New England humor given serious study

NEW ENGLAND HUMOR, by Cameron C. Nickels, University of Tennessee Press, 277 pages.

A book with the title “New England Humor” would be expected to provide ample belly laughs or at least chuckles. Undoubtedly, an anthology would — similar to “Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor” or Karl Meyer’s “Pundits, Poets & Wits” — but this new book by Carmeron C. Nickels is not an anthology. And although it is about humor, there aren’t many examples of it.

Instead, we have a scholarly discussion of New England humor “from the Revolutiony War to the Civil War.” As such, it is comprehensive and rich in its scholarly research and scope.

Nickels, a professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., has produced an extensive examination of Yankee humor set in the post-Colonial and early 19th century periods.

Nickels tells us in his opening acknowledgements, “Although this is a book about humor, it is not a humorous book.” It is a historical approach to early humor by a highly literate master of the study of the English language.

The book begins with an attempt — mostly successful — to put early New England humor in a historical context within the culture and political development of the new nation. Nickels calls his first chapter, “New England Humor and the Dilemma of American Identity.” His thesis is that “Brother Jonathan,” the early figure of New England humor, is a counterpart to the English John Bull and eventually led to the creation of Uncle Sam as a national character.

“The humor of New England humor typically lies in the incongruity of the inferior, the provincial …,” Nickels says. “It is above all as a rustic that the Yankee appeared as an appropriate representation of the American position and served the purposes of New England so well.”

Nickels traces the early rise of humor from Yankee Doodle and Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood” writings to the first “mock travel books” of the 1800s. Then he abandons the chronological approach in favor of examination of genre — separate chapters on stage humor, on poems and letters and on illustrated humor. Much of the early efforts at humor were in dialect and he gives us a taste of this.

The largest segment, however, is a discussion of what Nickels calls “cracker barrel philosophers.” This is the richest part of the book. Here he delivers up such creations as Joe Strickland, Jack Downing and Sam Slick, all such philosophers with a kinship to later mythological characters such as Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, or Boston’s Hosea Biglow. Unfortunately, while there is a fulsome discussion of Sam Slick, et al., there are few samples of their writings.

Perhaps the most attention is paid to James Russell Lowell’s rustic satiric letters in verse of Hosea Biglow, which Nickels ties to the “common touch” of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, whom Lowell admired.

For scholars, this is a worthy addition to a fairly slim list of compilations about early humorists. For the average reader, this is sadly lacking in the richly satiric writings of these early humorists. One wishes there were less discussion of the humor and the writers and their chronology and more examples of their writing.

New England humor is rich enough to warrant a new anthology, a collection of the writings of our early humorists. While literary historians and scholars will appreciate Nickels’ approach, the rest of us might like to read the splendidly satirical writings about which he writes.

Bill Roach is professor emeritus of journalism and communications at the University of North Florida, and a summer resident of Maine.