SOURCE: Cohen, Hennig, and William B. Dillingham. Introduction to Humor of the Old Southwest, edited by Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, pp. ix-xxiv. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964.

[In the following essay, Cohen and Dillingham delineate the defining characteristics of the Southwestern humor tradition.]

The Southern frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century was an elusive, ever-changing line. What was wilderness in the 1820's became a settlement by the 1830's. The frontier moved rapidly from the interior of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia westward through Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and across the great river through Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. William Byrd, a Virginia aristocrat, and numerous other early travelers in this region wrote about the peculiar specimens of humanity to be seen in the backwoods. In 1728 Byrd portrayed comically the squatters of backcountry North Carolina. They were so lazy that they imposed all the work on their poor wives, he said, while they would “lye and Snore, till the sun has risen one-third of his course.” Many of the travelers commented upon the strange, comic ritual the frontiersmen performed before they indulged in fighting. James Kirke Paulding wrote in Letters from the South (1817) of a batteauxman and a wagoner who worked themselves up to a fight by exaggerated bragging: “The wagoner flapped his hands against his hips, and crowed like a cock; the batteauxman curved his neck and neighed like a horse.” Then they argued which man had the finest horse, the handsomest sweetheart, and the best rifle. Their anger mounted at each new brag, and they finally fought it out with a loss of much blood and many teeth. Roving preachers, Timothy Flint and Mason L. Weems, who were both traveling the Southwest in the early years of the nineteenth century, described their meetings with braggarts or ring-tailed roarers. Weems recorded a fight in which one of the combatants swore that he could “flog any Son of a B-tch on the whole ground.” His opponent answered: “Here I come, gentlemen! … Half Horse Half Alligator, and with a little touch of the snapping Turtle.”

When these odd frontier hybrids, these half-alligators, half-horses, were not bragging and fighting, they might have been heard spinning yarns of superhuman hunters and describing animals that possessed a fantastic understanding of human beings. The loud-talking, wildly imaginative storytellers provided the origins of Old Southwest humor. By the 1830's the region was saturated with tall tales and comic stories that were laughed at over campfires, aboard rafts floating slowly under the stars, or in villages wherever men gathered. Then all over the South men, many of whom never thought of themselves principally as writers, began to compose humorous sketches for publication. Before the 1860's dozens of them sent their accounts of ring-tailed roarers or of comic manners to newspapers and sporting journals. This brand of American comedy flourished from the publication of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835) until the Civil War. There were forerunners, Weems, Paulding, and others; and Southwestern humor can also be found later in the writings of such authors as Mark Twain and even William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. But the overwhelming concentration was in that period of some twenty-six years from 1835 to 1861.

Not all of Longstreet's sketches in Georgia Scenes dealt with rustic Southern types, but there was enough Southwestern humor in the book to influence other writers. Numerous collections of humor did follow: William Tappan Thompson's Major Jones's Courtship (1843), Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845), Thomas Bangs Thorpe's Mysteries of the Backwoods (1846), John S. Robb's Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), Joseph M. Field's The Drama in Pokerville (1847), Henry Clay Lewis's Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” (1850), Joseph B. Cobb's Mississippi Scenes (1851), Joseph G. Baldwin's The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood's Yarns (1867), and several more.

Many of the stories in these collections were first printed in a humor and sporting magazine called the New York Spirit of the Times. The editor of this journal, William T. Porter, was sympathetic to the Southern humorists, sought their sketches, and helped them get their books published. Although he did not himself write humorous material, he was extremely influential among those who did. The Spirit of the Times was their principal medium of publication, serving not only as a ready means for countless new humorists to break into print but also setting a standard of form and quality. During his editorship (1831-1856) Porter's paper was, as its subtitle indicates, “A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature, and the Stage.” Its humor “correspondents” were not paid but were lavishly thanked and praised for their contributions. By 1856 Porter claimed (an exaggeration, no doubt) 40,000 subscribers and extensive international circulation. Readers and contributors in the North and in the South were usually gentlemen of some means with a leisurely interest in masculine pursuits. They were, Porter said, “country gentlemen, planters, lawyers, etc. ‘who live at home at ease.’” Racing news and humorous anecdotes constituted the chief appeal of the journal. The success of the Spirit prompted other papers to include humorous sketches—sometimes original, sometimes reprintings—in their columns. By the early 1850's such newspapers as the New Orleans Delta and the Picayune, the St. Louis Reveille, and the Cincinnati News rivaled the Spirit of the Times in this respect.

