The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor.

The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor. Edited by Ed Piacentino. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 326. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-3086-5.)

Southwestern humor is currently enjoying a well-deserved resurgence of popularity. The past decade has seen several new approaches to southwestern humor including Scott Romine's The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge, 1999), Kathryn McKee's "Writing in a Different Direction: Postbellum Women Authors and the Tradition of Southwestern Humor, 1875-1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996), and James H. Justus's Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain (Columbia, Mo., 2004). Something all these projects have in common is their debt to Ed Piacentino's work on the origins and importance of southwestern humor.

Piacentino's latest, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor examines the effect that southwestern humor has had on contemporary U.S. culture. His introduction situates the fourteen essays that make up the collection within a critical superstructure set on "examining the intersections between antebellum southern humor.., and modern and contemporary southern literature and popular culture" and ultimately argues that "permutations of the humor of the Old Southwest, which sometimes emerge in the strangest places, seem virtually ubiquitous" (pp. ix, 2). Divided into two sections, this collection tracks the influence of southwestern humor on literature and popular culture (although there are eleven "literary" essays and only three focus on popular culture). An astute reader will appreciate the way Piacentino's editorial approach organizes this collection with an emphasis on both the way humor of the Old Southwest manages to mock the haughty by confounding ostensibly fixed social boundaries and how the heirs of this tradition have continued in this vein. With essays examining such compelling subjects as The Beverly Hillbillies and Jeff Foxworthy's "Redneck" phenomena, one of this volume's most immediate strengths is its ability to maintain serious intellectual rigor in the face of some intensely irreverent and uproariously funny material. (Edwin T. Arnold's treatment of the watermelon romance scene from Sutree comes to mind.)

There are really too many good essays in this collection to list in the space allowed, but a couple stand out for making especially salient points about southwestern humor's ability to cross the high culture/low culture boundary and influence both sides of the social divide. In "Camp Meetings, Comedy, and Erskine Caldwell: From the Preposterous to the Absurd," Sylvia J. Cook highlights southwestern humor's ability to create a kind of ambiguity that speaks in two directions at once when she says of the burning-mule joke in Henry Clay Lewis's "Day of Judgment," "this grisly satire of the tormented soul as victim of a cruel joke might be read as a travesty of revivalist rituals or a recognition of their urgent necessity" (p. 57). Similarly, Frank W. Shelton's essay entitled "George Washington Harris and Harry Crews" follows the trail of naturalism in southwestern humor from Sut Lovingood's nascent sense of competition in life to the unflinching observation made by one of Crews's characters: "'God, it hurts, that everything is eating everything else'" (p. 126). Considering how much of Crews's work asks us to think about our place within the food chain of consumer culture in the New South, Shelton's reading of Crews also invites readers to reconsider the stand that southwestern humor took relative to antebellum southern culture.

If this collection has a weakness it is the lopsided and somewhat unpersuasive way it divides the essays between literary and popular legacies. Ultimately, however, the thing that has kept both the southwestern humorists and their heirs significant is their urge to defy categorization and mock hierarchy. It should come as no real surprise when they do the same to our critical structures.

CHRISTOPHER BUNDRICK

University of Mississippi