Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs:
The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 examines an era in
which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and
multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that
would appeal to a diverse audience, had to formulate a method for making
the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic
strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were
portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that
grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.
Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing
a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about
ethnicity--how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity,
commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic
sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters
feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized.
Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and
literature and the people who produced them--including George Herriman,
R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and
William Glackens--and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph
Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American
and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the
Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful
place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into
the twentieth century.
