Comic relief

Abstract: One day, many years ago, two well-known men of letters, Louis Untermeyer and Ralph Shikes, were sitting together in the New York Public Library laboriously sorting through papers and books pUed before them. Their brows were furrowed, the corners of their mouths turned down; their silence was broken only by an occasional sigh or muttered remark. After watching them for some minutes, a Library employee turned to a colleague: "Those guys are working on humor?' he asked, shaking his head in disbelief. Fifteen contributors plus the editor (who is also a contributor) work on humor in this collection of essays: the brows are furrowed, the corners of the mouths turned down, the sighs and muttered remarks are hidden between the lines of every page. No jokes here except the Caldwell cartoon on the jacket, depicting an author tickling the fancy of his typewriter as he taps the keys. This is a warning to readers who still judge a book by its cover—or who have never tackled the arduous task of classifying or analyzing humor. Comic Relief is a serious book about humor in contemporary American literature. No one is more serious about the topic of Comic Relief than its editor, whose earlier writings (Saul Bellows' Enigmatic Laughter, plus essays on the humor of Henry James and Philip Roth) establish her credentials. In an introduction entitled "The Variety of Humors" (why not Varieties of Humor?), she presents an overview, impressive in scope, of American humor from the Civil War to the present; her command of her subject is evident also in her concluding "Selected Checklist of Criticism." I wish, however, that she had not said "During World War II ... no distinctive American humor emerged," because I think of Bill Mauldin's cartoons and the humorous pieces that appeared in servicemen's magazines as offering a new and distinctive view of a new and distinctive kind of war. I wish, too, that she had not lumped together all humor of the post-World War II period, because I see significant differences between the kinds of wry humor, parody, and satire produced in the fifties (cf. Margaret Halsey, The Folks at Home; William H. Whyte, Is Anybody Listening?) and their equivalents of the sixties and seventies. But this is carping: every wide net has holes, and Cohen's purpose—to prepare readers for the essays that follow—is well served.

Abstract: A spate of plays in the history of the American drama are memorable for containing an engaging character type. The stage Yankee who supplied comic relief in native plays from 1787 down to the Civil War and beyond is worthy of a role in our literary history more dramatic than that of theatrical curiosity or ingenious caricature to which he has been assigned by students of American drama and American humor. After humble beginnings as a boorish servant, the stock Yankee expands and inflates until he takes on the proportions of a comic Odysseus, moving through a series of ludicrous situations that carry him to far parts of the globe; in the end he emerges as a generic folk figure capably illustrating cheeky traits of the American temper. Indeed, for an extended, uniform treatment of a humorous native type, this sequence of plays is surpassed in American literature only by the series of Crockett almanacs which delineate an allied comic folk type, the frontiersman. In spite of the wide range and duration of the Yankee plays, it can be shown that the type-figure they contain adheres consistently to set formulas and conventions that had come to be associated with the picture of the mythical Yankee in the mind of the folk.

Abstract: The comic relief of the theater has an everyday analog. It is seen in the momentary humorous respites from the seriousness or lengthy concentration on a collective task commonly found in certain spheres of daily life. These respites facilitate the completion of that task by refreshing the participants. Observations of social comic relief made during a series of rehearsals and performances of an amateur theater company are reported. The nature and function of this sort of humor is considered, first in theater, and then in other similar settings. A comparison of social comic relief as a function of humor with selected philosophical and psychological relief theories of humor follows. A concluding section considers the place of creativity and wit in social comic relief.