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The Front Porch

The Front Porch This is Southern Cultures's first "special issue"--that is, its first devoted to a single topic. The topic is southern humor, and the articles come from a symposium on the subject at Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of 1993. As the visiting Eudora Welty Professor of Southern Studies at Millsaps, I had the chance to organize a symposium on a subject of my choosing, and the immediate impetus for this event was, believe it or not, a New York Times Book Review that described a book as "full of brash, irreverent, New-York-style one-liners" and just a few pages later referred to "the deft, rapier wit of the British." Those phrases got me thinking: Would anyone speak without irony of "brash, irreverent Mississippi-style oneliners" or of "the deft, rapier wit of Tennesseans"? Yet some of the funniest people around are southerners. From Bill Arp to Jerry Clower, Mark Twain to Roy Blount, many southerners have even made their livings by being funny. They have just been funny in southern ways. But what does that mean? And so evolved the symposium that brought some well-informed people to Jackson to talk about southern humor. I figured that even if http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

The Front Porch

Reed, John Shelton.
Southern Cultures , Volume 1 (4) – Jan 4, 1995
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488
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Abstract

This is Southern Cultures's first "special issue"--that is, its first devoted to a single topic. The topic is southern humor, and the articles come from a symposium on the subject at Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of 1993. As the visiting Eudora Welty Professor of Southern Studies at Millsaps, I had the chance to organize a symposium on a subject of my choosing, and the immediate impetus for this event was, believe it or not, a New York Times Book Review that described a book as "full of brash, irreverent, New-York-style one-liners" and just a few pages later referred to "the deft, rapier wit of the British." Those phrases got me thinking: Would anyone speak without irony of "brash, irreverent Mississippi-style oneliners" or of "the deft, rapier wit of Tennesseans"? Yet some of the funniest people around are southerners. From Bill Arp to Jerry Clower, Mark Twain to Roy Blount, many southerners have even made their livings by being funny. They have just been funny in southern ways. But what does that mean? And so evolved the symposium that brought some well-informed people to Jackson to talk about southern humor. I figured that even if

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 4, 1995

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