American Cornball

December 23, 2013
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.

January 15, 2014
An alphabetical history of "things that used to make Americans laugh." If you yuck and guffaw at the likes of old maids, absent-minded professors and red-nosed topers, then this is just the book for you. As novelist Miller (The Cardboard Universe, 2009, etc.) notes, these were the things that were widely considered to be funny--and perhaps nothing so much as the specter of the henpecked husband. Other things have come along since in a humor culture that may have become less kind and gentle (courtesy of, say, Sam Kinison and his like), leaving these old-fashioned sources of japery in the realm of "cornball." Miller describes the comedic grammar: Lucille Ball resists the intoxicating powers of Vitameatavegamin, since, by Miller's light, she was "a fully realized character with twenty-nine episodes of backstory behind her" when that one aired, whereas Red Skelton, as a one-off kabibbler, was free to yield to the sauce. Or, on another matter, since most absent-minded professors teach science, it's not always easy to distinguish them from their mad-scientist peers--just ask Buddy Love. Miller's encyclopedia of comic types is wide-ranging, complete and lively; you have to appreciate a sentence such as this: "A fat work-shy self-righteous long-winded blustering grandiose feckless confabulating braggart, Hoople is forever boasting of shooting elephants, overpowering octopi, advising heads of state, and so on." The only shortcoming is the too-easy glossing on the psychology of humor: There's more to making fun of so-called easy girls than the mere fact that for men, "it's something they like to think about. A lot." Freud would tell you otherwise--but then he was one of those pointy-headed absent-minded prof types, wasn't he? A good-natured, entertaining read. It doesn't make Family Circus any funnier, but it explains good bits of Blondie and Snuffy Smith.

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