Humor in Popular Culture

Judith Yaross Lee

Any doubts about the centrality of humor to American culture vanished in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Self-censorship ruled the day. The New Yorker abandoned cartoons in the issue of September 17. Round-the-clock reporters replaced late-night comedians as commentators on current events. Mark Russell took his musical politics on tour in October but felt the need to justify stand-up comedy in the midst of so much woe: pointing out that the President had urged Americans to go back to work, he recast political satire as patriotism. And so it was. Even if he did set aside most of his George Bush jokes (which did not, as he threatened, reduce the performance to a mere 8 minutes) and fill most of the program with such timeless targets as the AARP, automated telephone menus, and Supreme Court rulings, the very idea of public political humor helped reaffirm our choice to critique – or not. The closest Russell got to the ineffable events in New York and Washington, however, was silence, a postmodern presence through absence. His new lyrics to “Those Were the Days” (familiar to fans of television producer Norman Lear as the theme song of All in the Family, an earlier performance of political and social humor) invited everyone to wax nostalgic for the easy satire of the Bush-Gore election, sexual scandals, and politics as usual.

From the standpoint of humor studies, the biggest challenge regarding humor in popular culture comes from this very centrality and ubiquity. Billboards, television and radio commercials, personal ads, bartenders, comic strips, popular songs – all fool around with ideas and values outside the bonds of high art, whose aesthetic ambitions and formal structures discipline comic play. The results reward those critics who explore tensions and the technical apparatus of comic play, but the essence of humor belongs, as Bakhtin has indicated, to the vulgar comic forms of marketplace and carnival, where discipline is overturned.

The essays in this special issue on humor in popular culture explore some of this wild terrain. For M. Thomas Inge in “Al Capp’s South: Appalachian Humor in Li’l Abner,” the territory is Dogpatch, the Appalachian community that Capp constituted from a host of literary sources, theatrical influences, and personal travels. These, in turn, shaped images of mountain people for the popular writers, performers, and artists who followed. The urban origin, distribution, and setting for early comics made Li’l Abner innovative as a strip with Southern characters, settings, and plots; and tensions between the urban context of comics and Capp’s rural subject underscore how the attitudes and values of an audience help shape the productions it receives. In addition to tracing origins and influences, however, Inge demonstrates the dynamic among elements of American expressive culture all along the hierarchy of taste and status. Romantic fiction by Harold Bell Wright and John Fox, Jr., “hillbilly” acts in vaudeville, films such as Cabin in the Cotton (1932), radio programs of folk and country music, “belletristic” literary productions by the Fugitive Poets and their successors, and manifestos such as I’ll Take My Stand – all have links to Dogpatch. Moreover, just as Capp’s sources and influences argue for integrating popular and high culture, so Inge’s methods in this essay show how literary techniques for genetic criticism, influence, and historiography apply also to comic strips. Recent studies of comics have moved toward the theoretical; in Understanding Comics Scott McCloud defined them as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). Here, in this historical study, Inge demonstrates the interplay of many media – oral, print, film, broadcast – to show how regional images emerge and thrive. The enduring equation of Appalachia and Dogpatch, so insulting to mountain residents proud of their distinctive culture in an age of homogeneity, owes much to the power of popular images’ mutual reinforcement. In the process, Inge also hints at the origins of the contemporary visual turn in narration, especially over television and the World Wide Web, in illustrated print tales marked by bold pictures, vivid but limited text, and serial distribution in exaggerated, suspended time.

