American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny

by Christopher Miller

Overview

American Cornball is Christopher Miller's irresistibly funny illustrated survey of popular humor—the topics that used to make us laugh, from hiccups and henpecked-husbands to outhouses and old maids—and what it tells us about our country yesterday and today.

Miller revisits nearly 200 comic staples that have been passed down through our culture for generations, many originating from the vaudeville age. He explores the (often unseemly) contexts from which they arose, why they were funny in their time, and why they eventually lost their appeal. The result is a kind of taxonomy of humor during America's golden age that provides a deeper, more profound look at the prejudices, preoccupations, and peculiarities of a nation polarized between urban and rural, black and white, highborn and lowbrow.

As he touches on issues of racism and sexism, cultural stereotypes and violence, Miller reveals how dramatically our moral sensibilities have shifted, most notably in the last few decades. Complete with more than 100 period illustrations, American Cornball is a richly entertaining survey of our shifting comic universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062225184
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/17/2015
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Christopher Miller is the author of the novels The Cardboard Universe, a Huffington Post Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Believer Book of the Year Award, and Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects, a Seattle Times Best Book of the Year. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

American Cornball is a winning testament to broad-minded playfulness and nerdy expertise, and it’s the perfect book to dip into over and over again: it’s funny and smart and endlessly informative about everything Americans thought to be funny, from Rilke to rolling pins.

Jim Shepard

Christopher Miller recreates a lost world in mind-boggling detail, and explores its implications without losing his aplomb, or his sense of humor.

Geoffrey O'Brien

A spectacular compendium...making inspired zigs and zags through ancient bits and gags, from Krapp’s Last Tape to Andy Capp’s shtick.

Ben Greenman

Miller’s thick tome, organized encyclopedically, is discursive, illuminating, and erudite.

best 2014 books for nerds boingboing.com

Christopher Miller…has written an erudite, entertaining and addictive compendium of things that used to make Americans laugh and nowadays don’t.

New York Times Book Review

An uncommonly brilliant idea…extremely clever…Miller’s utterly brilliant encyclopedia of things that were ‘formerly funny’ in America…

Buffalo News

Miller writes with the humor that benefits his myriad subjects, and though he says it could have had twice the number of entries (and tells us some in his afterword), consider his book exhaustive. This is the only laffopedia you will ever need.

Columbus Dispatch

A clever, discursive, meticulously researched guide to explain all that old-fashioned humor of yesteryear…impressive survey of humor...an insightful study of the peculiar and contradictory beast that is the American psyche.

Boston Globe

There is no way anyone interested in humor won’t find this book essential reading.

Inkspill

A peculiar, enlightening book, an investigation of trivia, a strange history of American life from 1900 through 1966… It’s a delight.

Elizabeth McCracken

…an erudite, entertaining and addictive compendium of things that used to make Americans laugh and nowadays don't…[Miller's] a lively and perceptive critic.

The New York Times Book Review - Bruce Handy

12/23/2013
All manner of stale gags from the century past are jolted back to life in this amusing cultural study. Novelist Miller (The Cardboard Universe) mines comic strips, cartoons, novelty postcards, joke books, Marx Brothers movies, and Three Stooges episodes to unearth obsolete, semi-forgotten, and downright embarrassing tropes of mass humor from the period between the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars. His alphabetical essays riff on archetypes, settings, subjects and props, including roller pin-wielding wives, traveling salesman, dumb blondes, absent-minded professors and dim-witted yokels; yowling alley cats and gabbling chickens; desert islands, psychiatrist offices and golf courses where punch lines breed; disappointing honeymoons, baffling Rube Goldberg mechanisms and mass pie fights; plummeting safes, pianos and anvils and the apparently hilarious though never lethal head injuries they cause. While drolly taxonomizing the absurdities and arbitrariness of stylized humor, he digs into its psychological resonances: the undercurrents of violence and sadism; racial bigotry and the asymmetric war between the sexes; the conflicting impulses to both stigmatize nonconformists and upend the stuffed shirts, dowagers and cops who police conformity. Miller's lovingly jaundiced exploration of the way America once laughed crackles with insight; the result is that rare book on humor that is as entertaining as its subject. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-01-05
An alphabetical history of "things that used to make Americans laugh." If you yuck and guffaw at the likes of old maids, absent-minded professors and red-nosed topers, then this is just the book for you. As novelist Miller (The Cardboard Universe, 2009, etc.) notes, these were the things that were widely considered to be funny—and perhaps nothing so much as the specter of the henpecked husband. Other things have come along since in a humor culture that may have become less kind and gentle (courtesy of, say, Sam Kinison and his like), leaving these old-fashioned sources of japery in the realm of "cornball." Miller describes the comedic grammar: Lucille Ball resists the intoxicating powers of Vitameatavegamin, since, by Miller's light, she was "a fully realized character with twenty-nine episodes of backstory behind her" when that one aired, whereas Red Skelton, as a one-off kabibbler, was free to yield to the sauce. Or, on another matter, since most absent-minded professors teach science, it's not always easy to distinguish them from their mad-scientist peers—just ask Buddy Love. Miller's encyclopedia of comic types is wide-ranging, complete and lively; you have to appreciate a sentence such as this: "A fat work-shy self-righteous long-winded blustering grandiose feckless confabulating braggart, Hoople is forever boasting of shooting elephants, overpowering octopi, advising heads of state, and so on." The only shortcoming is the too-easy glossing on the psychology of humor: There's more to making fun of so-called easy girls than the mere fact that for men, "it's something they like to think about. A lot." Freud would tell you otherwise—but then he was one of those pointy-headed absent-minded prof types, wasn't he? A good-natured, entertaining read. It doesn't make Family Circus any funnier, but it explains good bits of Blondie and Snuffy Smith.

Kirkus Reviews