{"title":"Comedy Gold: Humor on the Alaska-Yukon Border, 1886-1896","authors":"C. Petrakos","doi":"10.5325/STUDAMERHUMOR.7.1.0086","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article sketches a rough outline of ways humor and laughter were used in setting social boundaries along the Alaska-Yukon border in the decade before the Klondike gold rush (1896-1900). It maintains that humor possessed an extraordinary capacity to both collapse and sustain social hierarchies on the frontier—establishing in and out groups in the absence of any \"official\" state or national authority in the Far North, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World as a theoretical framework to analyze humor's capacity to establish togetherness and otherness. Frontiersmen, this article suggests, harnessed the leveling power of humor to create in-groups while deploying it against Indians and Black Americans to define otherness.","PeriodicalId":53944,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Humor","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2021-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Studies in American Humor","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STUDAMERHUMOR.7.1.0086","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
ABSTRACT:This article sketches a rough outline of ways humor and laughter were used in setting social boundaries along the Alaska-Yukon border in the decade before the Klondike gold rush (1896-1900). It maintains that humor possessed an extraordinary capacity to both collapse and sustain social hierarchies on the frontier—establishing in and out groups in the absence of any "official" state or national authority in the Far North, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World as a theoretical framework to analyze humor's capacity to establish togetherness and otherness. Frontiersmen, this article suggests, harnessed the leveling power of humor to create in-groups while deploying it against Indians and Black Americans to define otherness.
期刊介绍:
Welcome to the home of Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association. Founded by the American Humor Studies Association in 1974 and published continuously since 1982, StAH specializes in humanistic research on humor in America (loosely defined) because the universal human capacity for humor is always expressed within the specific contexts of time, place, and audience that research methods in the humanities strive to address. Such methods now extend well beyond the literary and film analyses that once formed the core of American humor scholarship to a wide range of critical, biographical, historical, theoretical, archival, ethnographic, and digital studies of humor in performance and public life as well as in print and other media. StAH’s expanded editorial board of specialists marks that growth. On behalf of the editorial board, I invite scholars across the humanities to submit their best work on topics in American humor and join us in advancing knowledge in the field.