¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 150.

² Cox, S. S., “American Humour,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 50, 299 (1875), 691Google Scholar.

³ In An Archive of Feelings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), to which my thinking on affect is greatly indebted, Ann Cvetkovich engages the relationship between affect and identity through a discussion of trauma. In this work, Cvetkovich argues that affects (potentially) produce many different identities; indeed, the book itself is an exploration of “how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures” (7). Cvetkovich identifies the experience of trauma as a “national category,” and, perhaps as an extension of this thesis, identifies the practice of humor as an ethnic category when she writes of “Jewish traditions of humor” (26). Here, affective practices both express and produce identity in specific historical contexts. It is at this point that I make my most significant intervention into current thinking on affect. For it is my thesis that the articulation of identity to affective practice is itself ideological; this thesis finds its basis in the observation that most theorizing of the relationship between identity and affective practice rarely considers in an elaborated way the history of this articulation, but instead takes it as a given, essential component of the “character” of identity. But this articulation has its own specific history, and, in fact, a profoundly influential one in American studies and especially its subfield of American humor studies. The subtle influence of this scholarship is registered in the moment I identify above when Cvetkovich, despite providing a complex history of affective practice, and a sophisticated theorization of trauma's relationship to identity, assumes without problematization the existence of a “Jewish tradition of humor.”

⁴ David Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

⁵ See especially David E. E. Sloane's arguments in New Directions in American Humor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).

⁶ An 1883 publication, Famous Funny Fellows: Brief Biographical Sketches of American Humourists by Will M. Clemens brings nationalist interests to bear on humour production in the nineteenth century.

⁷ Walter Blair, Native American Humour (San Francisco: Chandler, 1960; first published 1937); Constance Rourke, American Humour: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

⁸ Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 25.

⁹ For an example of this practice, see the introductory material to William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner's Critical Essays on American Humour (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984).

¹⁰ Cox, “American Humour,” 691.

¹¹ Ibid., 692.

¹² This hierarchy is underscored by the fact that as “Africans” and “darkies,” black people are not even granted the status of nationality. It should be noted that this hierarchized kind of talk carries on in American humor studies. For instance, in the 1 Nov. 2004 issue of “To Wit,” the “Official Newsletter of the American Humor Studies Association,” editor Kirby Olson's call for the study of all kinds of humor, like Cox's, condescendingly extends to include subjects outside its usual purview: “And I have only touched upon the career of western humor. What use is humor to Australian aboriginals, to American Indians (with their impressive trickster tradition), to Africans, to Eskimoes, or to Cambodian Buddhists?” (5).

¹³ Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 238.

¹⁴ Ibid., 238.

¹⁵ Carla L. Peterson, in Doers of the Word: African-American Women and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 197, notes that economic issues also played a role in the failure of Reconstruction, a role that casts the diamond/carbon distinction Cox makes between white and black humor practice in even clearer light: “The return of land to former plantation owners, the depression of the 1870s, the failure of the Freedmen's Savings Bank, the erosion of free labor ideology leading to increased tensions between capitalists and workers all had the effect of severely curtailing African Americans' search for economic autonomy; and these factors further exacerbated the still tense race relations between whites and blacks, resulting finally in the restoration of white supremacy in the South.”

¹⁶ Corbin, John, “How the Other Half Laughs,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 98, 583 (1898), 30–48.Google Scholar; Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (London: Penguin, 1997; first published 1890).

¹⁷ Corbin, 33, 39.

¹⁸ Ibid., 36.

¹⁹ Ibid., 36.

²⁰ Ibid., 38.

²¹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991; first published 1983); Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

²² Three additional Harper's pieces on humor from the period, both of which raise issues of nationality in relation to humor, are Henry Clay Lukens, “American Literary Comedians” (April 1890); Professor S. H. Butcher, L.L.D., “The Evolution of Humour” (May 1890); and Brander Matthews, “The Penalty of Humour” (May 1896). All three do similar work to that of Cox, Corbin, and Ker, assuming that humor practice is linked to identity and that humor practice must be subject to classification.

