Previous studies of ethnic humor[1] as well as humor about ethnicity have often emphasized the complex stance of the humorist in relation to his or her audience. Both Nancy Walker and Kenneth Lincoln, for example, investigate the negotiations of power implicit for ethnic individuals in creating humor and in imagining the audience that will interpret that humor. As such critics as Annette Kolodny and Gloria Anzaldúa have emphasized, interethnic relationships occur on a psychic as well as physical “borderlands” region that needs further exploration. Such regions are often characterized by tension and the transgression of cultural norms, while providing opportunities for enormous creativity.
The essays in this issue
extend these interests in (and from) several different directions. John Bruns’s
“Laughter in
the Aisles: Affect and Power in Contemporary Theoretical and Cultural
Discourse” addresses, among other matters, the shared perspectives and
experiences that can be obscured when a powerful interpretive community
possesses preconceived notions of age, ethnicity, and stance that exclude an
audience from sympathetic identification: those in power construct (and
represent in the press) the young African American males who “laugh at” Schindler’s
List as naïve or, worse, culturally
insensitive, even potentially anti-Semitic. In this situation, transgression
begets both friction and the possibility for “re-visioning.” Bruns contends that some traditional
theoretical stances foster a narrow, normative interpretation, however
troubling and inaccurate such an interpretation may be: “Here we have yet another
instance of the systematic privileging of solemnity over laughter; some things
are simply not meant to be laughed at.
The point of this essay is to explore this common attitude—one granted
too much explanatory significance in contemporary culture” (5). Among Bruns’s arguments is that “we often
deny the confusion and strangeness associated with laughter in particular, and
that we continue to be frustrated by the fluid relationship between affect and
object in general”; he explores what happens when we acknowledge “the freedom
of affects to combine with and overlap each other” (10).
Dennis Perry’s “Hybrid History: The Pequot
War and American Indian Humor” considers audience-author relations from another
perspective. Perry’s analysis seeks to
tease out the humor of Native Americans as the Puritan historians John
Underhill, John Mason, and Lion Gardiner respond to and transform it; he argues
that from this inter-cultural conversation there emerges an amalgamated
discourse of humor:
“While these
three historians were initially conditioned by the conventions of piety,
providence, and typology typical of orthodox Puritan expression, all three
pushed these limits in their responses to Indian humor, creating a hybridized
style that enlarges our understanding of both Puritan history writing and the
linguistic ramifications of Puritan encounters with Indians” (25). Transformed by the tensions (and freedoms)
of the borderlands, Puritans’ responses to the Indians were, he argues, not
merely physical but also, significantly, linguistic; in the discursive situations
that he examines, audience is bi-directional and mutually transformative.
In her essay on Spain’s American colonies, Julie Greer Johnson similarly expands our sense of “American” humor with
an examination of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the precocious
“illegitimate daughter of a Spaniard and a woman of New Spain” who became
“colonial Spanish America’s most outstanding literary figure and the epitome of
baroque expression in the Indies” (36). Manipulating the literary conventions
of her time and crossing a psychic borderland, Sor Juana challenged male
writers’ depictions of women as licentious, mindless, or physically
idealized. Writing much of her most
powerful work from within a convent, Sor Juana defused criticism with her
outspoken humor: “Addressing both men
and women, she effectively confronted gender roles in patriarchal colonial
society, subverting its very foundations.
Humor, as she demonstrates, was not at odds with her gender but a
valuable vehicle for the expression of her exceptional creativity and her
highly developed intellect” (43).
Johnson suggests that, in addition to her social position, Sor Juana’s
understanding of the complexity of her audience and its attitudes enabled her
to be heard in a time when women were rarely allowed public voice.
