The humor of the colonial and early national periods featured indigenous American character types, some of whom were progenitors of what Louis D. Rubin Jr., in his introduction to The Comic Imagination in American Literature (1973), has defined as the "great American joke"—the difference between what people are and what they should be. In colonial America and in the early days of the Republic, this disparity was often treated satirically, satire being an import appropriated from Great Britain. Many of the practitioners of eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century American humor cast their mocking barbs at various character types, manners, and social concerns endemic to the American experience. Their comedy also often displayed a strong democratic tendency, which would become a key recurring ingredient in what Walter Blair has called, in his book of the same title, native American humor.
Acknowledged as the father of American humor, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) introduced several comic types who have enjoyed long and prominent currency in American culture. In several of his most memorable comic works, Franklin adopted democratic voices who spoke in a direct, amusing, and sometimes even self-deprecating manner and who expressed essential values for living. Through Silence Dogood, a loquacious New England countrywoman, Franklin spoke forthrightly and practically, deriding Boston manners, education, religion, government, and male idleness in the Dogood Papers, fourteen essays written in a manner imitative of the Spectator papers of Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) and published anonymously in his brother James's newspaper, the New England Courant, between 2 April and 8 October 1722. Richard Saunders, the wise fool of Franklin's perennially best-selling Poor Richard's Almanack (1733-1758), was both entertaining and moralistic, conveying gems of wisdom in jokes, light verse, comic predictions, and satiric pronouncements—all of which were intelligible to practical-minded common people. A conservative voice, a purveyor of witty advice or, as Walter Blair has classified it, "horse sense," Richard is remembered for his comically didactic and plainspoken aphorisms, such as "He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir," "Men and melons are hard to know," and "Tongue double, brings trouble."
Throughout the eighteenth century, in the competitive almanac market that Poor Richard's Almanack helped to spawn, humor became a major staple. And as Robert K. Dodge observes in Early American Almanac Humor (1987), almanac humor served as a barometer of "what early citizens of the United States considered funny" (p. 4), which included attitudes toward women, relations between the sexes, and attitudes toward immigrant minorities and Native Americans. One of Franklin's most famous comic pieces, "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker" (1747), uses as a female persona a woman of easy virtue who naively and reasonably defends her promiscuity by criticizing the double standard of sexual morality and justifies her sexual behavior by innocently claiming that she was merely following nature and "nature's God," the God who said "increase and multiply."
Another dimension of Franklin's humor, a dark and sinister side, is manifested in his preRevolutionary and Revolutionary War political sat-ires—"Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One" (1773), "An Edict by the King of Prussia" (1773), "A Method of Humbling Rebellious American Vassals" (1774), and "The Sale of the Hessians" (1777)—each caustically ridiculing oppressive British policies. In them Franklin creates personae, fashions them in the blatantly ironic manner of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), and employs them as his mouthpieces, adopting the point of view that he is attacking, pretending to support it while actually carrying this view to an absurd extreme, thereby making a mockery of his subject.
Franklin continued this practice in "On the Slave Trade" (1790), an expression of his opposition to American slavery. Adopting the form of a fictitious letter from Moslem Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim that he enclosed with his own letter to the editor of the Federal Gazette under the signature of Historicus, Franklin, who belonged to a society dedicated to improving the conditions of African Americans, employed Ibrahim's letter as an ironic response to Georgia Congressman James Jackson's defense of slavery. In assuming the guise of Ibrahim, Franklin pretended to defend the continuation of slavery, drawing on some of the same political and economic arguments of Jackson. Although, his actual intent in exposing Moslem pirates' capturing of Christian white people along the African coast, a situation closely analogous to the slavery system in America, was to ridicule the irrationality of Jackson's proslavery stance.
The versatile Franklin also created one of the first American political cartoons, "Join or Die," published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754, depicting a snake severed into eight parts, representing all of the American colonies except Georgia and Delaware. Franklin likewise used this cartoon as part of his "Plan of Union" presentation to the Albany Congress in New York to persuade the leaders of the colonies to unite in order to survive. Another famous political cartoon, Elkanah Tisdale's "The Gerry-Mander" published in the Boston Weekly Messenger in 1812, depicts a political district as a salamander in protest of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry's effort to restructure the state's voting districts to prevent the election of members of the opposing political party.
Humor as a vehicle for political protest can also be found in Thomas Paine's (1737-1809) widely influential pamphlet Common Sense (1776), his spirited and rational plea for ending all attempts at reconciliation and for immediate independence from Great Britain. Sarcasm was among the strategies that Paine effectively employed in Common Sense to persuade his readers to embrace his political agenda, particularly in the section, "Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession," where he debunked the monarchy, particularly the British crown. In attacking the practice of hereditary succession, which he states is "a degradation and lessening of ourselves" and as "an imposition on posterity," Paine sardonically writes that "one of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion." He further caustically observes that persons "so weak" to believe in "the folly of hereditary right . . . let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion." Paine also turns his invective to the notion of the "honorable origin" of monarchy, cynically denying the possibilities of any noble origins of kingship. Instead, what one would discover, he points out, is "the first of them [is] nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers."
