Title: The rise and fall of American humor
First published: 1968
Description: BOOK JACKET: As comprehensive as it is incisive, this wide-ranging critical history of American humor shows that our humor is the consequence of pluralism, the reductionist voice of truth in a nation where conformity, hypocrisy, and minority dissent have been equally encouraged. American humor has always tried to combat the sentiment and shibboleths of the American experience, and the many elements of comedy involved - from cruelty, and complication through realism, anti-climax, nihilism, comic reversal, anti-proverbialism - are carefully analyzed. Here, too, is a penetrating look at the American comic preoccupation with misogyny, the confidence man, and social antagonism. From this position, Jesse Bier determines that the three high points In American humor were the Jacksonian period, the Civil War and post-bellum era, and the decade of the 1930’s when radio, film, and literary humor reached their apogee. But by establishing the importance of these periods he does not sell short the humor and the humorists who fell in between. Beginning with Franklin, ShiIIaber, Philip Freneau, he goes on to discuss everyone of importance, from household names like Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers, to A. B. Longstreet, Joseph Baldwin, Ambrose Bierce, Don Marquis, George Ade, Lenny Bruce, and many more. Finally, Professor Bier claims that modern American humor has lost its comic sense to outright despair and nihilism, that the negative elements of our comedy have been pushed over the line. He believes the resurgence of great comedy will be an international responsibility, and although he sounds a warning, he has told his story with all the flair and excitement of his subject.
Subjects: History and criticism, American wit and humor, American wit and humor, history and criticism