The writers who sent their brief anecdotes to these papers often went on to publish one or more collections of stories. But they were not professional authors. They wanted to do something in the writing line, did not expect to be paid for it, liked to publish under a pseudonym, and sometimes regretted at a later date having indulged in such a trivial pastime. They had their own professions and were writers only by avocation. What is surprising is that there were so many of them and that they were producing such similar results. They hid behind such pseudonyms as “Pete Whetstone” and “The Turkey Runner” to enjoy the amateurish thrill of writing surreptitiously. Others no doubt felt that their tales were relatively unimportant and would injure their professional status. After all, some of these stories were earthy, shocking to the gentle reader. The gap between the genteel literature which was being enjoyed by pale young ladies in New England drawing rooms and the masculine humor which filled the pages of the Spirit of the Times was immense. The use of pseudonyms also suggests the extent to which basic materials were common property, a part of the folk heritage of the region.

So similar were these writers that a composite portrait is possible. The typical Southwestern humorist smiled easily but was no clown. He was a man of education and breeding who felt deeply and spoke with conviction. Usually he wanted to talk about politics. Often a devoted Whig, he was convinced that if the nation was to be saved from chaos and degradation, only the honor, reasonableness, and sense of responsibility of gentlemen—Whig gentlemen—could save it. Usually he was a lawyer and often also a judge, a state legislator, a congressman, or even a governor, but he might have been a physician, a planter, or, rarely, an actor, artist, or army officer. Frequently he was also a newspaper editor. For the South he felt a protective and defensive love, though he might have been born elsewhere. He was keenly angered by the North, which seemed to show little understanding of the South and its institutions. He defended slavery and, when the time came, secession, with passion. He was a relatively young man, but already he had known frustration, and he was to know a good deal more of it before his life was over. Ambitious and hot-tempered, he endured defeat only with great personal pain. This is a rigid mold, perhaps, but the Southwestern writers who do not fit into it are few. Seldom has a literary movement or school of writers of any time or place reflected more unanimity in background, temperament, literary productions, aims, and beliefs.

For subjects to write about, the Southwestern frontier humorist had simply to open his ears and his eyes. The oral tale passed from one generation to another and remained a rich reservoir of materials. As important as the oral tradition was, however, the influence of literary sources should not be underestimated. Even though the Southwestern writers were not professionals, they were educated men, self-taught or otherwise, who especially admired the style and wit of such eighteenth-century essayists as Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith and who were acquainted with some of the best of classical and modern literature. If they used folk tales from their Southern environment, they frequently also made use of stories they had read. They knew, for example, The Travels of Baron Munchausen, and situations in that book appear repeatedly in their writings. The subtitle of Paulding's John Bull in America (1825) is “The New Munchausen,” and one of Francis James Robinson's sketches about “the Texas Traveller” is entitled, in part, “Baron Munchausen Revived.” Washington Irving exerted a strong influence on Southern humor. The Sketch Book (1819) achieved immediate popularity. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has most of the ingredients of a typical sketch of Southwestern humor: the physically awkward, ugly, and avaricious Ichabod; the good-natured but rowdy Brom Bones and his friends, who love a practical joke; the desirable plum, Katrina Van Tassel. All that is missing is the Southern backwoods vernacular. It would be difficult to estimate the number of Southern tales directly influenced by “Sleepy Hollow.” Some were obviously and openly based on it: Joseph B. Cobb's “The Legend of Black Creek,” William Tappan Thompson's “The Runaway Match” and “Adventure of a Sabbath-Breaker,” and Francis James Robinson's “The Frightened Serenaders.” Others show the influence indirectly but unmistakably in their use of characters modeled after Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, and Katrina Van Tassel.