María Luisa Ochoa Fernández takes quite a different approach to comic stereotypes in “Getting Ethnically Humorous: Dolores Prida’s Beautiful Señoritas.” Whereas Inge explains the development of Appalachian comic characters and situations and traces influences upon and from them, Ochoa Fernández celebrates their self-destruction and deconstruction in satire. Drama, as public performance, enables satirists to reach and affect audiences directly, and Prida’s humor makes her brand of feminism particularly meaningful to Latino audiences while entertaining Anglo viewers as well. As Ochoa Fernández demonstrates, Prida relies on stereotypes of popular and folk culture to critique machismo traditions, especially expectations for women’s behavior imposed by the Catholic Church and by the sexual ethos of Latino culture. The didacticism of Prida’s drama aligns it with Western satire, while its abstract characters reflect traditions of Spanish drama and the stereotypes from North American popular culture. Prida’s work deserves to be better known, and comic drama deserves better integration into studies of American humor. As Prida’s play careens from its slapstick display of characters to their symbolic actions and recitations, Ochoa Fernández makes clear that some feminists do have a sense of humor by pointing to the social significance that humor can have for people’s lives.

Turning us from social to political satire, a major strand of humor in popular culture, Stephen Kercher recovers the work of Victor Navasky in “‘We hope you like us, Jack’: The Kennedy-Era Satire of Victor Navasky’s Monocle and Outsider’s Newsletter.” Considering the dominance of the Republican political agenda over the last twenty years, the lively critique of Democratic politics by Democrats merits particular attention from cultural critics. Kercher’s examination reveals, however, that the key contribution of Navasky’s two satiric publications between 1957 and 1965 was their comic critique of policy. Given the contemporary emphasis on personal attack, Navasky’s contribution seems all the more important to revisit. While Kercher’s brief does not extend to reasons for the shift, his survey of topics taken up by Monocle and The Outsider’s Newsletter point out the loss to national conversation of informed comic critique. Indeed, Navasky’s political satire aimed to influence political action. The most notable example is Monocle’s mock campaign of Marvin Kittman, but Navasky’s publications spoke to, and often from within, a circle of political insiders who included actual policy advisers such as John Kenneth Galbraith. Equally important, the magazines’ campus connections (students as well as faculty) remind us that college humor magazines have a long and distinguished history in American popular culture. The Harvard Lampoon, which gave birth to the old Life and the National Lampoon, also led in various ways to the New Yorker in a process of comic gestation that continues in The Onion today and is manifest in Comedy Central, Saturday Night Live, and other comic products aimed at college audiences. But audiences do not always constitute markets, as Navasky’s work indicates. Non-commercial forms of humor may occupy a space between mass media products and folklore.

Tyler Hoffman’s analysis in “Treacherous Laughter: The Poetry Slam, Slam Poetry, and the Politics of Resistance” also reminds us that commercial imperatives do not organize all varieties of popular culture, although they lie everywhere beneath the surface. Thus Hoffman makes a strong case for understanding the creation and performance of slam poetry as undisplaced Bakhtinian mockery. Not typically considered a genre of popular culture, poetry in all its nonsentimental forms remains vital partly for its capacity to critique. The bawdiness and vulgarity of slam poetry create a humor in extremis, which extends that capacity to poetry as a genre and to literary culture generally. The performance of self through language in slam poetry, Hoffman points out, enables comic celebration of community, creativity, and orality even as it critiques commodity capitalism, racist hierarchies, (hetero-)sexual politics, and literary conventions. Here humor asserts itself as both means and end: a liberation from the strictures of the dominant culture and the creation of alternatives, if only in words.

With examples running from the 1930s through the 90s, the essays in this special issue illustrate the capacity of American popular culture to absorb humor. Contexts range from commercial and literary to the political (communal and personal), and moods vary accordingly, but the pervasive spirit is celebratory. Even when grounded in historical or geographical fact, or in depressing political events, humor relies on the imagination of its creators, and audiences’ approval of that imagination, to succeed. The ubiquity of humor in newspaper features, contemporary drama, political criticism, and literary experimen-tation also extends to advertising, film, television, radio, and email – all the media that represent and circulate popular culture – and thus puts humor at the core of American life.

Works Cited

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Lettering by Bob Lappan. 1993. New York: HarperCollins; Kitchen Sink Press, 1994.

Russell, Mark. Performance. Blackburn-Templeton Alumni Memorial Auditorium, Athens, OH. 2 Oct. 2001.

_____. Personal Interview. 2 October 2001.