American humor

American humor refers collectively to the conventions and common threads that tie together humor in the United States. It is often defined in comparison to the humor of another country – for example, how it is different from British humor and Canadian humor. It is, however, difficult to say what makes a particular type or subject of humor particularly American.
Humor usually concerns aspects of American culture, and depends on the historical and current development of the country's culture. The extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous obviously depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including, but not limited to geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and context. People of different countries will therefore find different situations funny. Just as American culture has many aspects which differ from other nations, these cultural differences may be a barrier to how humor translates to other countries.

General features

Themes

One leading analysis of American humor, the 1931 book '' American Humor: A Study of the National Character'' by Constance Rourke, identified the character of the "Yankee" as that first American comic figure, the first widely accepted American character that the nation could find funny, make fun of and even export for the amusement of the world – a gangly traveler who told stories, played elaborate practical jokes, was ingenuous, sly, perhaps uneducated. She reports that American comedy sprang forth after the American Revolution, when the country was "freed from the worry of self preservation" and its citizens began to regard themselves as "works of art".Rourke, Constance, (1959 ed.
American Humor: A Study of the National Character on the American Studies at Univ. of Virginia website
(324 pp.), chapter 1; retrieved on 2007-06-20.

Types of humor

American humor might also be distinguished by its most common type of humor, for example, more slapstick and physical comedy. There is less emphasis on understatement, and so the humor tends to be more open, rather than satirizing the social system through exaggeration.

American humor prefers more observational techniques. However, the style of observational humor (while not exclusively American) is very much a staple of the American style of humor since it seeks to point out the aspects of American culture and social discourse which are obvious while at the same time highlighting their ridiculousness.

Sources

The United States has many diverse groups from which to draw on for humorous material. The strongest of these influences, during the 20th century at least, has been the influx of Jewish comedians and their corresponding Jewish humor, including some of the most influential: The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and Lewis Black are a few examples.
In the latter half of the 20th century, comedy from the United States saw its African-American comedians come to the forefront. With exposure stemming from TV shows such as ''The Jeffersons'', ''Saturday Night Live'' and ''The Cosby Show'', black comedians became household names. During the eighties and nineties, Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby were two of the most popular American comedians exported around the globe.

Literature

The earliest example of deliberate, skillful and sustained comedy and satire in American literature is 1637's "New English Canaan" by Thomas Morton of Merrymount, who devoted chapters and poems to his wry observations of Native people and English Puritan colonists alike, including a witty comparison of their cultural values that produced surprising and disturbing answers. A second example is Benjamin Church's "Entertaining Passages from King Philip's War" (1680s editions, Richard Slotkin, ed.), in which a seasoned frontiersman and friend of Native New Englanders observes the foolish tactics and needless tragedies of the conflict.

By the 1830s, regional humor became popular across the US, with examples like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's ''Georgia Scenes'' (1835) from the South and Seba Smith's ''Major Jack Downing'' series (1830-1850s) from New England. Smith was influenced by earlier works by John Neal exhibiting Maine and New England accents and cultural references.

Later in the nineteenth century, Ernest Hemingway credited Mark Twain as the 'founding father' of American humor. Twain remained conscious of his humor's relationship with European counterparts, commenting in 1897 that, "The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter."

This early definition puts emphasis on the performance orientation of American humor, and thereby necessarily the performer her/himself. Indeed, in his time on the lecture circuit Twain essentially 'performed' many of his works, most notably "The American Vandal Abroad" lecture he gave via the Lyceum Movement before the publication of his breakthrough work ''The Innocents Abroad''. Thus, at the root of American humor is the very concept of stand-up comedy itself, and the shift from textual means of conveying humor to that of performance and performer.

His value notwithstanding, Twain represents only one strain of humor in the United States. Another famous American humorist of the 19th century was Ambrose Bierce, whose most famous work is the cynical ''Devil's Dictionary''. Popular humorists who spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries included Samuel Minturn Peck (1854–1938), who wrote ''My Sweetheart'', and Hayden Carruth (1862–1932), who wrote ''Uncle Bentley and the Roosters''. Early 20th-century American humorists included members of the Algonquin Round Table (named for the Algonquin Hotel), such as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and Robert Benchley. In more recent times popular writers of American humor include P. J. O'Rourke, Louis (L) Harding, Erma Bombeck, and Dave Barry.

There has also been a history of using humor in children's books, sometimes using rhymed text. Popular choices include Dr. Seuss

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