Folk and literary elements were combined by the Southwestern humorists with local and personal materials and emerged in the form of hundreds of sketches ranging from mythic tales of gigantic men and animals to more comic treatments of rogues, practical jokers, and eccentrics. The backwoodsman, the squatter, or the villager is shown enjoying his favorite sport or social event—hunting, fighting, politicking, party-going, or yarn spinning. The nature and variety of Southwestern frontier humor may be suggested by the following list of subjects:

• (1) The hunt
• (2) Fights, mock fights, and animal fights
• (3) Courtings, weddings, and honeymoons
• (4) Frolics and dances
• (5) Games, horse races, and other contests
• (6) Militia drills
• (7) Elections and electioneering
• (8) The legislature and the courtroom
• (9) Sermons, camp meetings, and religious experiences
• (10) The visitor in a humble home
• (11) The country boy in the city
• (12) The riverboat
• (13) Adventures of the rogue
• (14) Pranks and tricks of the practical joker
• (15) Gambling
• (16) Trades and swindles
• (17) Cures, sickness and bodily discomfort, medical treatments
• (18) Drunks and drinking
• (19) Dandies, foreigners, and city slickers
• (20) Oddities and local eccentrics

Besides amusing himself and others, the Southwestern frontier humorist was attempting to record realistically local customs and manners and to provide a chronicle of the times. He generally dealt with scenes and customs out of the immediate past, striving, as he often explained, to preserve the picture of an era which was quickly passing away. Longstreet subtitled Georgia Scenes “Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic” and stressed in his preface the basis in real life for the incidents and the people he wrote about. In the preface to The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches (1845), one of two anthologies of humor which he edited, William T. Porter commented on the new school of humorous writers in the South whose objective was to describe “thrilling scenes and adventures in that then comparatively unknown region, and the extraordinary characters occasionally met with—their strange language and habitudes, and the peculiar and sometimes fearful characteristics of the ‘squatters’ and early settlers.” John S. Robb wrote in Streaks of Squatter Life (1847) that “every step of the pioneer's progress has been marked with incidents, humorous and thrilling, which wait but the wizard spell of a bright mind and able pen to call them from misty tradition, and clothe them with speaking life.”

To some extent these pronouncements resulted from a desire to give an aura of reality. The widespread objection to fiction as untrue was still an obstacle to the writer. Thus authors like Longstreet may have been protecting themselves in the same fashion as the early novelists Hannah Foster and Susanna Rowson, whose works were always “founded on fact.” But this must have been a slight motive. They did not have to please the fastidious hairsplitters of moral principle. Their audience was far different from that which swooned over The Coquette (1797) and Charlotte Temple (1791). They had a genuine interest in local color and in history, and filled their pages with vivid pictures of the times. Hooper, for example, portrays a segment of the chaos in Alabama which resulted from the rumor of approaching Indians in the Creek War:

There goes old man Simmons, with his wife and three daughters, together with two feather beds, a few chairs, and a small assortment of pots and ovens, in a cart drawn by a bob-tail, gray pony. On the topmost bed, and forming the apex of this pile of animate and inanimate “luggage,” sits the old tom-cat, whom the youngest daughter would not suffer to remain lest he might come to harm. “Who knows,” she exclaims, “what they might do to the poor old fellow?” On they toil! the old man's head, ever and anon, turned back to see if they are pursued by the remorseless foe; while the wife and daughters scream direfully, every ten minutes, discerning in the distance a cow or a hog—“Oh, they'll kill us! they'll skelp us; they'll tar us all to pieces! Oh, Lord! daddy! oh, Lord!” But the old tom-cat sits there, gravely and quietly; the very incarnation of tom philosophy!

Baldwin's The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi is virtually a social history of “that halcyon period, ranging from the year of Grace, 1835, to 1837; that golden era, when shinplasters were the sole currency; when bank-bills were ‘as thick as Autumn leaves in Vallambrosa,’ and credit was a franchise.” The inordinate love of oysters, the popularity of the bustle, the flush times and hard times, wars and rumors of wars, the great excitement centering on the Millerites and their frenzied belief in the end of the world—all emerge clearly from the pages of the Southwestern humorists.

In a sense, then, these writers were local colorists, the immediate ancestors of that group of regional authors who flourished from a few years after the Civil War to the turn of the century. But the Southwestern humorists were vastly different from the later local colorists in several ways, one of which was their lack of respect for delicate sensibilities. A writer like Longstreet who felt the need to apologize for putting “damn” in the mouth of some of his characters was capable of having another character say to the coins he has just won in a gander pulling: “Oh you little shining sons o' bitches! walk into your Mas' Johnny's pocket.” The writings of Bret Harte, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and the other local colorists would hardly have offended the taste of young women in nineteenth-century seminaries. Even the earliest documents of the Southern frontier, on the other hand, are often characterized by stark, realistic details and off-color, bawdy comments. For example, in The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1812) Parson Weems describes with unpleasant clarity a drunkard who rides his horse into a tree: “There was not a sign of a nose remaining on his face, the violence of the blow had crushed it flat, miserably battering his mouth and teeth, and completely scalping the right side of his face and head—the flesh, skin, and ear, torn off to the back of his skull. One of his eyes, meeting a snag on the trunk of a tree, was clearly knocked out of its socket; and, held only by a string of skin, there it lay naked on his bloody cheek.”

