{"title":"The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire's Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions","authors":"Sarah J. Sillin","doi":"10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.0304","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:By reading antebellum-era jokes about Cuba in conversation with Judith Yaross Lee's argument that imperialism has persistently shaped American humor, this essay considers how US humorists located pleasure in the nation's fraught foreign relations. Examining a variety of comics, anecdotes, and malapropisms from Yankee Notions demonstrates how this popular, long-running magazine mocked US Americans' efforts to assert their cosmopolitan knowledge of Cuba while nonetheless naturalizing US global power. Together, such jokes participated in a larger cultural project that shaped late nineteenth-century images of Cuba in a way that was designed to generate support for the idea of US intervention. More broadly, the magazine demonstrates how jokes about ignorance and knowingness became a way to justify US imperialism and resist foreign power.","PeriodicalId":53944,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Humor","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","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.7.2.0304","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:By reading antebellum-era jokes about Cuba in conversation with Judith Yaross Lee's argument that imperialism has persistently shaped American humor, this essay considers how US humorists located pleasure in the nation's fraught foreign relations. Examining a variety of comics, anecdotes, and malapropisms from Yankee Notions demonstrates how this popular, long-running magazine mocked US Americans' efforts to assert their cosmopolitan knowledge of Cuba while nonetheless naturalizing US global power. Together, such jokes participated in a larger cultural project that shaped late nineteenth-century images of Cuba in a way that was designed to generate support for the idea of US intervention. More broadly, the magazine demonstrates how jokes about ignorance and knowingness became a way to justify US imperialism and resist foreign power.
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.
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