Dan Shiffman’s recovery essay on the twentieth-century Jewish writer Leo Rosten, which precedes a reprint of Rosten’s “Mr. K and the Magi,” investigates the responses of Rosten’s multiple audiences (which include recent immigrant Jews, their children, and affluent white readers) to the author’s brilliant malapropist, Hyman Kaplan. Kaplan is a student in “the beginner’s class of the ‘American Night Preparatory School for Adults’ in New York” (50). Shiffman argues that “Rosten’s stories are both a progression from and a continuation of an earlier generation of ‘Jew Comics’ who presented crude, provincial but endearing ethnic caricatures to the public. The stories, like the comic routines, expose and reconcile social tensions between cultural insiders and outsiders within an increasingly multi-ethnic America” (49). As the essays by Bruns, Perry, and Johnson also articulate, humor’s mediation by ethnicity (whether of audience, author/artist, or both) engages multiple interpretive codes and performs a variety of cultural work, often simultaneously supporting and suspending the dominant culture while it also reconstitutes the borderlands.
Judith Lee’s essay on the year’s work in American humor studies also suggests the centrality of ethnicity, and the borderlands, to current investigations in the field. Not only does ethnicity constitute an important part of our understanding of central figures such as Mark Twain, it also figures importantly in new work being done (and earlier work, such as Kenneth Lincoln’s, becoming more fully recognized) on wide-ranging expressive forms of Native American and African American humor. As we move toward interethnic studies such work extends our understanding of “American” humor as a whole (Lowe, “Theories” 455). Lee highlights in particular an essay by Bruce Lenthall that complements the work of this special issue in its attention to the reception of various texts, including comic strips, by a broad “popular” audience.
The collective interest of
these essays in audience, and in the interaction between audience and
author/artist, suggests to me that we might usefully consider the texture of
such encounters within two other theoretical frameworks. The first of these is gossip. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has so carefully
argued, gossip can occur on a continuum from harmful to
community-building. Rejecting intimacy,
the first kind of gossip generally discloses nothing of the speakers; rather,
it is intended solely to injure the reputation of its object. The second kind, on the other hand, reveals
the characters of the participants to one another and attempts to build a
community of common ideas, including people across various cultural
borders. From this perspective, we
might argue that Sor Juana intervenes in a genre of larger, negative cultural
“gossip” about women—an ironic stance in view of the fact that women are more
often than men affiliated with gossip and that for women, “loose lips” have
consistently represented another form of sexual licentiousness—in an effort to
construct a community able to re-vision exclusionary cultural representations
of women. Johnson’s essay invites one
to consider: How might gossip, especially humorous gossip, be positively
employed—not just in small groups of individuals but also in discourse
communities—across the lines of gender, class, and ethnicity as a means of
questioning normative cultural paradigms?
Similarly, in thinking about Bruns’s essay we might consider the
reaction of the dominant, “adult” community to the young African American
males’ laughter at Schindler’s List
as a form of harmful public gossip that continues to exclude the unique
perspective of those young people.
Another potentially valuable theoretical framework in an exploration of humor and ethnicity in the Americas surrounds travel literature. The work of Mary Louise Pratt and Mary Suzanne Schriber, among others, foregrounds the sometimes difficult or blurred conversations between “insider” and “outsider,” “native” and “foreign.” Such work also clarifies the difficulty of defining the line that divides these positions, as well as their multiple manifestations (see Leveen, Winokur, Boskin). In the case of the Puritan historians described by Perry, does their “occupation” of Indian rhetoric transform their “insider” status to a more mediated position; what do the Native Americans who taunt the Puritans gain or lose in their “translation”? Similarly, because Sor Juana is Mexican American, readers of “American” humor might well ask, which “inside” does she occupy, and how does her ethnicity (as well as her gender and class) inform that situation? Concerning Shiffman’s discussion of Rosten, we might raise an affiliated question: in what sense might an ethnic immigrant—or the child of that immigrant—be simultaneously “foreign” and “native”?
These questions point toward the concerns, tensions, and potential freedoms of the borderlands. The place of humor in these borderlands shifts according to such variables as author/artist, historical moment, and audience (see Dorinson and Boskin), while the borderlands themselves are constantly in flux. The essays in this issue seek to conceptualize, understand, and explain a few of these permutations, as they help us to envision “American” humor more broadly.
[1] As John Lowe observes, it is difficult to define either “ethnic” or “humor,” let alone the terms in combination (“Theories” 439). See also Lowe’s special issue of MELUS.
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