The past remains present and active in the dispositions it has produced.
Pierre BourdieuFootnote 1The history of every American's life is humorous.
S. S. CoxFootnote 2What is the relationship between affect and identity? In what specific ways has American studies scholarship assumed that a historically produced articulation between affect and identity is a natural or inevitable one? The recent explosion of critical and historical interest in affect in the discipline has placed the first question at the center of its inquiries, but has spent little time considering the second. Usually this is in the fine interest of pushing the scholarship forward to consider new possibilities for understanding the cultural (or ideological) work of affect in the history of the Americas, and, sometimes, for imagining how we might turn affect to new political and social account today. But to gloss over the history of the articulation of affect to identity occludes important aspects of the history of affect itself; that is, the history of how affect has been made to serve particular political interests through the belief in a natural or given relationship between affect and national identity. When we do not address the history of this connection, we participate in the recirculation of a very specific, influential, and durable belief in the imbrication of affect and identity that has shaped notions of national subjectivity since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and not usually in the same progressive interests shared by most American studies scholars who work on affect today. When the connection between affect, identity, and nationalism is considered historically, it is often in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of national identity (often in the form of nativist avowals of “national character”) and how this advocacy has been left behind; what I want to do is bring the history of this advocacy into new focus, tracing its surprisingly durable (if subtle) influence on scholarship by telling a brief history of the relationship between affect, scholarship and nationalism in the often-overlooked field of American humor studies.
Telling the history of American humor studies makes methodological sense for engaging the questions I pose above because it is the most basic way, if not the most obvious way, that the relationship between scholarship, affect, and (national) identity presents itself to us.Footnote 3 Although American humor scholarship carries on in American studies through the American Humor Studies Association, its journal Studies in American Humor, its panels at the MLA and ASA annual conferences, and monographs usually published by lesser-known presses, it generally goes unnoticed by the discipline. But this present in no way relates to the formative role American humor studies played in the late nineteenth century and in the mid-twentieth century in the history of the discipline's advocacy of nationalist ideology. What follows, then, is a short history of the durable articulation of national identity to humor practice, an articulation produced with the help of American literary and cultural scholarship during a period of profound cultural, political, and economic transformations in the United States.
The first section of this paper traces the invention of an academic tradition that believes “American humor” to be an expression of “American character,” and tells in broad strokes the history of how this particular form of scholarship labored to make humor “American.” Here I historicize the articulation of humor practice to national character in American studies (an articulation that remains durable outside the field) and identify this articulation as historically produced in specific political interests. The second section seeks to address what alternative histories might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as not inevitable. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge in its modern form. These three case studies are meant to gesture, perhaps polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, and to underscore the need for a more fully historicized understanding of the relationship between identity and affective practice in general.
YANKEE BULL CRAPAUD
Discourses linking humor practice to identity can be traced at least as far back as the origin of the word “humor” in the ontological categorization of bodily “humors” that produce temperament and character, while discourses linking temperament and national identity are at least as old as the idea of the nation. My history necessarily begins, then, in medias res, when efforts to produce affective notions of national character drove the study of humor in the United States. These efforts took place in the 1890s in quality magazines, where in an important sense the work of American studies began. As David Shumway has noted, late nineteenth-century magazines were the direct institutional precursors of the twentieth-century study of US literature and culture in universities.Footnote 4 Thus, before literature and folk practice were considered proper academic material, popular and quality magazines led the way in criticizing and analyzing these cultural forms. The questions magazines brought to humor practice, and the methodologies they promoted for answering these questions, remained central to American humor scholarship at least until the mid-1980s, and in the case of some until at least 1998.Footnote 5 Working out this curious history for the study of what came to be identified as “American humor” has the virtue of linking the emergence of American humor studies to the emergence of American studies itself.Footnote 6 For these pieces, humor practices express and constitute a unique national character and thus form a key component of American identity.
