Reflecting on "American Humor" in a 21st Century Lens

        Ralph Ellison’s “American Humor” takes an almost anthropological lens to understand how a form of humor has developed in American history. Elision speaks on the existential importance to have a collective sense of humor in society. Additionally, he argues that American Humor is built on ethnic humor because of the unique composition of this nation’s populus and situation. Leading his audience from the colonials’ need for humor, when the new world contrasted their known reality of the old world so harshly, to reflect the mercurial nature of their new existence. Elision exhorts a theory on American humor as one born in the anguish of uncertainty and potential ill fate. Thusly, the founding of our modern society coincided with the advent of a form of humor ingrained in the American tradition. 

Before transgressing on the downfall of this form of humor in the 1930s and 1940s, Elision describes how humor helped American society become more inclusive. He recalls the Irish immigration to America as an important period in the unfurling of our society in which the existing populus began to accept a new segment of people through derogatory humor. I found this argument engaging because it highlights the outlandishness of civility. The Irish were perceived to be lower class than American citizens, but they were not Black: they were as white as Anglo-Saxons. So they could not be completely exiled from society or treated in the same manner as Americans had regarded Blacks. What is the solution? Humor and ridicule in the social sphere, if they ‘obliged’ to coexist. 

The perspective is Hobbesian, but the outcome it had in the long run, as Elision argues, was beneficial in the amalgamation of Irish into accepted peoples by the greater whole. One note that I made while reading this piece is that America is good at this, for white people. We have seen them as “other” and joked at their behest for a period of time–but then assimilation happens. The jokes continue, but the out-group is now part of the in-group and the ridicule becomes jest. However, America has had a much different outcome for its acceptance of colored peoples. In all ethnic backgrounds–from descendants of slaves, to Jews,  to immigrants from Asia and the Pacific Islands–American society has subjugated and ridiculed people of color since their introduction to the continent, some five years ago, some earlier than the Declaration of Independence. Humor has not bridged the divide in that regard, completely. However, it does help to influence the cultural lexicon and acceptance of different modalities of being; as Elision points out, Black comedy has had an immense impact on the structure of comedy as we know it. 

Elision goes on to describe the downfalls of culture too meak to laugh at ethnic differences. He recounts his own experiences through the 30s and 40s to highlight how the inability to laugh at one another becomes detrimental and creates hostility. He says “when Americans can no longer laugh at one another, then they have to fight one another. The humanizing factor gets lost, and we lose our resilience, our ability to bend a little bit and to adapt” (Elision 153). The shared experience of laughter and jest brings our country together and revels in the triviality of our differences while poking fun at the encompassing absurdity of the American experiment. 

I cannot help but compare this understanding of humor and the effects it's lacking in society has to today with ‘cancel culture’ and political correctness. In recent years–though humor is not dead in day to day life–we have seen a challenging of the status quo of humor and the inducement of a PC social environment where if you do not say the right things and fall in line with the right ideology, you’re socially persecuted, whether it be on Social Media, in the workplace, or your personal life (although that is becoming increasingly blurred with our social media lives). Our culture has lost the ability for people to be people similarly to what Elision exhorts against. In a way we have gone past the critics of The Invisible Man thinking it wrong to laugh at the plights and ridiculousness of a Black character, to necessitate an understanding of circumstance and a recognition of the systematic oppressive infrastructure surrounding it. Crude humor is not taken just as jokes anymore, it is admonished and spoken down on as something to be learned from–not in the realities and absurdities it exposes, but because it is in poor taste and is derogatory. 

This alternation of accepted language is not entirely a bad thing and there must be a line between using humor to keep someone oppressed, as a use of power to accentuate division between groups, and with humor that exposes the absurdities of American society. We cannot completely cut out racial humor because it is crude. It is a foundational way America has infused the ingredients of its ‘melting pot’ together. There has been such an increase in tension in America in the last decade–to the point where media talking-heads say we are “as divided as we have ever been since the civil war”– because we have lost the edge humor that poked fun and exposed the veneer of order and structure of society and replaced it with political correctness as the supposed cure for disparities and differences between people. Rapidly, American society has jumped straight to ‘accepting everyone for who they are’ as the far left side of the social movement has persistently pushed in PC culture. This PC push resulted in Trump and the “stop the steal” ideological bent of a vast swath of Americans (I don’t mean the singular idea of the 2020 election being rigged, I mean the country, as a conglomerate of Americans believe, being stolen by a new identity). This has created an ethnic humor vacuum and increased the conceptual divide between Americans. We need humor, along with the discussions that have been forthcoming about Race issues and disparities, to get to a more unified society that can accept everybody as is. 

Humor is like the lubrication that gets the tough gears to start turning, the others may have been twisted by hand (they agree with a more inclusive society already), but in order to actually make progress, we need to get everything willing to move. Humor accelerates this procedure because it is a bonding agent that brings people who otherwise would not interact together, as well as an exposing agent that highlights the absurdity of American society in all its forms and manifestations. 

To be truly equal, a gay woman needs to be able to make a joke about a straight man, or a Black woman about a White man or a Philipino little person needs to able to make a joke about a gigantic cross-dressing Pole, and all these jokes need to be seen in the same way: as humor. Once anyone may joke about anything and it can be understood as such, and not misinterpreted or influenced by a racial or social power hierarchy, then we will be closer to equality than a culture that says it is not okay to joke about differences. Making them unspeakable only increases the divide and accentuates the differences more.