The Southwestern humorist portrayed relationships between the sexes as directly as he described gory accidents and fights. In numerous stories visitors in one-room cabins have to undress for bed before the young ladies of the house—all to the great embarrassment of the visitor. Courtings and honeymoons also provoke racy humor. Joseph B. Cobb's “The Bride of Lick-the-Skillet” favors the reader with a bawdy account of a wild, prank-filled wedding night, during which an old suitor of the bride, posing as a ghost, frightens the bridegroom away and takes his place in the bed. Cobb's description of the bride's nude bath in a spring adds to the earthiness of this uninhibited story. Another sketch, John Winslow's “Mr. Warrick in Distress,” is representative of a number of pieces which deal openly with some of the distressing hardships of a young man in love. Not the least of Billy Warrick's troubles is his fiancée's mother, old Mrs. Bass, who embarrasses him by criticizing pants that button down the front (he had forgotten to button his) and ladies' bustles, which she says make them look like “an 'oman was sorter in a curious way behind.” After the old lady retires for the night Billy begins kissing his beloved Barbry in earnest, only to be mortified by Mrs. Bass's sudden cry: “My lord!—Barbry, old Troup [the dog] is in the milkpan!—I heerd him smackin his lips a lickin of the milk.” At the furthest extreme from the genteel tradition in almost every way are Harris's yarns of Sut Lovingood. Whether lusting after sensuous Sicily Burns or making love to fat Sal Yardley, Sut is one of literature's most unabashed spokesmen on the subject of sex. About young widows, for instance, he says:

But then, George, gals an' ole maids haint the things tu fool time away on. Hits widders, by golly, what am the rale sensibil, steady-goin, never-skeerin, never-kickin, willin, sperrited, smoof pacers. They cum clost up tu the hoss-block, standin still wif thar purty silky years playin, an' the naik-veins a-throbbin, an' waits fur the word, which ove course yu gives, arter yu finds yer feet well in the stirrup, an' away they moves like a cradil on cushioned rockers, ur a spring buggy runnin in damp san'.

The form which Southern humorists preferred was much more conventional than their subject matter. It ranges from the semi-literate epistles of Thompson, C. F. M. Noland, and Phillip B. January to the literary essays of Joseph G. Baldwin. Most sketches, however, employ a framework. In such stories, the author takes the superior vantage point of a cultured gentleman observing and describing the doings of rougher folk. The typical sketch opens and closes with the author's own words, reasoned and dignified. Often he speaks in the first person and relates an occurrence which he says he personally witnessed. Hooper's “Col. Hawkins and the Court” begins: “Some years ago, I knew an individual whose sobriquet was ‘Col. Hawkins,’ and who was the most perfect specimen of the dare-devil frontier-man, that I ever saw, at least in Alabama.” After telling of Hawkins's escapade, frequently allowing the characters to speak in their own dialect, Hooper himself closes the sketch: “Satisfied—almost—with his victory, our hero charged back to town—putting to flight everything equine, of which he came in view. …” Part of the motivation for using this envelope was that the flawless grammar and flowery rhetoric of the narrator contrast comically with the vernacular speech used by the backwoodsmen and country folk of the sketch. But the frequent recurrence of the framework suggests another reason. This technique created an aesthetic distance between the author and his characters not unlike that of the American naturalists. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris wrote about people moved by forces over which they had no control. Crane's Maggie and Norris's McTeague are described, watched, studied, and sometimes laughed at by their authors. Likewise, Southwest humorists often separated themselves from their characters. It is as hard to identify Longstreet with the lowly characters of Georgia Scenes as it is to link Norris with his brute dentist. In both cases the authors place themselves in positions above and apart. The Southwest humorist wanted to laugh at the earthy life around him and to enjoy it, but he did not want to be identified with it. Like the romantics, he recognized the existence of the more humble aspects of life; but he had no desire to cast his lot with the yokels. The framework was thus an effective method of setting off the narrator, who liked to consider himself a gentleman of self-control, taste, and reason, from the oddities he presented in his story.

