Origins of American Satire  

So Joanne, I take great pride, as a honorary member of the 19th century American United States, of claiming the invention of American humor with this Mark Twain guy and some other pretty funny people. Thomas Nast is a cartoonist. But was there nobody funny until Mark Twain come along in American history?

JOANNE: There was no humor before Mark Twain.

MALE SPEAKER: It explains a lot. I’m guessing maybe there was something funny.

JOANNE: There was a lot of humor. I mean, it might not always be humor that translates into the 21st century, but there was a lot of humor. But in particular, there was one kind of a strain of humor that seems to have been typical, certainly, in the mid and late 18th century. And that is this tendency to take this sort of rustic American guy, this sort of unsophisticated, unschooled guy and sort of turn that on its head and say, yeah, that’s exactly who we are and we got a thing to say.

You know, we’re going to tell you something or other. Something that actually one would not expect from John Adams. But Adams in the 1760s actually had a couple of columns in a newspaper that he pretended to be somebody else. And he played this sort of rustic American guy. He adopted the name Humphrey Ploughjogger.

And as Humphrey Ploughjogger he sort of poked fun at local politicians and weighed in in print, and basically did what satire does really well, which is to poke fun at authority under something of a mask. So it’s pointed, but it doesn’t seem as pointed as it would if he came out and did that in person.

MALE SPEAKER: Wouldn’t be nearly as funny if the real Humphrey Ploughjogger had been stepping forward, right?

JOANNE: No. The real Humphrey would’ve gotten in trouble. So there’s that tradition. You know, another thing that plugs into that tradition is the song “Yankee Doodle,” which started out actually as a song, a British song making fun of these rustic colonials. And Americans essentially said, well, yeah? We are that person. So what? We’re Yankee Doodle. Yeah, that’s going to be our song. And they turned it around and sort of threw it at the British.

MALE SPEAKER: And you know, Joanne, that tradition continues even into the dark era of the Civil War when, ironically, American satire flourishes. This is when Mark Twain first becomes prominent. It’s also when one of my favorite people in American history becomes prominent, and his name is Petroleum V. Nasby and–

JOANNE: You made that up.

MALE SPEAKER: I thought that was a Supreme Court decision. No, it sounds like it, doesn’t it? No, Petroleum V. Nasby is the stage name, a guy named David Locke. And he takes on the voice of an ignorant northern Democrat racist voter who doesn’t understand anything that’s going in the Civil War, hates Abraham Lincoln.

And here’s what was so funny about it is every Republican paper in the North would reprint these things, which would make the Democrats look like idiots. Lincoln would actually read these aloud in accent, and the last thing that we know that Lincoln read on the day that he was assassinated was regaling dinner companions with stories from Petroleum V. Nasby.

The slight difference with this, Joanne, in the Civil War is they’re using the yokel’s voice to make fun of the yokel. You know, they’re not merely hiding behind the rustic identity of the American against the corruption of the English. They’re actually showing, this is what these idiots actually say among themselves.

And it’s right out of that tradition that Mark Twain himself comes with his greatest hits in the immediate wake of the Civil War.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, I could certainly extend that into the 20th century, and certainly the satirist who picked up the mantle from Mark Twain was H.L. Mencken–

MALE SPEAKER: Right

MALE SPEAKER: –who was renowned, especially in the 1920s, for making fun of rubes, of small town America at the very moment that America was no longer a majority of small town Americans.

JOANNE: So I’ve heard of Mencken. I don’t think I’ve actually read Mencken. So do either one of you guys know what he sounds like? What his humor looks like?

MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, it’s mean.

JOANNE: Oh.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s very patronizing, condescending. He glories in his cigar, in his Baltimore setting, in his drinking–

MALE SPEAKER: He’s an op ed writer and each piece kind of skewers one element of country life. So why were these regular folks in the country powerful in Mencken’s mind? It’s because together they could push through measures like prohibition that meant city people couldn’t drink.

MALE SPEAKER: And the anti-evolution crusade, which becomes a major focus of Mencken.

MALE SPEAKER: Exactly. So I want to just pose a question to you folks. It seems to me that perhaps what makes American satire particularly distinctive is that the satirist is not particularly afraid of the state, not afraid of the king. What they’re afraid of is not appealing to the market. They’re not worried about government censorship.

MALE SPEAKER: They’re afraid about bombing.

JOANNE: Right.

MALE SPEAKER: So I would say that the market looms particularly large in reining in how satirists have to operate.

JOANNE: But that becomes really complicated when the market’s polarized, right?

ED AYERS: Yeah.

BRIAN BALOGH: Absolutely.

ED AYERS: Even with a highly polarized and fairly evenly divided viewership and electorate, the mainstream comedy shows are all just going after Trump full bore and flourishing in the market, confirming Trump supporters belief that smug coastal elites are making fun of them. So we’re kind of going back to the very beginning of the story that Joanne talked about.

It’s still rube versus sophisticate, and now you got the market overlay and it depends what’s going to pay to actually make fun of somebody. So Colbert’s ratings flourish by attacking Trump. Jimmy Fallon takes it easier and is suffering as a result. So ironically, playing it safe for the market doesn’t really seem to work anymore.

JOANNE: Well, so yes, obviously, satirists are going to be interested in the market. But I think, don’t you feel that there is a sort of sense of public need of satire here that I– obviously, plugs into the market, but also goes beyond that? That some of these people who are doing political satire have some sense that they’re serving a minor political role or something? That they’re stepping into the public venue to say something that they think is important.

ED AYERS: Joanne, does it strike you that one reason that satire is such a prominent theme in today’s culture is because traditional journalism just doesn’t really know what to do with this historical moment?

JOANNE: Well, you know, what strikes me is we’re in this weird moment where we’re questioning journalism and we’re questioning facts. Maybe in this environment where we’re not sure where to look for facts or what facts are, humor becomes the most powerful tool.

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