Defense Date
11-13-2024
Graduation Date
Fall 12-20-2024
Availability
Immediate Access
Submission Type
dissertation
Degree Name
PhD
Department
English
School
McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
Committee Chair
Greg Barnhisel
Committee Member
Faith Barrett
Committee Member
Kathy Glass
Keywords
humor, American Literature, critical distance, emotion
Abstract
It is generally accepted by scholars of humor that humor requires an observer to take on a perspective of “critical distance” – or a perspective through which the observer can be critical of the target of humor. Consequently, work in the field is dominated by an assumption – whether implicit or explicit - that humor (and, especially, twentieth century American humor) necessitates that the observer disengages emotionally from the target of humor. In this project, I challenge this assumption and argue that humor has the potential to be extremely emotionally engaging. Focusing on written humor and building on both classic and recent humor theories – including superiority theory, relief theory, incongruity theory, play theory, and benign violation theory - I take the position that humor is characterized by attack, that humor is self-reflexive, and that humor operates by constructing a complex “game” through which the observer is positioned paradoxically as simultaneously critically distant from and emotionally engaged with the target. Bringing my argument to bear on a number of twentieth century American humor texts, I demonstrate that, in the twentieth century, American humor evolved so as to construct increasingly more layered and complex games and to be profoundly emotionally engaging for the reader - encouraging the reader to engage with the target of humor, even as the target of humor had the potential to experience extreme pain as the result of the humorous attack. Through analysis of dark humor texts – Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – I demonstrate that, in twentieth century America, as humor began to attack more sensitive subject matter and to attack more aggressively, humorists did not merely accommodate these attacks with more aggressive “signals of play,” but, rather, these humorists constructed complex games that allowed them to maintain critical distance while simultaneously encouraging their readers to engage with extreme pain. Analyzing comedic memoirs that spanned the twentieth century – James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times, Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All others Pay Cash, and David Sedaris’ Naked – I argue for the development of a modern American comedic persona, which was initiated in the form of the “Little Man” of the New Yorker and which evolved throughout the century as a tool of constructing complex and emotionally engaging games. Finally, analyzing the housewife humor of Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck, I lay a foundation for a much larger discussion regarding the contribution of marginalized groups to the emotionally engaging humor that evolved in the U.S. during the twentieth century.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Stanger, N. (2024). IT'S FUNNY WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT: FORMAL COMPLEXITY AND EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN HUMOR (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/2286