The framework was also used for other reasons. Though many narrators were patronizing, others respected the backwoodsmen. The attitude of the narrator toward the yarn-spinning hunter, Jim Doggett, in “The Big Bear of Arkansas” is a case in point. Instead of viewing him with superiority, the narrator seems to set himself apart from Doggett's audience and to share with him a sense of the profound mystery of the great bear. If most of the humorists looked upon their characters with amused condescension, others envied them their freedom and manliness. But sometimes the frame was used simply because it had become a convenient tradition; this was the way most stories were told and had been told for years. The Southwestern writers were rarely sophisticated craftsmen, much less innovators of structural techniques.

They were innovators, however, in language. When the narrator abandoned his gentlemanly pose and made the characters themselves speak, he was laying the foundation for a new style in American writing. Rich in similes and metaphors and in exaggerations, this backwoods language is characterized by concreteness, freshness, and color. It was effective, too, because it rang true where the pale or pompous dialogues of the genteel novels were contrived and unrealistic. The difference between the language of Old Southwest humor and that employed in most contemporary novels is expressed in the following sentence from Henry Clay Lewis's “The City Physician versus the Swamp Doctor”: “The city physician … requires a patient to ‘inflate his lungs to their utmost capacity;’ the swamp doctor tells his to ‘draw a long breath, or swell your d—dest:’ one calls an individual's physical peculiarities, ‘idiosyncrasy;’ the other terms it ‘a fellow's nater.’”

Vernacular speech was being employed in Down East humor in such writings as Seba Smith's letters of Major Jack Downing, which began to appear in 1830, but it blossomed in the work of the Southern humorists. The use of the vernacular in Southern tales was more widespread, bolder, more surprising in its metaphorical richness. Constance Rourke sums up this basic difference in her treatment of American humor: “It was always possible to see where the Yankee left off and the backwoodsman began. The low key of the Yankee was maintained against the rhapsody of the backwoodsman. Yankee humor was gradual in its approaches, pervasive rather than explicit in its quality, subtle in its range. Backwoods drawing was broad, with a distinct bias toward the grotesque, or the macabre. Backwoods profusion was set against Yankee spareness. The Yankee might compare himself or another with a weasel or a blacksnake, but he never was the weasel or the blacksnake as the backwoodsman was the alligator or the raccoon or the tornado.”

The most striking feature of vernacular language as it was used by the Southwestern writers is the earthy vividness of its comic similes. Having become captain of the local militia, Simon Suggs says in his acceptance speech: “Let who will run, gentlemen, Simon Suggs will allers be found sticking thar, like a tick onder a cow's belly.” The simile is remarkably visual, and it also is supremely appropriate to Simon, who does resemble a blood-sucking tick. Characters frequently compare themselves to animals and insects. In the big brags the speaker is half-man, half-horse or alligator. Harris's Sut Lovingood complained: “I ladles out my words at randum, like a calf kickin at yaller-jackids; yu [‘George’] jis' rolls em out tu the pint, like a feller a-layin bricks—every one fits.” Such comparisons are effective not only because they are comically incongruous but because they are also strikingly accurate. Rich figurativeness is accompanied by unrestrained exaggeration. William C. Hall's Mike Hooter says that he has known some men in Mississippi “what war so hungry for er fight that they fell away an' got so poor an' thin that they had to lean up agin er saplin' to cuss!” Mike knew one man so mean “he was cotch one day stealin' acorns from a blind hog.” Although the use of local dialects was not new, this kind of language was. It combined the wild imagination of the frontiersman with the concreteness of poetry.

The humor of these sketches derives only in part from the exuberance and exaggeration of the language. The Southwest humorist was also adept at creating incongruous and ridiculously comic situations. His stories abound in slapstick comedy. In Harris's “Mrs. Yardley's Quilting” Sut Lovingood describes a wild-eyed horse and how it romped over the guests and through the quilts at Mrs. Yardley's party. Much of the humor at the beginning of the story comes from Sut's figures of speech, his extraordinary exaggerations, and his bold treatment of sex. He says Mrs. Yardley's stockings hanging on the clothes line to dry “looked like a par ove sabre scabbards, an' her naik looked like a dry beef shank smoked.” Of fat Sal, Mrs. Yardley's daughter, he says: “I'd 'bout es lief be shet up in a steam biler wif a three hundred pound bag ove lard, es to make a bisiness ove sleepin wif that gal—'twould kill a glass-blower.” With this same vigorous language he then tells what happened at the party. Always ready to play a practical joke, Sut scares a horse in Mrs. Yardley's yard while the quilting party is in full swing. The results are depicted in incredibly clear, well-defined images: the horse running over and under the lines of quilts in the yard, popping ropes and carrying quilts and lines and people along with him, approaching the front door of the house, encountering Mrs. Yardley and her neighbor as they admire a quilt on the ground, running over the old lady, carrying the quilt along on his foot, the corners of it cracking like a whip in the wind. Then the horse's mad rush away from the house, its owner trying to stop him and being run over, and the chaos which generally follows in the wake of the horse's wild run. Not content to end there, Sut goes on to tell how he is kicked by old man Yardley while making love to Sal.

