The Reservations of the Funny: Ethics of Studying Funny Communication

Studying the funny trends within historically marginalized populations has historically been used as a means of making them seem nonthreatening to dominant cultures. Scholars, furthermore, have often applied dominant-culture contexts toward reading minority artifacts without taking the time to understand the premises for other cultures’ funny enthymemes (Epp 2010; Price 1994). This paper proposes two solutions to the dilemma of recognizing the importance of representing marginalized populations’ humor in the scholarly canon but also studying those funny artifacts with a mind toward ethics, using Native American humor as a representative case study.

#BBQBecky & #PermitPatty: African-American Humor & Resistive Discourse on Twitter

Humor has always been a social tool by which to navigate the slings and arrows of human existence. This has been exceptionally true for historically marginalized groups, such as African-Americans. Throughout U.S. history, “Black humor” has served to challenge authority, resist domination, lampoon the powerful and assuage injustices. It has served and both balm and weapon for a cultural group that has often found itself on the outside looking in, while being punished for being in that position. However, even within marginalized groups, canonical examples of cultural humor have been largely produced by a small segment of the population (i.e.,comedians, writers, poets, musicians). Social media, Twitter especially, has removed the barriers of production and gatekeeping of humor. Therefore, by examining responses to a cultural moment by “non-elite” African-Americans on Twitter, as the this paper does, helps to elucidate some evident trends, narratives, rhetorical strategies and tropes that may possibly be considered universal hallmarks of “Black Humor” as resistive discourse. Furthermore, these hallmarks can perhaps be understood to be the preeminent forms by which African-Americans create community, resist oppression and challenge hegemonic norms.

Realism and the Uses of Humor

This chapter examines the ways in which nineteenth-century American humor influenced realist writers. Down East humor and Southwestern humor in the first half of the century and literary comedians and local colorists in the second half provided models for ways to use humor to establish a sense of life, setting, characterization, satire, and social comment. An analysis of key comic scenes and techniques in Henry James’s The American, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country shows how these writers used humor as a device in their development of realism.