American Cornball: A Laffaopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny

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.)