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This week: Fourth of July Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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"I had thought - I had been told - that a 'funny' thing is a thing of a goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery... and a sharing... against pain and sorrow and defeat."
- Valentine Michael Smith
(Robert Heinlein,
Stranger in a Strange Land) |
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American Humor
Yes, I know most of these newsletters are about American comedy, because, well, most of the editors are from the United States. Not, as Seinfeld might say, that there's anything wrong with that...
But the Fourth of July is coming up, that most quintessential of American holidays (because it's what made the US the US), and so I thought I'd take the opportunity to spotlight what makes our humor better thandistinct from that of other cultures.
Which reminds me of a joke:
Q: What's the difference between the United States and yogurt?
A: Given time, yogurt will develop a culture.
Anyway, before Europeans invaded and messed everything up, the natives of what would become the United States had comedy centered around tricksters such as the figure of Coyote, whose exploits against Road Runner are legendary and remain hilarious to this day.
After the American Revolution, for some reason, there wasn't a whole lot of comedy going on in America. Possibly that's because everyone was either busy being a slave or owning them, or trying to get slavery to go away, to do anything funny. After all, there's nothing funny about slavery. Just ask Walt Disney.
So the first figures to emerge in the nascent America to get us all laughing again (and, not coincidentally, get us to take a good, hard look at what people were doing to Native Americans and imported Africans), were Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain.
Ambrose Bierce was the author of the Devil's Dictionary, a fine example of satire and word play, whose origins can be traced back to the late 1800s (note that this was over a century past the Revolution), but which didn't get published until 1911. Fortunately for us, the copyright on it expired long ago, and the text is available online for all to get a kick out of. It includes such gems as:
HOUSELESS, adj. Having paid all taxes on household goods.
and
RECONSIDER, v. To seek a justification for a decision already made.
And yet, in perusing the Dictionary, one finds many references to what is now archaic and possibly even quaint practices and ideas. So while many of the definitions have stood the test of time, the Dictionary is grossly in need of updating.
Which brings me to the American humorist that never needs updating: Mark Twain.
Like Bierce, all of Twain's stuff got written after the Civil War, thus lending support to my thesis that there wasn't anything funny in America between the time the Europeans got here to mess everything up and the time they finally got rid of the whole slavery thing.
Twain (and hey, if you don't know what his real name was by now, there is no hope for you) was funny. He was funny in a way that no one before him was funny, and that everyone since him has tried, with varying degrees of success, to emulate. Dave Barry, for example, wishes he was Twain. People have called him the founder of American literature. At the very least, he turned its course around.
And that's an American revolution I can get behind.
I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.
-Mark Twain |
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Comedy: June 30, 2010 Issue [#3827]
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Nice newsletter. Somehow it all sounds so familiar . . . 