Few of the Southwestern writers were equal to Harris in the creation of physical comedy, but many of them strove for the same basic effect. In that time and place and to those writers, life was action and movement, and comedy was largely the result of things that happened. The fundamental and lasting appeal of this kind of unsophisticated humor, of which the Old Southwest humorists were early masters, is attested by its continued vitality in literature as well as in motion pictures, on the stage, and on television. William Faulkner's “Spotted Horses,” one of his funniest stories, is the modern counterpart of “Mrs. Yardley's Quilting.” The ingredients are essentially the same: the homey, comic similes, the uninhibited backwoods discussion of sexual matters, and the hilarious situations flashed swiftly before the reader's eyes as he watches the movements of those wild Texas ponies. Faulkner owned a copy of Sut Lovingood's Yarns.

Character, language, and comic physical movement are all essential considerations in the Southwestern sketches, but underlying the most successful is a tension which the reader senses. Stories of practical jokes, of country boys in town, of rogues swindling their prey, of misunderstandings and mistakes, of contests and militia drills, of mock fights, and of many other subjects all depend upon the absence of information. If all knew what the reader knows, naive country boys in the stories would not make fools of themselves; would-be victims of practical jokes and swindles and deceptions of all kinds would not fall into the traps set for them; fighters would seldom have cause to fight; and characters generally would avoid misunderstandings and mistakes which are often the basis of comedy. But the world of Southwestern humor is populated with those who do not know all they need to know, and the tension between knowledge and ignorance acts as the essential stimulant to laughter. This tension often functions in language and character as well as in situation. For example, one feels the difference between the illiterate language Sut Lovingood speaks and the wisdom embodied in his words, or the difference between the lowly characters of the sketch and the sane, reasonable gentleman who is the narrator. Whatever form it takes, this tension underlies Southwestern humor.

Some sketches, however, are not funny, nor were they intended to be. The most obvious example is the tall tale. While there is a decidedly comic effect in “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” it is not humorous in the same sense as Robb's “Swallowing an Oyster Alive.” No one really laughs when the powerful conclusion of Thorpe's story is reached. Instead, the reader is left with a feeling of almost sad comic wonder. A like reaction may result from reading the legends of Davy Crockett's superhuman accomplishments or from merely hearing fishermen tell of extraordinary catches. One smiles and at the same time feels something akin to nostalgia. This mixed effect derives chiefly from another tension, the head-on meeting of the humorous and the serious. To put it another way, the effect of the tall tale comes from the reader's delighted appreciation of the exaggerations and of the comic character and his language in juxtaposition with the sad realization that the events of the tale, the accomplishments of the protagonist, could never really happen. In real life one never encounters “creation bears” or giants who can wake up the sun. And it is regrettable that this is so. The reader knows how ridiculous such exaggerations are, and yet he half wishes that such wild and illogical and unbounded wonders could be true.

Some elements of Southwestern humor were more amusing when the sketches were written than now. It is something of a shock to see pranksters playing practical jokes at funerals, making fun of the disappointed, the sick, and the deformed, or glorying in the bodily discomforts of their fellows. It is amazing how much of this unhealthy humor there is in Southwestern tales. Lapses in decorum occur in the middle of otherwise conventional comic sketches, and the author apparently makes no distinction between the quality or kinds of humor he is dealing with. Longstreet's “The Character of a Native Georgian” portrays one Ned Brace, who indulges in a series of practical jokes. Most of them are relatively harmless pranks which take advantage of others' pomposity, foolish curiosity, and gullibility. But one jest seems astonishing in its bad taste. Ned joins a solemn funeral procession, makes a bad pun on the name of the dead man, and causes great laughter among some of those present. The head of the procession was in “mourning and in tears, and the foot of it convulsed with laughter.”

