Book Review: Humor as Anti-Didactic

By Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University

Carrie Conners. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetics. UP of Mississippi, 2022. 162 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $25.00 paper.

In Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Carrie Conners examines the ways that poets writing between about 1960 and 2001 use humor—particularly humor based in deviations from the expectations of genre—to make non-didactic political critiques of real-world practices and power structures. She focuses her discussion primarily on four poets—Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson—although she places each of these poets briefly in dialogue with another—R. S. Gwynn, Terrance Hayes, Derek Walcott, and Anne Carson, respectively. 

Laugh Lines opens with a brief introduction in which Conners sets up her primary assertion that “humor is integral to the character of contemporary American poetry” (3) and explains her temporal focus: she begins in the sixties for the era’s distinctive countercultural currents, and ends in 2001 because of the “marked shift in the political climate” that followed 9/11 (6). Conners asks why critics who are interested in the playful and comic tendencies of postmodern fiction have largely ignored humor in the era’s poetry. One answer, she suggests, may be the primacy of a prescriptive understanding of lyric poetry that typecasts it as by definition a humorless examination of the speaker’s subjectivity. Conners selects poets working in a variety of genres—formal lyric, prose poetry, epic—to cut against this definition, while arguing that “poetic genres recall the societal constructs that the poets ridicule” (9). 

Conners opens her examination of the intersection of poetic form and political protest with Marilyn Hacker. The chapter concentrates on what Conners describes as Hacker’s hedonism, by which she means Hacker’s valorization of pleasure—particularly the multifaceted physical and intellectual pleasure of an affair between an older and a younger woman in Hacker’s sonnet sequence Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. The poet’s choice of received form (in this case, the sonnet) is also “a hedonistic act and consequently a political performance” (34). The political agenda, however, is saved from being “preachy or priggish, Conners asserts,” by Hacker’s “humorous delivery” (42). It might have been interesting for Conners to have elaborated this connection between hedonism and humor, and the ways in which humor is part of the pleasure the poems seek, create, and celebrate, but Conners concentrates primarily on the ways that Hacker “offers a critique of those who label her life as bad or immoral” by “representing a pleasurable, and therefore good, life of a lesbian feminist” (44).

The second chapter concentrates on Harryette Mullen’s use of “nonnarrative word play” in Sleeping with the Dictionary (45). Conners argues that Oulipo techniques allow Mullen to expose the ways that capitalism reifies the individual and language itself. Mullen’s verbal games, Conners suggests, critique the ways that “reified thought can transform words into commodities” (54), in the process codifying racism and sexism. Here, humor plays a double role: racist jokes may give jokers and audiences plausible deniability, allowing them “to gloss over the violence” of offensive terms (55), while Mullen’s challenging playfulness—structuring poems around anagrams or sound associations based racist terms, for example— “encourages the reader to interrogate the text” (61). Conners contends that “[a]lthough Mullen uses humor to show how these racist and violent terms are a part of American cultural consciousness, she also reveals that humor can be manipulated to help package and sell these terms.” (57)

Conners continues her examination of how poets use humor to critique capitalism when she turns to Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Conners situates Dorn’s text against President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address that the “military-industrial complex” undergirding American politics and economics may become too powerful (85). She argues that the poem mocks the capitalist-heroic figure of Howard Hughes, whom Dorn selects as a “paragon of capitalism” (79), in part because Hughes and his equivalents “mock”—in the sense of reductively imitating—the workers they exploit (81). Dorn’s mockery, by contrast, is meant to “encourage […] readers to analyze the [capitalist] system for themselves”; this will help readers avoid being “described,” or reduced to a single, branded identity (102): such description is dangerous, Conners suggests, because it encourages people (within the poem and beyond it) to conceive of themselves and of others in prescriptive, reductive terms.  

Russell Edson’s prose poems in The Very Thing That Happens, inspired by a medieval bestiary, comically subvert such reductive descriptions. Conners argues that Edson’s absurdist treatment of animals—and of humans as animal-like—implies that “we should turn our attention to our anthropocentric tendencies” and engage in a posthuman self-critique (107), with the goal of “debunk[ing] the assumption that the realms of human, animal, and inanimate are separate” (119). Of the four chapters, this one contains perhaps the most ambitious argument. It lays out not just critique (of homophobia, of capitalism) but a sustained suggestion of an alternative framework of values: “Edson’s work suggests that our world will continue to be violent unless we confront our need to elevate the status of our species and intelligence and cease to define ourselves at the expense of others” (130). 

Conners’s examination of political humor draws on a variety of theoretical sources, varying her approach productively as she treats each poet. The book consistently draws an interesting connection between formal constraint and humor, both because form raises expectations that poets can comically confound, and because, as Conners contends, form’s sometimes arbitrary limits can mimic the social and political rules these poets contest or rebel against. It would be have been helpful, though, for Conners to have had a more articulated central through-line beyond the assertion that humor helps poets avoid limited or didactic political critique. We may already know that “capitalism enables racial and gender discrimination” (79). It would be interesting to explore in more detail how genre-twisting humor casts light on that fact. If the humorous revelation of incongruity makes readers interrogate the subject matter, does it direct that interrogation? If humorous adaptations of genre help us recognize the artificiality of political constructs, what does it suggest we do about those constructs—how should we reconceive them, or are there core truths with which we could replace them? If humor is a starting point, does it suggest a direction in which we could proceed? The answers to those questions will of course vary depending on which poets we consider, but following up on the questions Conners raises may lead us to a deeper understanding not just of the political phenomena she examines but of an important difference between mockery and substantive critique.

Rachel Trousdale (www.rachelvtrousdale.com) is a professor of English at Framingham State University. She is the author of Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry; Humor in Modern American Poetry; and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination.