American Cornball
A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
American Cornball is Christopher Miller's irresistibly funny illustrated survey of popular humor—the topics that used to make us laugh, from hiccups and henpecked-husbands to outhouses and old maids—and what it tells us about our country yesterday and today.
Miller revisits nearly 200 comic staples that have been passed down through our culture for generations, many originating from the vaudeville age. He explores the (often unseemly) contexts from which they arose, why they were funny in their time, and why they eventually lost their appeal. The result is a kind of taxonomy of humor during America's golden age that provides a deeper, more profound look at the prejudices, preoccupations, and peculiarities of a nation polarized between urban and rural, black and white, highborn and lowbrow.
As he touches on issues of racism and sexism, cultural stereotypes and violence, Miller reveals how dramatically our moral sensibilities have shifted, most notably in the last few decades. Complete with more than 100 period illustrations, American Cornball is a richly entertaining survey of our shifting comic universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
All manner of stale gags from the century past are jolted back to life in this amusing cultural study. Novelist Miller (The Cardboard Universe) mines comic strips, cartoons, novelty postcards, joke books, Marx Brothers movies, and Three Stooges episodes to unearth obsolete, semi-forgotten, and downright embarrassing tropes of mass humor from the period between the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars. His alphabetical essays riff on archetypes, settings, subjects and props, including roller pin-wielding wives, traveling salesman, dumb blondes, absent-minded professors and dim-witted yokels; yowling alley cats and gabbling chickens; desert islands, psychiatrist offices and golf courses where punch lines breed; disappointing honeymoons, baffling Rube Goldberg mechanisms and mass pie fights; plummeting safes, pianos and anvils and the apparently hilarious though never lethal head injuries they cause. While drolly taxonomizing the absurdities and arbitrariness of stylized humor, he digs into its psychological resonances: the undercurrents of violence and sadism; racial bigotry and the asymmetric war between the sexes; the conflicting impulses to both stigmatize nonconformists and upend the stuffed shirts, dowagers and cops who police conformity. Miller's lovingly jaundiced exploration of the way America once laughed crackles with insight; the result is that rare book on humor that is as entertaining as its subject.
