes and who find the vulgarity and transgressive rhetoric of Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes to be distasteful and offensive. However, Bown is not a conservative bemoaning the perceived limitations imposed on public culture by the woke worldview. Bown's critique is, rather, classically Marxist, and his key argument is that the privatization and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/656/image/coversmallPost-Comedy by Alfie Bown (review)2025-10-23text/htmlen-USPost-Comedy by Alfie Bown (review)2025-10-232025TWOProject MUSE®89362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-23