The prankster has thus attempted to bring laughter into a realm of the reader's experience where it is ordinarily forbidden. Longstreet's sketch is one of many which reveal a preoccupation with death and graveyard humor. A long parade of corpses passes through the work of Hooper, Lewis, Harris, and others. Henry Clay Lewis's Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” was a popular success in the 1850's; yet much of it seems macabre to the modern reader. It is as much an experience in Gothic horror to read Lewis as it is to read Poe. In “The Curious Widow,” for example, a young medical student tells of a cadaver he has been dissecting:

The subject that we were engaged upon was one of the most hideous specimens of humanity that ever horrified the sight. … Just emaciated sufficiently to remove the fatty tissue, and leave the muscles and blood vessels finely developed, still he was so hideous that nothing but my devotion to anatomy, and the fineness of the subject, could reconcile me to dissection; and even after working a week upon him, I never caught a glimpse of his countenance but what I had the nightmare in consequence. He was one of that peculiar class called Albinoes, or white negroes. Every feature was deformed and unnatural; a horrible hare-lip, the cleft extending half way up his nose externally, and a pair of tushes projecting from his upper jaw, completed his bill of horrors.

By way of a practical joke, the student cuts this hideous face from the cadaver and hides it in oilcloth among his belongings so that his curious landlady will find it as she snoops about.

Other stories in the Swamp Doctor attest to a morbid fascination for cadavers. Since Lewis was a physician, these sketches are understandably less inhibited on matters of dead bodies, diseases, and suffering than they might otherwise have been. Young Dr. Lewis wanted to be funny, but he also wanted to shock, to demonstrate superiority. Much of his writing is extreme if not disgusting, but he was not unusual in his humorous treatment of death. To cite one more example, Harris has Sut Lovingood explain his whereabouts by saying he has been “helpin tu salt ole Missis Yardley down. … Fixin her fur rotten cumfurtably, kiverin her up wif sile, tu keep the buzzards frum cheatin the wurms.” In other words, he has been preparing her corpse for burial and feels pretty lighthearted about it.

In his comic treatment of death and bodily decay, the Southern writer was not without precedent. For example, macabre jokes are common in Elizabethan literature. Shakespeare furnished the clown in Hamlet with a tall tale about the rate of decay in dead bodies. In answer to an inquiry regarding the length of time a man will “lie i' th' earth ere he rot,” the clown replies: “Faith, if 'a be not rotten before 'a die (as we have many pocky corpses now-a-days that will scarce hold the laying in), 'a will last you some eight year or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year.” When asked why a tanner's body will last longer, he answers: “Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that 'a will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.” Similar jests appear in writings after the Southwest humorists. In Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883), a raftsman discusses with his fellows the relative merits of water from the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers: “The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says: ‘You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth shucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.’” Although humor may not be the predominant intent of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), the comic undeniably plays a large part in the novel, and some of it results indirectly from the situations involving Addie Bundren's corpse and the troubles her family has in getting it to the burial ground.

While the Southwestern writers cannot be viewed as unique in their graveyard humor, they were unusual in the consistency with which they employed it. To understand this one has to realize that death has always held man's attention and stimulated his deepest curiosity. The writers of the Old Southwest knew death intimately. It pervaded their lives and their folklore. From childhood they witnessed its ravages and were forced to think of its terrors and mystery. They sought through humor to reduce this fearful spectre to less awful proportions. They also pursued the possibilities of the grotesque to the extreme point of comic incongruity—to the grin on the face of the skull.

Since the Southwestern humorists frequently distorted the surfaces of reality in order to picture a somewhat different world, the term “realists” must be used with care and qualification when describing them. They were realistic, often nakedly so, in that they endeavored to capture the flavor of the times in scene and language. In this sense, they were the first American realists in fiction. In another sense, however, the world of such characters as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood is anything but the real world. The reader is taken into a real-unreal place where suffering and ugliness and death do not clash with horseplay so much as they become part of it. Exaggeration is the quality which prevails in this world from the tall tales about Davy Crockett and Mike Fink to the adventures of Billy Fishback. To accept this exaggeration and to view the universe comically requires suspension of some of the judgments and restraints that ordinarily apply.

