{"id":37928,"date":"2017-04-11T01:00:13","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T05:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37928"},"modified":"2017-03-31T11:05:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T15:05:46","slug":"qotd-the-great-american-humourists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/11\/qotd-the-great-american-humourists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The great American humourists"},"content":{"rendered":"

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred. <\/p>\n

H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming \u2014 and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not \u2014 but at the bottom of each man\u2019s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character.<\/p>\n

Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, \u201cTo make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.\u201d Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer<\/em>. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn<\/em> and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening \u2014 \u201cthe most stupendous event in my life,\u201d he called it \u2014 and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his \u201cPrejudices\u201d and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: \u201cThere are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.\u201d<\/p>\n

The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men\u2019s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the \u201cprehensile moron,\u201d his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. \u201cIt was wonderful to find America,\u201d Twain wrote. \u201cBut it would have been more wonderful to miss it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2016-08-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred. H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming \u2014 and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not \u2014 but at the bottom of each man\u2019s deep well of humor was a brackish and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,57,41,13],"tags":[86,347,591,949,907],"class_list":["post-37928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-debunking","tag-hlmencken","tag-marktwain","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9RK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37928"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37930,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37928\/revisions\/37930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}