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American Humor in History

Is there a special problem in historicizing humor? Foucault is thought to have established that if sexuality is not primordial nature, then its implication in the transmission of power can be historicized; can the same be done for humor? Presumably, but the trickiness is not that humor seems less political than sexuality but that its relation to power is essentially obscure and vacillating. Think of the prototypical male stand-up comedian (say, Lenny Bruce): phallic and excremental, paternal and infantile, threatening and abject. Two of the books I am reviewing, nevertheless, are clear about the political service they wish humor to perform—both would be content if American humor took political shape as constructive liberal satire—and historicize comedy by way of its success or failure in speaking truth to power. Stephen E. Kercher, in Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (2006), mainly celebrates leftist satire from World War II to the late 1960s; Paul Lewis, in Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict (2006), believes that from the 1980s until now, humor has reached unprecedented levels of cruelty, mainly among conservatives. At least in the clarity of their periods, Kercher and Lewis are utterly different from Michael Dunne, who in a wildly ahistorical book, Calvinist Humor in American Literature (2007), finds in Puritanism the defining, eternal (if protean) mode of American humor. From Dunne’s point of view, Kercher’s liberal satire might be understood as a secularization of Calvinist invective, and Lewis’s explosion of rightwing mockery a twisted reprisal of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” What this totalizing of American history shares with Kercher’s and Lewis’s periodizing is excessive lucidity about the historical relation of humor to power. In Calvinist Humor, Dunne displays two talents that will find little appreciation these days: for finding American Puritanism