Many American humor histories, after acknowledging the influence of articles like Cox's, pinpoint the field's formal emergence with two seminal works from the 1930s that brought academic legitimacy to the study of humor, inspiring a host of scholars to research, historicize, and theorize folk and mass humor history: Constance Rourke's 1931 American Humor: A Study of the National Character and Walter Blair's 1937 Native American Humor.Footnote 7 Like their similarly titled nineteenth-century magazine counterparts, which I discuss below, these books efficiently announce their political investment in the production and maintenance of a national US identity through humor study. This commitment is consistent with scholarly practice of the 1930s and 1940s that imagined literary and folk histories as instruments for gauging the exceptional and unique status of the United States.
These two books, like the magazine articles that preceded them, were thus efforts to turn a traditional understanding of “character” to account in the interests of the nation. It is important to underscore here just how much was at stake for Rourke and Blair when they chose to articulate humor practice to national character. The notion of national character, for instance, brings into play identity and ethics; as Thomas Augst notes,
by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, character … [implied moral] qualities that through some combination of heredity and influence marked a person as individual and unique. In this sense, character became linked with the ancient rhetorical concept of ethos, which described a person's structure of motives, feelings, and thoughts that cause action and to which we impute moral responsibility.Footnote 8
Character, then, whether applied to an individual, to affective practice, or to a nation, is invested with notions of identity and responsibility. In this particular mode of thinking, to be without a (national) character is to be a blank page, to be of no account, and to not exist in any meaningful sense (and certainly not in a unique or exceptional sense). So when American humor scholarship converts humor practices into expressions of distinct national characteristics, it casts the shape of America, making the national body recognizable and knowable, granting it identity and responsibility in the form of types of affective character. The practice of casting identity into being through types runs intriguingly counter to notions of identity as essence or performance, since the metaphor of “character” derives from a specific material history of imprinting and circulation. For instance, the form of the penny is not an expression of the essence or performance of copper, since, in the process of casting, character is imprinted and stamped by something necessarily external to the metal that is to become the penny. Most discourses of character, critical or not, tend to obscure this material history, but it has left its residue on the discourse nonetheless. Thus, in American humor scholarship, the particular shape that “American character” takes is subject to debate and change, but that there is a national character is itself not questioned. This is a significant part of what is at stake, ideologically, for Rourke and Blair in their efforts to identify (that is, invent) an American national character.
But now it is time to turn to the roots of these stakes which took firm ground in the nineteenth century. American humor scholarship often refers to S. S. Cox's April 1875 article “American Humor” as a “reflection” of humor's important place in US culture during this period.Footnote 9 This article figures humor as a seemingly natural part of the mass print landscape and also discloses in its own peculiar fashion how humor as an affective practice was understood in relation to key discourses, including nationalism, that were common to nineteenth-century US forms of affective production. In so doing, the article, which is a founding piece of American humor scholarship, provides a neat lesson in the means by which humor practices became articulated to national character.
Cox maintains throughout his article that humor practice indexes national and racial identity through points of difference and similarity:
humor differs only in degree, not in kind. The white man and black man both have fun in them, just as the diamond and charcoal are of the same material – carbon. In one it is crystallized and concentrated; in the other it is diffusive and combustible. Try each under the blow-pipe: the charcoal will glow with plentiful scintillations long before the diamond releases a sparkle of light.Footnote 10
The passage is accompanied by an illustration of a chubby black man in overalls gently guffawing; the caption reads, referring to the mass culture humor industry of minstrelsy, “Jolly Darky.” Just as the image and text fantasize a basic material connection between races only to highlight a basic material and commercial distance between races, so too do text and image link the imagined materials of race to humor practice. By selecting materials (coal and diamonds) invested with commercial value, Cox points to a perceived relation between white and black paralleled by a difference between luxury and labor, between coarse and fine/refined, between surplus and use-value. The contradiction – that black and white's common material origin sustains ontological distinctions of value that divide black and white – permits Cox a sweet rhetorical conceit of equality and a violent symbolic conceit of difference.
