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ebonyutley's review against another edition
1.0
This book is old. Not that I'm against old, but it weirded me out when she kept saying 50s and I had to remember 1850s. The title is misleading. To me, the book was not about humor. It was a survey of American figures in literature. Before there were literary figures there were figures of folk expression. Literary figures became folk figures as they were literally shaped by the changing American geographical landscape. She covers history from the 1850s to the turn of the century pretty well if you’re interested in those stories. I was not so much. I grew wary of all the Negro/blackface talk and rather resented the claim that being black was funny back in the day, but that might explain why it took until the mid-60s for black humor to go mainstream. Blacks were too busy trying to shed the stereotype. Humor in the mid-60s and 70s did rail on the white folks but then it became minstrelsy again not long after that. I guess I'd have to read a book on humor in the 20t century to have answers to those quandaries.
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