
How the Other Half Laughs
The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920
Jean Lee Cole(Author)
University Press of Mississippi
Published on 30. January 2020
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-1-4968-2652-7 (ISBN)
Description
Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse Audience, had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity-how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized.
Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them-including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens-and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.
Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them-including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens-and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Jackson
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
63 black & white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
468 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4968-2652-7 (9781496826527)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
01/2020
Princeton University Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Jean Lee Cole is professor of English at Loyola University Maryland. She is author of The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity; editor of Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner; and coeditor of Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays. She is editor of the scholarly journal American Periodicals and a former president of the Research Society for American Periodicals.