ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 24 Nov 2020

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American Humor

#poe #humor

So far we have not detected characteristics of Poe's humor that could identify him as "American". It would seem that Poe's sense of humor was very personal or, at best, attributable to a European-style comedy. In reality, if we do not limit ourselves to a superficial impression, we realize that even in Poe we find some humorous elements typical of the most genuine American comic spirit. All his stories, always bizarre,  paradoxical, can be considered as tall tales, that is, tales of exaggeration. That General Smith of The Man who was Used up has been reconstructed so well that no one notices his horrific mutilations is an exaggeration. It is an exaggeration that the protagonist of The Spectacles may not realize that the beloved woman is eighty and not twenty-seven, and so on. Again in The Spectacles, another process common to many American humorists is used: misspelling (Madame Lalande's letter).

The main feature of American humor is fraud. And on the fraud Poe has based a whole story: Diddling considered as one of the Exact Sciences. The story consists of a series of sketches in which the most common cheats of the time are reproduced. As the title states, the scam is ironically analyzed from a scientific point of view. Man is defined as an "animal that cheats". The general characteristics of the cheater are described with textbook technique:

Interest: - your Diddler is guided by self - interest. He scorns to diddle for the mere sake of the diddle. He has an object in view - his pocket - and yours.

In Poe's stories the typical characters of American humor are not present: the Yankee, the Negro, the Backwoodsman etc. However, the American milieu itself emerges from many of his stories. We've already talked about the preacher scene in The Man who was Used up. The preacher's sermon, in fact, is a topos of all American humor. In one of Diddling's sketches considered as one of the Exact Sciences we find the environment of steamboats. It is precisely the same environment as The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin and the cheating of the "found" wallet that takes place there, could be the work of the "duke" and the "king". In another of the sketches, the habit of American families of keeping large Bibles at home is highlighted. Finally, in the last story we intend to deal with, X-ing a Paragrab, the journalistic world is represented, albeit always through the filter of the fantastic deformation operated by Poe's mind.

In "X-ing a Paragrab" the fights between the newspapers are ridiculed. Typographers steal each other's typography fonts, publishers print pieces that, in order to be original at all costs, are absurd (see the passages full of "o" by Mr Touch and go Bullet Head!)

Precisely in this story we find another of the procedures common to American Literary Comedians: the wrong quotation.

What is this world coming to?

The protagonist writes in his newspaper and bursts out:

Oh tempora! Oh Moses!

The quote is repeated by Poe deliberately out of proportion. Literally it would mean “What times! Oh, Moses! "which means nothing. The exact quotation, “O tempora o mores”, from Cicero's Catilinaries, instead means “what times, what customs”.

To confirm Poe's affinities with American humorists, Cunliffe, in his History of American Literature, dedicates several pages to the similarities between E. A. Poe and Mark Twain. The same is the pessimism, the same is the taste for the macabre, the same is the contempt for the crowd. The scene of Colonel Sherburn's attempted lynching in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn finds a parallel in X-ing's conclusion to Paragrab:

since that publisher was nowhere to be found, they thought for a while about the project of lynching the other one.

In addition to the perfect correspondence of the situation (a village lynching) there is an identical contempt for the mass which, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is stopped by only one man, while in X-ing a Paragrab  wants to do violence at all costs regardless of the object.

In summary, while in Poe one does not find the typical characters of American humor, some characteristics of this humor are found in his production:

environments with an American flavor

the fraud

the tall tale

technical procedures such as the use of incorrect spellings or inappropriate citations

As for the placement of Poe's humor within a general theory of comedy, we can certainly make him fall within the Bergsonian comic. Bergson bases much of his comic theory on the concept of rigidity, rigidity that ranges from the physical (the slip on the banana peel to which one has not paid attention) to the spiritual (the rigidity of the fixed idea and the incorrigible vice.)

The protagonist of The Spectacles makes his huge mistake and is duped by the old Lalande out of vanity. He is determined not to wear glasses, he believes that everyone is unaware of his very strong myopia which is instead in the public domain. Bon Bon is affected by the habit of drinking and cannot give up the possibility of making a good deal. The Duke of Omelette is greedy and superb. The editor of X-ing a Paragrab is stubborn and extremely short-tempered.

Bergson thinks that society should mockingly isolate and punish the faults of individuals. This is what Poe does. All the flaws and quirks of his humorous characters make them ridiculous and provoke their misadventures, even if they generally work out for the better. More than aiming at the correction of society, it seems that Poe uses the flaws of his characters to trigger the plot, which is what interests him most. Poe despises society, in our opinion he does not hope to reform it, but he has a lot of fun laughing at it.