Having introduced a racialized history of humor practice, Cox moves on to link a common nationalistic discourse to humor:
An Englishman laughs at the untoward effort of a Frenchman to speak English, though a Frenchman would not laugh at John Bull's awkwardness at French; yet Johnny Crapaud never laughs more than at Bull's surly airs of assumed consequence. An African bursts into irrepressible glee at the faintest approach of the ludicrous, as if his mind had but one side, and it was all smitten and quivering with jollity; yet the grave Spaniard, his master, composedly smokes his cigarette and twirls his moustache, utterly impervious to the stroke. The one, like jelly, shakes with every motion around; the other is frigid, like ice, and thaws with a cold trickle of pleasure.Footnote 11
This passage, accompanied by an illustration of “John Bull and Johnny Crapaud,” maintains that nationality becomes visible (and audible) through, just as it is importantly constituted by, identifiable and classifiable humor practices. The distinction drawn between John Bull, Johnny Crapaud, the anonymous African, and the masterful Spaniard of Continental habits (whose mastery follows closely on the African's irrepressibility), much like the “Jolly Darky” passage, maintains an implicit hierarchy among humor practices that readers are required to decipher to grasp fully Cox's supposed celebration of the human variety.Footnote 12 That is to say, Cox's celebration of human variety is more importantly an effort to hierarchize affective practice and to make the frightening modern assertion that all affective practices are potentially classifiable by scholarship.
Although I trenchantly maintain that, by virtue of beginning with Cox's article and Harper's, I am starting this story in the middle of things, I do want to suggest just how appropriate Cox's article is as a starting point for a history of this articulation in US culture. Published in 1875, the article and its argument appeared at the tail end of the Reconstruction period and just prior to the rebuilding and triumph of white supremacy in US law. This reversal in law is perhaps most famously realized in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1893 which brought about the infamous Jim Crow laws, but it was significantly prefigured, as Eric Sundquist notes, in “United States v. Reese (1876), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), and United States v. Harris (1883),” all of which “undermined federal jurisdiction in cases involving southern mob violence against blacks, in particular those attempting to exercise voting rights.”Footnote 13 Although Harper's New Monthly Magazine famously avoided taking overt political stances for fear of alienating potential readers, Cox's article seems to support, through its hierarchy of humor practice, the kind of work happening in the courts. If, as Sundquist notes of these law cases, “corresponding to the end of Reconstruction, the establishment of such a federal–state duality had the effect of drawing a stark color line,” then perhaps we might say that in the ideological cultural apparatus of Harper's that same color line is reinforced through the absolutely unequal separation of the “charcoal” humor practice of blacks from the “diamond” humor practice of whites.Footnote 14 If Cox's essay marks a kind of foundation in thinking on American humor, then it is an origin that, appropriately enough, takes place during a moment of national anguish, anxiety, and crisis. Locating early articulations of humor practice in relation to the fallout of the Civil War casts the effort to nationalize mirth in a whole new light, as if the drawing of the color line reconciled for the nation the erasure of the Mason-Dixon line in a bloody zero-sum game of white supremacy and union. Cox's article, then, is a revealing instance of the articulation of humor practice to identity in the interests of whiteness and the nation.Footnote 15
Like “American Humor,” John Corbin's 1898 “How the Other Half Laughs” (which is in light dialogue with Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives Footnote 16) categorizes humor practices for the purposes of illustrating strictly hierarchized and easily distinguished nationalities. Corbin's description of New York's East Side residents and their distinctive humor practices argues for the unthreatening pleasantness of “other half” New Yorkers only to describe how not to practice humor in the city. It is this negative injunction that is Corbin's specific contribution to the history of thinking on humor, although, like Cox in the 1870s, and American humor scholars in the twentieth century, Corbin in the 1890s also wants readers to understand humor practices in relation to a hierarchy of national characteristics.
