Critical studies attempting to define and dissect American humor have been published steadily for nearly one hundred years. However, until now, key documents from that history have never been brought together in a single volume for students and scholars. What's So Funny? Humor in American Culture, a collection of 15 essays, examines the meaning of humor and attempts to pinpoint its impact on American culture and society, while providing a historical overview of its progres-sion. Essays from Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, William Keough, Roy Blount, Jr., and others trace the development of American humor from the colonial period to the present, focusing on its relationship with ethnicity, gender, violence, and geography. An excellent reader for courses in American studies and American social and cultural history, What's So Funny? explores the traits of the American experience that have given rise to its humor.

What do Jon Stewart, Freddy Krueger, Patch Adams, and George W. Bush have in common? As Paul Lewis shows in Cracking Up, they are all among the ranks of joke tellers who aim to do much more than simply amuse. Exploring topics that range from the sadistic mockery of Abu Ghraib prison guards to New Age platitudes about the healing power of laughter, from jokes used to ridicule the possibility of global climate change to the heartwarming performances of hospital clowns, Lewis demonstrates that over the past thirty years American humor has become increasingly purposeful and embattled. Navigating this contentious world of controversial, manipulative, and disturbing laughter, Cracking Up argues that the good news about American humor in our time—that it is delightful, relaxing, and distracting—is also the bad news. In a culture that both enjoys and quarrels about jokes, humor expresses our most nurturing and hurtful impulses, informs and misinforms us, and exposes as well as covers up the shortcomings of our leaders. Wondering what’s so funny about a culture determined to laugh at problems it prefers not to face, Lewis reveals connections between such seemingly unrelated jokers as Norman Cousins, Hannibal Lecter, Rush Limbaugh, Garry Trudeau, Jay Leno, Ronald Reagan, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Bill Clinton. The result is a surprising, alarming, and at times hilarious argument that will appeal to anyone interested in the ways humor is changing our cultural and political landscapes.

Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character," singles out the archetypal figures of the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel to illuminate the fundamental role of popular culture in fashioning a distinctive American sensibility. A memorable performance in its own right, American Humor crackles with the jibes and jokes of generations while presenting a striking picture of a vagabond nation in perpetual self-pursuit. Davy Crockett and Henry James, Jim Crow and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders in a work that inspired such later critics as Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs and which still has much to say about the America of Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Traits of American Humour is a three volume edition which contains numerous short stories, sketches and tales, illustrating the character and wit of American people from North to South and from East to West. Table of Contents: Vol. 1: My First and Last speech in the General Court Hoss Allen, of Missouri The Widow Rugby's Husband The Big Bear of Arkansas Johnny Beedle's Courtship The Marriage of Johnny Beedle Johnny Beedle's Thanksgiving Aunt Nabby's Stewed Goose Decline and Fall of the City of Dogtown The Coon-Hunt A Ride With Old Kit Kuncker Seth Willett; The Elk County Witness The Two Fat Sals War's Yure Hoss? Bob Lee The Shooting-Match The Horse Swap Three Chances for a Wife The Yankee Amongst the Mermaids Captain Stick and Tony The Way Billy Harris Drove the Drum-Fish to Market Yankee Homespun The Indefatigable Bear-Hunter Colonel Crockett's Ride on the Back of a Buffalo Colonel Crockett's Adventure with a Grizzly Bear Colonel Crockett's, The Bear, and the Swallows A Pretty Predicament Vol. 2: The Editor's Creed Josh Beanpole's Courtship Peter Brush, the Great Used Up Cousin Sally Dilliard The Age of Wonders How Simon Suggs "Raised Jack" My First Visit to Portland Billy Warrick's Courtship and Marriage Our Town Falling off a Log, in a Game of "Seven Up" A Yankee Card-Table Dick M'Coy's Sketches of His Neighbours Kicking a Yankee Why Mr. Sellum Disposed of the Horse Metaphysics A Tight Race Considerin' A Shark Story A Bear Story The Best-Natured Man in the World Chunky's Fight With the Panthers A Bully Boat, and a Brag Captain Fydget Fyxington Doing a Sheriff The Muscadine Story Polly Peablossom's Wedding The Mother and Her Child Peleg Ponder Vol. 3: The Thimble Game Mike Hooter's Bar Story Cousin Guss The Gander-Pulling How Mike Hooter Came Very Near Walloping Arch Cooney An Interesting Interview Ben Wilson's Last Jug-Race Mike Fink in a Tight Place Our Singing-School Where Joe Meriweather Went To Georgia Theatrics Taking the Census A Family Picture Colonel Jones's Fight The Fastest Funeral on Record Old Tuttle's Last Quarter Race…

Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the cultural history of the concept from its British origins as a way to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the history of an idea, Wickberg's study provides new insights into a peculiarly modern cultural sensibility.The expression "sense of humor" was first coined in the 1840s and the idea that such a sense was a personality trait to be valued developed only in the 1870s. What is the relationship between Medieval humoral medicine and this distinctively modern idea of the sense of humor? What has it meant in the past 125 years to declare that someone lacks a sense of humor? How is the joke, as a twentieth-century quasi-literary form, different from the traditional folktale? Wickberg addresses these questions, among others, using the history of ideas to throw new light on the way contemporary Americans think and speak.The context of Wickberg's analysis is Anglo-American; the specifically British meanings of humor and laughter from the sixteenth century forward provide the framework for understanding American cultural values in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The genealogy of the sense of humor is, like the study of keywords, an avenue into a significant aspect of the cultural history of modernity. Drawing on a wide range of sources and disciplinary perspectives, Wickberg's analysis challenges many of the prevailing views of modern American culture and suggests a new model for cultural historians.

Part road-trip comedy and part social science experiment, a scientist and a journalist travel the globe to discover the secret behind what makes things funny, questioning countless experts, including Louis C.K., along the way.

The author presents a collection of ways to reap the proven human and corporate benefits of humor at work, organized by core business skill and founded on his own work as a business speaker and coach with the consulting company, Humor That Works.

One of the most entertaining genres of American literature is the bold, masculine, wildly exaggerated, and highly imaginative frontier humor of the Old Southwest, produced between 1835 and 1861 in an area that extended from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Lousiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham have tapped the wealth of this region to produce a collection that over the last three decades has become the standard anthology of Old Southwestern humor. This new, extensively revised edition includes an expanded introduction, a dozen replacement sections, an updated bibliography, and works by three new writers--Phillip B. January, Matthew C. Field, and John Gorman Barr. Most generously represented are George Washington Harris, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Selections from twenty-five authors are featured along with brief biographical essays that combine historical and political analysis with perceptive literary criticism. These selections document important facets of antebellum American culture and provide the background of the literary achievement of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.