Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest

Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest by H. Collin Messer Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1835­1925. By Andrew Silver. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. xii + 222 pp. $42.95 cloth. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor. Edited by Ed Piacentino. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. x + 326 pp. $49.95 cloth. Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain. By James H. Justus. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004. xiii + 591 pp. $54.95 cloth. In Following the Equator (1897) Mark Twain grouses, "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." Having fully entered the curmudgeonry of his later years, Twain approaches the level of facile truism in drawing a connection between humor and pathos. The relationship is at least as old as Juvenal himself. In the three books under consideration in this review, however, this truism is to varying degrees called into question. For Andrew Silver it seems that pathos is all. With particular focus on nineteenth-century racial violence and the human distortions and degradation that attended the Reconstruction era, Silver envisions humorous http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Southern Literary Journal University of North Carolina Press

Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest

Messer, H. Collin.
The Southern Literary Journal , Volume 39 (2) – Jul 23, 2007
Download PDF
7 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/dark-laughter-humor-and-pathos-in-the-old-southwest-uJ0qixY1F0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English. All rights reserved.
ISSN
1534-1461
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Dark Laughter: Humor and Pathos in the Old Southwest by H. Collin Messer Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1835­1925. By Andrew Silver. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. xii + 222 pp. $42.95 cloth. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor. Edited by Ed Piacentino. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. x + 326 pp. $49.95 cloth. Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain. By James H. Justus. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004. xiii + 591 pp. $54.95 cloth. In Following the Equator (1897) Mark Twain grouses, "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." Having fully entered the curmudgeonry of his later years, Twain approaches the level of facile truism in drawing a connection between humor and pathos. The relationship is at least as old as Juvenal himself. In the three books under consideration in this review, however, this truism is to varying degrees called into question. For Andrew Silver it seems that pathos is all. With particular focus on nineteenth-century racial violence and the human distortions and degradation that attended the Reconstruction era, Silver envisions humorous

Journal

The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jul 23, 2007

There are no references for this article.