“Humor Saves Steps”

Abstract

Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.