Corbin's study of the entertainment industry in New York's East Side details how various nationalities living in particular neighborhoods expressed their imagined distinct characters through humor practice. Whether through a description of popular Italian comedians who spit on the shoes of their fellows, a practice Corbin notes “could scarcely have been an Americanism,” or through descriptions of “Yiddish” adaptations of popular Harper's tales, like “Thrilby,” readers learned about how different they were from the other half in terms of race, nationality, local residence, and, just as crucially, humor and laughter. As a result, properly American humor (which meant, for the most part, white and middle-class urban humor) could confirm its own status by contrast to its fishy opposite.Footnote 17
Corbin solves the problem of a threatening place on the map inhabited by threatening people who do threatening things by turning them into objects of knowledge and by classifying their humor practices along an implicit hierarchy of national characteristics. For instance, in response to a letter received from an actor that declares “I am perfectly convinced now that it is no use to work for the Italian people of America,” Corbin writes, “Yet this is not the whole truth; thousands of Italians regard America as home, and by nature they are one of the most pleasure-loving of all our foreign colonies.”Footnote 18 Corbin reassures the Harper's half that Italian people and their threatening affective practices are not likely to spill out of the East Side since the distinct national “nature” of these people is harmlessly pleasure-loving, and because Italy is somehow an American foreign colony and implicitly subject to America's soon-to-be-labeled “big stick” imperialism. Corbin goes on to ease imagined tensions by noting of Italians that “even in the theatre they spoke to each other mainly in English,” and, perhaps most importantly,
in seeking amusement they fall prey to the flash and glare of our variety bill posters. The new generation, who lack the traditions of the home country, and sometimes the knowledge of Italy to appreciate its drama, are almost certain to become Americanized in their tastes.Footnote 19
Corbin elaborates this narrative of national conversion to justify his hierarchical categorization of humor practices and to underline the important politics that motivate his trenchantly hierarchical articulation of humor practice to identity. After describing an encounter with a man who complains that reporters often turn Bowery residents “into ridicule,” Corbin writes,
I pointed out that it is a reporter's business to speak of the amusing things he finds, and added that I was interested to know what he had to say about the life of the foreign people in America. “Ah!” he exclaimed, with quick intuition, “I see you will turn me into ridicule. I don't care. By-and-by I will write about you.” I accept the challenge; and if I am provincial enough to find keen delight in the strange people and strange sights I met, I stand in danger of swift retribution. If we laugh first, it behooves us to laugh heartily as we can, for these Yiddish people are hot on our trail in the arts as well as in commerce.Footnote 20
If nations, as Benedict Anderson and Lauren Berlant have argued, are communities imagined through national symbols like monuments, traditions, and holidays, then they are also made up of affective practices that confirm by contrast the symbolic boundaries of national behavior even as they reinforce the territorial boundaries of the geographic nation.Footnote 21 For Corbin, humor practices bring nationality into focus, as expressions of a national character that is subject to conversion through colonization. To be sure, Corbin's tale registers a powerful contradiction in nationalist ideology in which humor practices are subject to change by conquest even as they are forever locked into a rigged and discriminatory evaluative hierarchy, but what is not in conflict is the durable belief that humor practices are constitutive of national identity.Footnote 22
What binds together these nineteenth-century articles and the twentieth-century humor scholarship that followed them is their collective effort to join the study of humor practices to nationalism by turning humor practice into a national folk tradition.Footnote 23 By producing categories of American humor and essential American character they helped to make “Americans” an identifiable group knowable by their affective behavior, reinforcing Noah Webster's famous belief that Americans had “a national character to establish and extend by [their] wisdom and virtues.”Footnote 24 Such efforts were further aided by Rourke and Blair's implicit insistence that American humor studies, as a field, must answer the question, what makes humor American? Or, alternatively, what are the qualities of humor practice in America that are distinctly American? As historians have noted, much literary scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century was dedicated to legitimating the study of American literature as a professional endeavor of value to the nation, and to establishing the existence of a distinct American literature.Footnote 25 Rourke and Blair, building on the work of writers like Cox and Corbin, founded the twentieth-century study of American humor within this context, producing representative American types of humor practice to establish the existence of an American character grounded in the experience, performance, representation, and evaluation of humor.
