A joke is never just a joke, not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury, Eran Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally.
Join us for this Virtual Program as Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth.
This humor--a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry--shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. This anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies. However, the story is ultimately one of democratization gone awry, as this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves.
Eran Zelnik teaches history at California State University, Chico. He was a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2019-20.