| This study examines the high stakes of comic expression during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period both saturated by humor and desperate to outgrow it. If humor had always been a pronounced feature of the country's character, during the cultural reinvention that followed the Civil War, levity began to seem dangerous, indulgent, and contradictory to the national call for seriousness. In his 1864 essay, "The Humorous in Art," New York art critic Clarence Cook condemned the comic painting of his day, calling the worst of it "a grave sin against society."1 Conservative literary and cultural critics similarly damned the new breed of dialect humorists who made the transition from newspaper column to stage as the nation's first stand-up comedians in these years. If a "vulgar" and "coarse" brand of humor seemed to be spreading over the next two decades, by 1895, American culture at large was seen to be suffering from a "plague of jocularity."2 In the realm of fine art, especially, a primary means through which the country sought to advertise its maturity both to the contemporary world and for posterity, humor had to be reigned in, controlled, or concealed.; I examine this contest between a swelling jocularity and the call for seriousness to argue that 'fine' art of the period was in part constructed according to this ostensible opposition. Although many artists in this climate either gave up humor or produced a kind of populist comic imagery bent on drawing the easy laugh, a few responded by insisting that ambitious art could be produced through a serious engagement with humor and the problems it posed. Works in this vein can be opaque and inscrutable-seeming, innocuous yet cutting, silly on the surface yet ultimately dark and deep, or resolutely humorless. By pondering how a Civil War medical scene or the monumental figure of a Puritan negotiated humor discourse in this period, my project asks us to expand the canon of comic expression, revise our methods for assessing visual humor, and rethink how nineteenth-century American humor has been understood.; 1[Cook], "The Humorous in Art," The New Path 1 (February 1864): 133-5. 2H. H. Boyesen, "The Plague of Jocularity," The North American Review 161 (November 1895): 528-36. |