These articles are not unique but instead representative of a nationalistic discourse, common to nineteenth-century US mass culture and, to some extent, to twentieth-century American studies, that articulated national identity to humor practice. This articulation produces national identity through ontology and hierarchy, converting humor practices (and representations of humor practices) into the constitutive properties of a national subjectivity, and it is this conversion that is the specific and productive purpose of their scholarship. The way these pieces use affect to make their arguments is what makes them uncanny when held against affective theories today; that is, they are uncanny not because they are so different from what we do now, but because they are not different enough. When critical histories of affect today assume a relationship between affect and identity, though their interests may be very different from those of their American studies predecessors, they nonetheless share in the same understanding of affective practice either as productive, or as an expression, of identity, whether national, racial, ethnic, or otherwise.
AFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVES
This exploration of a discipline's politics and methods has provided a brief history of how the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity came to be. Recognizing this articulation's history has a particular value for understanding the history of scholarship on American literature and culture, and the political and theoretical assumptions about affect and identity that are its basis, but it also opens up the possibility that there are other ways to engage humor and other interests that might yet be served by this engagement. What is brought into the horizon when the nationalist efforts to produce identity are set aside? What happens when we consider affective practices without categorizing them in hierarchies? What happens when we shift the terms of the discussion from humor as an expression of national character to humor practices as expressions and instances of, say, the relations between national fantasies and a capitalist marketplace, a marketplace shifting dynamically with the emergence of mass culture? These questions point to important new directions American studies can take, and is taking, in relation to the study of humor and affect in general; in an effort to suggest the fruitfulness of these new forms of inquiry, I want to end with three quick case studies that underscore how humor writings, when taken out of the character/classification methodological apparatus, become exemplary instances of the unfinished possibilities for scholarship in the discipline.Footnote 26
MAGAZINES AND HUMOR PRACTICE
The “Editor's Drawer” in Harper's New Monthly Magazine was one of the most popular humor departments in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and, though often accused of a dusty irrelevance, was nonetheless an important player in the 1890s humor industry. A look at some of its humor which directly related to the nation (that is, for which the nation was the profitable subject matter) should provide a fine instance of how magazines hoped to profit from nationalism through humor production. Like much humor from the period, the Drawer related humor practice to national identity, and, in doing so, worked in tandem with the articles of Cox and Corbin to assert the existence of distinct national characteristics indexed by distinct humor practices. This tendency strikingly manifested itself in the regular contributions of David Ker, a freelance author working out of England who wrote for close to half of the Drawers from 1889 to 1893. Ker contributed short anecdotal pieces that detailed forms of humor from around the world, noticeably distant from the home of Harper's and many of its readers. Ker's column entertained readers and provided them with a blueprint for understanding themselves as a cohesive group whose identity could be confirmed by contrast to their otherworldly, international counterparts in specifically affective terms.Footnote 27
Ker's columns need to be understood within the context of a humor industry saturated by nationalism. In the September 1890 “Pease and Needles,” which begins with a misleading universal form of address, “Everyone is now familiar with the story of the German farmer who …,”Footnote 28 Ker invokes transnational affective history only to assert more firmly a nationalist hierarchy of affective practice. To summarize, the story of the German farmer is a tale of exchange with an ironic twist: a farmer presents a prince with an enormous turnip and receives a handsome sum of money in return. Another farmer, hoping too for financial reward, presents a magnificent horse to the prince only to receive the giant turnip in return. After detailing this apparently familiar narrative, Ker links it to another far-away national scene:
