Title: The comedian as confidence man
First published: 1997
Description: The Comedian as Confidence Man examines the humorist's internal conflict between the social critic who demands to be taken seriously and the comedian who never can be: the irony fatigue condition. Concentrating on eight American literary and performing comedians from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, this study explores the irony fatigue effect that seems to pervade the work of comedians - those particular social observers who are under the implicit injunction, "Smile when you say that." They are obliged to promise, "Only kidding, folks," even when they may not be; in G.B. Shaw's words, they must "put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang them believe they are joking."

If these social observers are obliged to become, in effect, confidence men, with irony as the satiric weapon that both attacks and diverts, then the implications are great for those social critics who above all wish to be heeded. Kaufman explores the problems of irony and irony fatigue through the analysis of a variety of texts and performances: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days; Benjamin Franklin's literary confidence games (including the Autobiography) and Melville's response to them in Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man; the stand-up routines and censorship battles of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks; the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, with their failed and hapless comedians; and the conflict between Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain as witnessed in Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson.

This leads to a concluding discussion of the disturbing either/or - irony or political commitment - as explored in the political philosophy of John Seery, Richard Rorty, Linda Hutcheon and others, including the most enigmatic of ironists, Thomas Mann.
Subjects: Comic, The, in literature, Irony in literature
LC classification: PN56.I65 K38 1997