²³ See Eric Hobsbawm's well-known argument in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

²⁴ Quoted in Bruckner, Martin, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly, 51, 2 (1999), 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ See such works as Russel Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986); Paul Lauter, Canons and Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Shumway, Creating American Civilization; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and David Noble, Death of a Nation: American Studies and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2002).

²⁶ Amy Kaplan, in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), puts forward a similar, though implicit rather than explicit, critique of traditional scholarship by collapsing previously cherished distinctions between America, anarchy, domesticity, and empire. For instance, in her chapter “The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain,” Kaplan suggests “that the national identity of Mark Twain, his ‘Americanness,’ was forged in an international context of imperial expansion.” Kaplan, 52. Here, imperial expansion converts (“forges”) humor practice (Twain's writing) and humorous character (Twain's persona) into a nationalist identity. Like traditional American humor scholars, Kaplan writes a history that assumes a connection between “America” and humor practice, but unlike those scholars Kaplan pressures the form that converts humour practice into national identity, setting that form in relief, rather than assuming that form as an apolitical ontological quality of humor. Barry Shank, in A Token of My Affection (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), provides a rich discussion of the relationship between humor practices, identity, and structures of feeling during the emergence of business culture in the United States; Melanie Dawson, in Laboring to Play (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), draws rigorously historicized connections between nineteenth-century parlor games and the emergence of new forms of middle-class identity. Shank's discussion of comic valentines (41–53), and Dawson's discussion of “don't-laugh” games (2–3), are fine examples, among many in current American studies scholarship, of the new directions I am pointing to here, even if they also spend too little time theorizing the articulation of affective practice to identity.

²⁷ It is worth noting here that the Drawer's 1890s editor, Harper's house humorist and best-selling humor-book author John Kendrick Bangs, understood humour in explicitly nationalist terms. As his son, Francis Bangs, writes in the biography of his father, “Bangs was interested in humor not merely as an end in itself but as a means to an end. He believed that the humorist had reason to be proud of his calling. He did not agree with Matthew Arnold that the American humorist was a national calamity. He maintained that ‘in the whole history of our humor, from Captain John Smith through Franklin, Irving, Lowell, and Artemus Ward, to Mark Twain, Bill Nye, Ade, and Dunne, we have shown an exuberance of feeling and a resentment of restraint, that have helped to make of us the free and independent people that we are.’ Bangs further held that nations without humor were unstable communities, and that it was only after the people of a nation developed a sense of humor that that nation could be registered upon the roll call of civilization.” This remarkable analysis, which lays out in direct terms precisely the position of many American humor scholars, is the more remarkable still for its obvious absence; that is, its determined effort to leave profit out of the “ends” humor might serve. As the most prominent humor editor at the house, Bangs had a profound impact on humor production in the 1890s. For him, humor is not only an expression of a unique national character and a way to make money for himself and his publisher, but also an important cause of freedom and independence. Francis Hyde Bangs, John Kendrick Bangs: Humorist of the Nineties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 280–81.

²⁸ Ker, David, “Pease and Needles,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 81, 484 (1890), 648Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid., italics original.

³¹ Ker, “A Mohammedan Joe Miller,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 81, 481 (1890), 162.

³² Marietta Holley, Samantha at the World's Fair (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1893). For an elaborated discussion of the relationship between suffrage, humor, stereotypes, and affect, see Epp, Michael, “The Traffic in Affect: Marietta Holley, Suffrage and Late-Nineteenth-Century Popular Humor,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 36, 1 (2006), 93–115.Google Scholar

³³ Holley, 114–15, original emphasis.

³⁴ Bill Nye, Bill Nye's History of the United States (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1894).

³⁵ Ibid., 248.

³⁶ Walter Blair, Essays on American Humour, 38, writes that the History “went through eight editions during the first year, and after the plates were sold as late as 1905 to Thompson and Thomas, the company, according to one of the partners, sold 250,000 copies in thirteen years. Nye's son estimates that at least 500,000 copies of the history were sold.”

³⁷ Nye, 250.

³⁸ Ibid., 219.