But a still more striking instance of this peculiar style of repayment is recorded in an Asiatic legend, which, though little known in the West, may often be heard in the East from the bearded lips of some mountain warrior of Khorassan or Afghanistan.Footnote 29
The story details how Alexander the Great once humiliated a buffoonish Eastern learned man. In the “legend,” an Eastern pundit claims to have achieved the impossible, and, referring to a cliché regarding the placing of a pea on the head of a pin, demonstrates before Alexander how after a year of dedicated practice he can now place a pea in such a manner at will. Alexander pretends to be impressed and remarks, after some sarcastic praise, “Ho, there! Give quickly to this worker of wonders a packet of needles and a sack of pease [sic].”Footnote 30 Like many Drawer jokes, both the German and the Afghan tales of exchange are disciplinary in the sense that they explain proper and improper manners of social behavior, and detail the shame and reward that result from such behavior. Here, the tales distinguish American humor practices from their exotic others, but also draw a point of connection – on the level of exchange – between nations. The point here is that both jokes, though distinctly foreign, remain funny even when they cross national borders. It is in this sense that Ker's column should be read as contradictory: the column holds up familiar notions of national hierarchy and difference, but also asserts that exchanges of wealth are inevitable and universal (we all understand these jokes of exchange as jokes of exchange), and so promotes transnational points of connection that rely on the very nationalism they manifestly complicate.
Theories of international relations are raised time and again in Ker's “Drawer” columns. In June 1890, Ker published a column entitled “A Mohammedan ‘Joe Miller,’” which he begins with a set of curious international connections:
The comic pre-eminence held by Tyll Enlenspiegel in Germany and by Joe Miller in England is in Moslem lands assigned to a certain “Nasr'-ed-Din El Khojah,” who, though probably as mythical as the Eastern Sultan whose court jester he is said to have been, has become a household word among all Mussulman races from the Ganges to the Atlantic. To this day, whenever you hear a hearty laugh from a listening ring of Arab traders, Afghan peasants, or Egyptian porters, you may be pretty certain that some threadbare jest of Nasr'-ed-Din El Khojah is the cause of the merriment.
Not a few of this worthy's jokes have become stock anecdotes in an English version, and those who repeat them would doubtless be greatly surprised to learn that the bare-limbed savages of Asiatic and African deserts were laughing at these very same stories 600 years ago.Footnote 31
Here, English humor, German humor, and American humor are traced to a mythical source in the east, establishing a discursive genealogy that does not argue for American exceptionalism but rather for wide-reaching global intimacies fostered by the tendency of jokes to repeat themselves ad nauseam. But such an argument for a shared history of wit, even this explicit, is accompanied by the “great surprise” one might feel at realizing this history. Thus, while the piece implicitly maintains an interconnected, international history of humor practice, Ker's column playfully suggests America's place in a global community while stoutly asserting the crucial difference between “bare-limbed savages” and the finely clothed, magazine-reading characters who populate the surrounding cartoons and represent Harper's readers to themselves. As in Cox's racialized humor history, similarity here is asserted only to claim a much more important difference. Ker addresses his readers as subjects who believe in a racialized hierarchy that assumes no connection between savages and Harper's readers or Americans. It is because of this assumption that readers are expected to be surprised – greatly surprised – by the point of connection Ker draws. The feeling of humorous surprise is the precise affective form the article seeks to produce. This is a fine line to walk, but it is often traced with precision by Ker and the Drawer, serving the interests of a magazine devoted to securing profit through the reading practices of a predictable, identifiable readership.