Another national leader, the future U.S. president, John Adams (1735-1826), also turned to humor, beginning in 1763, in a series of six epistolary satires, written in the vernacular dialect of Humphrey Ploughjogger, a New England farmer. He was an early exemplar of the rustic Yankee who commented critically on political and social issues, including the Stamp Act (1765), and who would reappear in numerous reincarnations in American humor of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.
The three most prominent humorists of the American Revolution were John Trumbull (1750-1831), Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), and Royall Tyler (1757-1826). One of the Hartford Wits, Trumbull was the author of a two-part mock-heroic poem, M'Fingal (1776, 1782), which satirized both British Loyalists and American Patriots. Warren was a Patriot who anonymously authored five satiric closet dramas between 1773 and 1779, the best-known of which is The Group (1775). In The Contrast (1787), Tyler introduced to the American stage the character of Jonathan, the comic Yankee, creating in him a discernible American identity. In The Group, which employs comedy as a tool for propagandistic ridicule, Warren uses derogatory and ridiculous names such as Meagre, Hateall, Crusty Crowbar, and Dupe to expose and accentuate the greed, self-serving motives, and hypocrisy of Tory sympathizers. For his part Tyler, also a Patriot, employed the strategies of British Restoration comedy in The Contrast to juxtapose the simplicity, virtue, and innocence of Jonathan, a country bumpkin, and the artificial and pretentious manners and speech of urban sophisticates like Dimple, a Europeanized American. Tyler's play, which clearly privileged the virtuous and naïve Jonathan and which offered a corrective to a potentially false, supercilious, standard of America's national manners, afforded the audience the opportunity to examine itself honestly and to determine what manners, fashions, and values to adopt.
The antithesis of Tyler's promotion of a democratic ideal of the innocent and virtuous farmer in The Contrast is found in New England Federalist mock pastorals of the 1790s. In courtship poems like Thomas Green Fessenden's (1771-1837) "Peter Periwinkle to Tabitha Towzer" (1798), they express antagonism toward democratization, mocking the common man by comically denigrating the rural Yankee.
Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Regan, His Servant (17921815), by Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1778-1816), is a comic picaresque novel and double-edged satire directed against both the common people, depicted as fools, and the educated, presented as impractical. In this work Brackenridge exposes the excesses and dangerous tendencies inherent in a democratic system of government such as existed on the Pennsylvania frontier in the eighteenth century. He focuses on the misadventures of the ignorant and unrefined Teague O'Regan, an Irish servant and the main object of the novel's humor, who repeatedly exposes his ineptitude when trying to pursue responsible vocations for which he is unqualified.
Despite Brackenridge's negative attitude toward democracy, the frontiersman began to emerge as a significant comic figure in America in the early nineteenth century. Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825), book peddler, preacher, and author of a biography of George Washington, also wrote The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1812). It comprises his humorous observations of and anecdotes about his travels on the southern frontier, graphically capturing in print the vernacular voice of the southern frontiersman and some of his rollicking activities, such as boasting, drinking, and fighting. Weems's contemporary, James Kirke Paulding (1770-1860), composed Letters from the South (1817), based on the author's travels in Virginia. It features epistles recounting some of the humorous manners and customs he observed among Virginia backwoodsmen. He subsequently incorporated this subject matter into The Lion of the West (1830), his popular play that features the bravado of Nimrod Wildfire, a tall-talking backwoodsman from Kentucky.
While both Weems and Paulding were important trailblazers in opening up the southern frontier as a rich source of humor, Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the pivotal force in popularizing and expanding the comic possibilities of the character of the backwoodsman. His History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) was notable for its foolish pedant, Diedrich Knickerbocker; its pseudocomic history; and its robust and earthy humor. More important, however, in the story called "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), Irving created a paradigm for merging the two American comic types—the Yankee and the frontiersman. Ichabod Crane, a genteel, ambitious Yankee schoolmaster, intrudes on the quiet, settled, rural hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, where he cultivates a design to marry a rich farmer's daughter and then, with her father's money, to migrate to the frontier. But Ichabod's rival suitor, Brom Bones—a rural ruffian known for his marksmanship and roguish, humorous pranks—foils and vanquishes Ichabod through trickery and deception. The eponymous hero of "Rip Van Winkle" (1820) is Irving's other major character creation. A likeable frontiersman, he avoids work by spending his time playing games with the village children or going on long hunts in the Catskill Mountains. In the mountains he escapes both civilization and his termagant wife, an advocate of a staunch work ethic. In "Rip Van Winkle" Irving also fabricated a comic plot formula, the tale beginning on a factual basis, then proceeding into the realm of the fanciful or incredible, and concluding with a return to a realistic semblance. Though derived from German folk sources, Irving's two classic tales are noteworthy for privileging the common man and his way of life and for popularizing several scripts featuring clashes of urban and rural values, lifestyles, and manners and a readily adaptable plot structure. These features would, beginning in the 1830s, be appropriated and reconfigured by the South's amateur frontier humorists and subsequent generations of professional American humorists, including Mark Twain.