To understand what stimulated the beginnings of Old Southwest humor one would have to probe deeply into the psychology of laughter as well as into the history of the westward movement of the frontier. Under the almost savage conditions of a wild new land, laughter was one of the means by which the frontiersman could for a time forget his hardship, preserve his courage, and retain his balance and his humanity. Through his tall tales and his exaggerated, at times almost bestial, behavior, he could laugh at himself and know at the same time that he was playing a role, that his civilized self remained intact beneath the half-man, half-alligator comic façade he created. It was a self-imposed mask, assumed for the purpose of contrasting the true self with the mask. He had attracted the attention of the outside world, too, and he was acting for it as well as for himself. Ring-tailed roarers furnished much of the folklore upon which the authors of Southwestern humor based their sketches. However, the writers were not themselves the rugged, illiterate but imaginative hearties who told their yarns but never wrote them down. They were educated men who seldom broke the wilderness, although they were close to it. From the roarers, from literary sources such as eighteenth-century essayists, from the tales of Baron Munchausen, and even from such contemporaries as Washington Irving, these men formed a new kind of literature, chiefly anecdotal in nature but with a freshness in language and a boldness in detail which stands as a foundation for modern American writing.

The motives of doctors, lawyers, judges, editors, actors, preachers, and politicians who wrote humorous sketches were not precisely the same as those of the keelboatmen and the frontiersmen or the backwoods hunters who spun their yarns and bragged comically of their prowess. The conditions which produced Old Southwest humor are numerous and complex, but at least four interrelated ones are clearly apparent.

• (1) As the youngest and most untutored region of the country, the Southwest was keenly self-conscious. In addition, its institutions, especially slavery, began to come under heavy fire from the North in the 1830's and 1840's. Accused of both crudity and cruelty, Southerners felt the need to let the world know that they were proud enough of their colorful, rustic homeland to want to write about it with the express purpose of preserving in literature its scenes and customs. But at the same time, these men, more than they themselves perhaps realized, wanted to be recognized as gentlemen. Therefore from their detached position as narrators, they contrasted themselves with the common folk they observed and wrote about. They liked the folk but maintained a proper distance.

• (2) Political undertones are discernible in the work of nearly all of the Southwestern authors. Many were staunch members of the Whig Party, and their plainly stated views occur in their sketches. But even where the political is not an obvious factor, it is a real, if slightly obscured one. The writers' amused observations on the outspoken, crude, and often illiterate democratic man reveal a persistent if sometimes only half-conscious feeling that while these ring-tailed roarers had their virtues, they could not be trusted to run the country.

• (3) The Southern frontier was a man's world. The essentially masculine emphasis of the frontier allowed and even encouraged the kind of writing which this group produced. In more settled and effeminate New England, Sut Lovingood could not have been created. The Southwest humorists wrote for a specific audience of men, and this fact alone accounts for many of the qualities of form and content. If they wanted to be accepted as gentlemen, they wished to be known as good fellows who knew how to tell a first-rate story. Horseplay is inevitable when men with a sense of humor get together.

• (4) It was easy in this time and place to become a storehouse of tall tales and comic stories. Through oral transmission, sketches like those of Longstreet, Thorpe, Hooper, and Robb were well known before they were written down. These writers, Arthur Palmer Hudson says, “had the wit to realize that something old in talking might look new in writing.” Not before the Southwest humorists nor after them has there been a richer opportunity to take advantage of folklore. To this they added a knowledge of ancient and modern comedy and produced sketches which show the influence of both.

The Civil War, which radically altered the South's way of life, and the disappearance of the Southern frontier combined to erase most of the conditions necessary for the widespread creation of humor of the kind that the antebellum authors produced. Those professional writers who owed their livelihood to humor, the literary comedians, followed the war with loud voices and entertaining stage mannerisms. A new age and a new kind of comedy had arrived, and those who had joyed in the humorists of the vanished Southwest could only look about them and say with Thorpe's old and sadly reminiscing Mike Fink: “Where's the fun, the frolicking, the fighting? Gone! Gone!”

The times changed and so did the mode of comedy, but Southwestern humor did not entirely disappear. Its vitality was recognized by young Samuel Clemens, who as a Southern youth had known the era and the ways which the frontier humorists wrote about. He used the lore and the language, giving them new dimensions. From Twain on into the twentieth century, Southwestern humor has remained live in writers like Erskine Caldwell, Robert Penn Warren, and, more recently, William Price Fox. In the work of William Faulkner, who read Southwest humor with great pleasure, it shows signs of living forever.