In the mass culture of the late nineteenth century, when writers, editors, and advertisers were busy inventing and responding to an emerging professional–managerial class, humor became a subject through which a profitable national identity could be expressed. In this sense, magazines like Harper's sold identity to a readership that looked to magazines for cues and advice on how to live in the Progressive Era. Humor here has much to do with nationalism, but not as a natural expression of a distinct national character so much as a clever response to imagined readerly desires that fit together with the interests of capital – in other words, as an ideologically and economically productive, and overdetermined, engagement with the emerging mass culture that strove to sustain a structure of feeling suitable to the interests of the nation, whiteness, and capitalism.
SUFFRAGE AND HUMOR PRACTICE
Marietta Holley was one of the most popular humorists from the 1890s, and one whose trenchant nationalism, like that of Harper's, helped to sell books. For Holley, however, humor and nationalism were not only opportunities to make money and maintain a racialized national identity, but also occasions for promoting women's rights in the United States. For instance, her popular 1893 humor book Samantha at the World's Fair expresses a fervently held national pride and articulates that pride to the necessity of promoting women's rights, most importantly women's right to vote.Footnote 32 The book sees Holley's popular first-person narrator, Samantha Allen (who ironically refers to herself as “Josiah Allen's Wife”), journeying to the Chicago World's Fair. This famous fair, which was intended to celebrate Columbus's 1492 discovery of America while promoting the nation's (and Chicago's) industrial might, represents a flashpoint for the Progressive Era framed as it was by a financial crisis that would deeply impact the national economy for years, and by the devastating and polarizing Pullman strike. What makes this articulation of the fair and of humor significant for my study here is that while Holley's book participates in humorous forms of affective practice that serve the interests of nationalism, her work also needs to be understood as an effort to turn those forms into an opportunity to secure women's rights.
In the book, Samantha tours through the fair, recording its wonders for her readers in her familiar dialect-driven, commonsense humor, while speculating on what the fair means for the nation and for women. Spending much time touring and admiring the famous women's pavilion, the suffragist Samantha immediately articulates popular humor to nationalism in the interests of promoting women's rights. The book opens with a dedication that reveals Holley's political project: “To Columbia – who has jest sailed out and discovered woman. And to the sect discovered this book is dedicated.” Written in Samantha's trademark dialect, and including one of her trademark dialect-driven puns (sect=sex), the dedication signals ironically the belatedness of Columbia's discovery of a sect that has always existed and also expresses the lighthearted hope that this discovery will be good for the development of that “sect.” Unlike Ker's columns, where politics are implicit, Holley's promotion of women's rights in the United States is an explicit, worked-out political program. Throughout the book, she implores readers to “raise our skirts and wade back into history,” or, if that is too difficult, “keep in the shaller water of a few short fleetin' months,” and catalogue “the rotten political doin's, the unjust laws prevailin' in regard to female wimmen, and also the onrighteousness of the liquor laws and the abomination of the license question.”Footnote 33 The point, which is repeated many times throughout the lengthy tome, is that the America that Columbus discovered and imagined – an America of peace, freedom, and religion – has been betrayed by unjust laws that privilege men and the rich.
The humorous context of these expressions neatly captures the multiple registers from which such humor writing can be appreciated in relation to nationalism and to the history of affect. Not simply an expression of a national humor tradition, or of a national woman's tradition, Holley's book is the product of a hardworking popular humorist whose nationalism sold books in a tradition of commodified popular culture irreducible to the “nation” or to gender even as it is also the product of a committed suffragist who linked nationalism and humor to promote women's rights. Humor practices in mass culture were being articulated within a structure of feeling by magazines like Harper's and pieces like Ker's, but they were also being mobilized in the interests of specific reformist and, to some extent, transformative politics like Holley's.
