The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America.

The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. By Daniel Wickberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. x plus 267pp.).

Unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century, the "sense of humor" fully emerged by the early twentieth century as a personality trait that was universally recognized as an essential component of a complete person. The rise of the sense of humor, Professor Wickberg argues, answered the strangest and most pressing demand of modern "bureaucratic individualism": it made possible a self that was capable of not taking itself too seriously. The sense of humor thus arrived as both a tool in fashioning, and a central feature in the makeup of, individuals primed for the requirements of corporate society.

From antiquity through the Middle Ages, according to Wickberg, "humor" referred always to objective entities. Laughter was understood as an unmediated physical reaction to deformed or inferior things that were objectively humorous. Before the 19th century, Wickberg argues, referring to a 'sense of humor' would have made no more sense than referring to a 'sense of temperament today. From the 17th century on through, with the rise of individualism as a political prescription and a sociological description, humor was gradually unmoored from its objective correlates and came to be understood as a subjective mental phenomenon, rather than an objective physical one. The 18th century's proliferation of intuitive faculties of judgment--the sense of morality, the sense of beauty, etc.--paved the way for the coining in the 1840's of the 'sense of humor' as a natural attribute contained within individuals. Nineteenth-century bourgeois sentimentalism stripped humor and laughter of their older associations with superiori ty, and recast them as markers of sympathy, relief, and ultimately, therapy.

By the turn-of-the-century the sense of humor became the signature attribute of a self that was defined as passive, detached, and consumerist, Wickberg argues. The sense of humor made it possible to smile and glad-hand with genuine sympathetic detachment. The sense of humor allowed people even to stand in a detached perspective from themselves, in order to make sympathetic evaluations of themselves as objective entities. This device, this "sense of humor," Wickberg argues, helped reconcile the apparently conflicting modern American values of individualism, on the one hand, and compliance to co-operative bureaucratic systems on the other. "The self-objectifying capacity of the sense of humor," Wickberg writes, "was specific to the individualism of a bureaucratic society; self-objectification removed the conflict between internal and external sources of authority and, in doing so, reconciled the ethic of self-determination with the demands of bureaucratic organization." (107)

There's not so much evidence for all that, but Wickberg takes his idea and runs with it through several penetrating chapters on the growing importance of the sense of humor in 19th and 20th century American culture.

The rise of the sense of humor rendered the individual a passive consumer, rather than a producer, of humor. In one of his best chapters, Wickberg analyzes the joke and its circulation as a "commodity form." Late in the 19th century, the joke became widely accepted as the fundamental unit of humor, much to the chagrin of advocates of an earlier narrative-centered model of humor, like Mark Twain. Humor production was professionalized, with the attendant homogenization of forms, divisions of labor, and de-skilling of amateur craftsmen. Wickberg shows how vaudeville and later radio stars systematically produced jokes in accordance with what they believed to be the "quasi-literary" form's objective component parts. Psychologists and sociologists used the same techniques to develop "sense of humor tests" for use in the analysis of personalities.

In the 20th century, the 'cult of the sense of humor' found its way into all spheres from which it had been strictly prohibited in the Victorian period, which Wickberg says recognized distinct humorous and serious spheres. In politics, for example, Wickberg argues that while 19th century politicians could never risk being known as humorous, in the 20th century, no politician could succeed without showing that they did not take themselves too seriously. Similar patterns were seen in churches, schools, and in business.

Central to Wickberg's argument is the idea that the rise of the sense of humor in the 19th and 20th centuries mitigated conflict in several social arenas. Here would seem to be where some real stakes are laid out for this kind of study. But Wickberg rejects the invitation to pursue them: "I am concerned less with cultural constructs as instruments of social domination (or with the instrumentality of culture in general) and more with the specific meanings and contents of those concepts," he writes. (92) In politics, in business, even at war, Wickberg hints that the sense of humor paved the way for the legitimization of corporate capitalism and the national security state. But he will not look long at the human stakes in the developments he sees. Had he been "concerned" with such matters, he might have written a more interesting book.

Wickberg's study does contribute an important chapter to our growing understanding of the history of emotional standards and experience. The creation of the sense of humor, and its elevation as the sine qua non of personality, seems to arrive in the middle of a broad period in which anger was under attack, jealousy censored, and romantic love eased from its status as the singular measure of intimate relationships. The flip side of the eradication of intense emotions apparently was the elevation of lighter ones. Senses of Humor, however, would have done more to move emotions scholarship forward had Wickberg explicitly incorporated other recent findings into the image of "bureaucratic individualism" that he tries to discern from his own research.

Though he promises eclectic sourcing, most of Wickberg's arguments center on texts from scholars, psychologists, and essayists from his period. Wickberg is deft at picking these texts apart and reading from them the subtle shifts in meaning over time. But just as one grows tired of Maureen Dowd and George Will in today's periodicals, and goes looking to the Metro Section for real news--or better still, to Letters to the Editor--one wants Prof. Wickberg to mute his pundits and show us some real people laughing. Just when did "sense of humor" start showing up in the personals? How about personnel files? Did people worry about their sense of humor in diaries, mention it in love letters? Sources for this kind of story are obviously elusive, but a handful of social history evidence would mean just as much as his handful of formal literary evidence, and would paint a broader picture.

Wickberg acknowledges this problem, but never fully answers for it. In his conclusion, he is forced to admit:

"This history has never been about individuals, or particular figures or groups of people; it has been about an idea, a cultural sensibility, a powerful way of thinking." (222)

But ideas, sensibilities, and powerful ways of thinking are all things that are done by, or at least happen to, individuals, particular figures, and groups of people. Some wings of the interdisciplinary audience that will be drawn to this book may find no problem in Wickberg's methodology. Social historians will likely be frustrated by it.