American Humor: A Study of the National Character.(Book Review)

American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Constance Rourke. New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

This book is a new edition of Constance Rourke's 1931 masterpiece, American Humor: A Study of the National Character. The best known of Rourke's seven books resurfaces every few years, then fades again from print, never quite establishing its importance as either a historical document or a relevant reference work. In the introduction to the new edition, Greil Marcus calls American Humor "Rourke's great no to America: her insistence that the nation had not yet truly come into being, or found its own voice" (xi). It is more accurate to read the text as Rourke's "yes," her rebuttal to the "no" of Van Wyck Brooks. In The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks had claimed that America "had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or next to none, to express it" (96), and thus no foundation for a literary tradition. Yet Brooks struck such assertions from his 1933 revision of The Ordeal two years after a young writer disproved Brooks's claim. That writer was Constance Rourke (1881-1941), and the text was American Humor. Anticipating by several decades theories of performance and performativity, Rourke portrayed America as a culture that--in response to feelings of fear, uncertainty, isolation, and inadequacy--lied, pretended, joked, and performed itself into being. With her subtle understanding of humor as a potent and multivalent verbal act, Rourke was the first American cultural critic to take humor seriously.

But how are we to take American Humor in 2004? The text now encounters a very different audience, one keenly attuned to representations of race, class, and gender. In the same paragraph in which Rourke calls blackface minstrelsy "a travesty," she claims that "Negro humor was always abundant, and from it early minstrelsy drew as from a primal source.... Burlesque appeared, but burlesque was natural to the Negro" (74). Greil Marcus defends Rourke's quest for the traces of "authenticity" in minstrelsy: "Rourke heard the slave--the black American--speaking through [the white minstrels]" (xviii). On the other hand, Eric ...