HISTORY, WAR, AND HUMOR PRACTICE
Popular humorist Bill Nye's 1894 Bill Nye's History of the United States, illustrated by occasional Harper's artist Frederick Opper, trades on a nationalism like Holley's, one that expresses criticism of conventional national histories while working to reproduce them.Footnote 34 This book is a good example of how easily and often the American nation, and American history, have been converted into profitable material for humorists and for alternative visions of the national past. A beautifully illustrated and bound book, Nye's history tells in the author's familiar one-liners and quips, and in broad, non-threatening humorous strokes, a familiar history of the United States that, while somewhat critical of the treatment of African Americans, Native Americans, and “Chinamen,” implicitly expresses the nation's cruel history of oppression as the result of a kind of childlike innocence that sometimes stepped over the line (abolitionists are accused of having never seen an African American outside of a minstrel show).Footnote 35 Insofar as the book relies, too, on a racialized hierarchy, it trades on familiar articulations of national identity to a privileged whiteness through the symbolic violence of such hierarchies. But its humor practice cannot be reduced to nationalism since its engagement of history and war in fact encourages a complex affective response to national history that is multiple, contradictory, and critical.Footnote 36
Nye's most explicit political commentary is reserved for a profound dislike of war. As the narrative enters the Civil War, Nye explains how war serves the interests of capital:
Of course after we have been drawn into the fight and been fined and sent home, we like to maintain that we were fighting for our home, or liberty, or the flag, or something of the kind. We hate to admit that, as a nation, we fought and paid for it afterwards with our family's bread-money just because we were irritated. That's natural; but most great wars are arranged by people who stay at home and sell groceries to the widow and orphan and old maids at one hundred per cent. advance.Footnote 37
Indeed, all wars in Nye's US history are tied to capital, including and perhaps especially wars fought between colonizers and colonized:
The Black Hawk War occurred in the Northwest Territory in 1832. It grew out of the fact that the Sacs and Foxes sold their lands to the United States and afterwards regretted that they had not asked more for them: so they refused to vacate, until several of them had been used up on the asparagus beds of the husband-man.Footnote 38
What Nye's lighthearted but brutal history suggests is how nationalism presented humorists with golden opportunities not just to secure capital and shore up hegemonic racial ideology, but also to critique capital's role in war by noting how “the flag” can be turned, by capitalists, into an excuse for exploitation of the nation itself. Nye had good company in the 1890s as a humorous critic of the US history of war (these include Finley Peter Dunne and Mark Twain); what his book signals, especially in relation to the jingoism of Ker and Holley, is that humor practice, even within something as historically particular as the humor industry, has always played complex, ambivalent political roles that are as capable of critique (even if it takes place in a less than ideal form) as they are of simple ideological reproduction.
AFFECTIVE FUTURES
The humor industry's close relationship to nationalist discourse still obtains in mass culture today; indeed, humor and nationalism are two of the major modes of modern discourse, as profitable for the entertainment industry as they are for advertising. Humor also remains an imaginative source for global politics: UNESCO, drawing on an internationally celebrated mythical figure for humor and wisdom, declared 1996 “Nasreddin Hodja Year” to mark the possibilities humor holds for fostering international peace and understanding. Drawing on Nasreddin's ancient, international reputation as a humorous wise man, UNESCO felt that this figure could stand as a rallying point, or model, for international relations. The purpose behind the institutional effort to articulate (transnational) identity to humor practice is distinctly different from that of the June 1890 Harper's “Editor's Drawer” tale of Nasreddin, which invoked the jester as an example of humor's capacity to mark distinct, hierarchized national characteristics rather than to encourage global solidarity, but despite its difference it shares many of the same assumptions about how we should understand the relationship between affective practice and identity. From Marietta Holley's articulation of humor and women's rights, to Bill Nye's humorous historicization of the causes of US wars, to the late nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers that shaped mass culture, the humor industry, and humor scholarship itself, humor practice remains a key source for imagining national and international “character” and relations, but not only through the simple assumption of what is in fact a produced relationship between identity and this specific form of affective practice. Histories of humor's relation to identity must necessarily remain political, but this politics needs to take the form of a specific account of affective practice in the scholarship that inevitably modifies, through its critical assumptions, the materials and practices it has claimed to merely explain.
