In this article, we explore what humor has to offer to two groups that are not typically treated together, feminists and veterans, who have experienced trauma as a result of false representations of them starting in the Nixon era. Our cross-disciplinary approach uniquely intertwines history and feminist theory with neuroscience and psychiatry, revealing connections between political gaslighting and the repression of inner truths relating to trauma. Ultimately, we find that when it comes to healing the mind we must also heal the body politic.
This article focuses on humor as a coping mechanism and a means of dealing with trauma during the AIDS crisis in three important gay American plays written and performed during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic: William Hoffman's As Is (1985), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991-92). These dramas demonstrate how satire, sarcasm, incongruity theory humor, absurdist denial, and gallows humor enable characters with AIDS to cope emotionally with their disease during an era that was frightening because of the dearth of information about the disease and because of intense homophobia, and to maintain their sanity and dignity during a horrific time in their lives.
Donald E. Westlake's concise novel, A Travesty (1977), lampoons the idea of performativity associated with the traditional whodunit of "Golden Age" crime fiction. When called on to assist police in four homicide cases, self-absorbed film critic Carey Thorpe, who never stops boasting about his Holmesian powers of observation reinforced by deductive logic, proves an asset. The novel progresses from a "closed-room" tale of detection to noir when the protagonist intentionally commits two murders to escape arrest. Largely overlooked by literary scholars, Westlake as a prolific author of popular fiction warrants wider recognition for his virtuosity as a ludic satirist in the American grain.
The early Cold War years have typically been seen as a period of increased religious interest in the United States. Religious and political leaders promoted interreligious cooperation among American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews amid an existential conflict against "godless communism." This article shows how popular comedy helped realize this project of ecumenical sociability by renegotiating the boundaries of proper and improper humorous speech with respect to religion. Moreover, it argues that humor-in supernatural comedy films, religious comic strips, and clergy joke cycles-served as a vehicle for propagating a popular theology intended to appeal across denominational divides and to bolster mainstream religious authorities.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Secretary of State William Henry Seward led US efforts to purchase several new and far-flung territories, including (successfully) Alaska and (unsuccessfully) multiple Caribbean islands. This article examines several strands of popularly circulating periodical humor that ridiculed the United States' nascent attempts at imperial acquisition, including humor and satire in newspaper squibs by Mark Twain and others, jocular editorial commentary on Alaska, and political cartoons in humor magazines. All these comic critiques of US expansionism traffic in the negative emotions of cynicism and distrust as they redefine postbellum US foreign policy decisions as geopolitical manifestations of the unscrupulous greed and graft emblematic of the Gilded Age.
In the decades after the Civil War, people in rural communities were happy to be entertained by touring lecturers of varying degrees of notoriety. Humorists, trying to expand their popularity and supplement their income, were among those who visited small towns, their arrival eagerly anticipated by young and old. During this period, characterized by social fluidity and marketplace upheaval, visiting humorists at times played the role of an advertiser whose wit helped quack doctors sell their patent medicines and at others the role of a respectable lecturer on the lessons of life. This article aims to place the figure of the Gilded Age comic lecturer in its larger historical context.
This article reevaluates Marietta Holley's status in the American comic tradition by considering her writings within the framework of Judith Yaross Lee's matters-of-empire thesis, and by exploring three topics: Holley's comic pedigree, her comic tactics, and her politics. Using her first book, My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's (1873), as a case study, the article examines how Holley deploys the comic vernacular tradition's trope of the country bumpkin who functions as truth-teller. It also investigates how the narrator Samantha's identifying herself as "Josiah Allen's wife," both on the title page of the book and in the text itself, fits into Holley's suffragette agenda.
The eleven letters that make up Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, which Satan composes and delivers to the archangels Gabriel and Michael, are nothing if not celebrations of possible joy in the face of assured sorrow. At the time Twain was writing this book, he was grappling with disease, death, and despondency, all of which inspired a "satanic" sense of humor that resonated with his unfinished manuscript The Mysterious Stranger. Twain used the figure of Satan to characterize human life as what he described as "a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain" and a general "confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs." This article examines the comic spirt behind these remarks as the basis for Twain's satanic sense of humor, especially as it relates to a moral sense.
