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This chapter explores the emergence of humour as a popular genre and its role in the development of mass culture in the United States during the period 1860–1920. It also considers the ways in which the humour industry engaged in ‘struggles over hierarchies of identity and economic profit’ in the era of the mass market, along with the rationalisation of popular humour production at print institutions such as magazines and newspapers. The chapter first provides an overview of the field of American Humor Studies before turning to a discussion of the social, economic, and political dimensions of various interests pursued by the humour industry during the period. It then looks at the articulation of humour to advertising, along with the success of illustrated humour and the emergence of comic strips. Finally, it examines the role played by two popular writers, Mark Twain and Marietta Holley, in the humour industry.

This chapter shows how performances that exploit the comically unstable persona for humorous effect update Twain’s brand of humor for contemporary audiences. In American literary humor, a second hallmark of Twain’s brand lives on in the form of the comic cross-cultural contrast. Mark Twain, throughout his career, mined a nationalist strand of literary humor that celebrated American separation from imperial Britain through comically invidious contrasts of American values, language, characters, and experience with those of other cultures, especially the ostensibly more cultivated European aristocracies and their descendents among educated Americans. Stand-up comedians perform oral narratives, usually monologues, in which they appear to express themselves rather than play a role. The genre of stand-up comedy actually encompasses a broad continuum of live performances ranging from solo and small-group verbal, musical, or physical clowning to direct joke telling and social commentary.

Jack Benny was the most successful of radio’s comedians. In 23 years of weekly broadcasts, Benny indelibly shaped American humor through this powerful mass medium, and became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20^th century. The ultimate master of comic timing, Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunner” producer/writer/performers. His modern style of radio humor (informal monologues and easy repartee with comic assistants like the famed Rochester character played by Eddie Anderson and wife Mary Livingstone) created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors products in commercials listeners loved, and how he dealt with challenges of race relations, gender ideals, creating comedy and thriving in rapidly changing American media.

This chapter presents how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African American humor. At the turn of the twenty-first century, American popular culture witnessed an explosion of millennial refashionings of spectacular black political leadership, even as postmodern black fiction and film contested the scenario of charismatic black political leadership as the primal and primary mode of political belonging and performance in the post-civil rights black cultural repertoire. The chapter examines Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle and the film Barbershop as revisionist counterstories, whose characters embrace an intuitive way of seeing that grapples with those “phantom subjects” of civil rights protest. These subjects are both the leaders they lack and the players in the drama of black political history that the leadership spectacle necessarily pushes out of sight.