Southern humor in all seriousness.
"Humor, in the end, seems to be one of those 'idiomatic imponderables' (in Edgar Thompson's phrase) that continue to set the South apart from the rest of the country."
"Humorists copied, exaggerated, and published these curious exchanges between power and wit, tainting them with racism while capturing them in form."
"Folk humor is a key to both American culture and its literary tradition."
"For situations that are frequently life threatening, it is at times hard to imagine guffaws associated with them. Yet black people managed to create the essence of the blues—to laugh to keep from crying—in and about a land that was as much hell as it was home."
"'What is that humor, you are wondering? Gentlemen, kindly cover your ears.'"
"My point is not so much that a Mississippi story is better than a Michigan story, of course. Such is not always true, obviously. Besides, Eudora Welty could write circles around Ring Lardner on any terrain. But her region, so populous with talk, gives her an obnoxious advantage, one which she exercises with complete skill and insight."
"As scholars and laymen alike struggle to determine what, if anything, constitutes the surviving essence of southernness, a close analysis of southern humor suggests that, contrary to our insistence on the seriousness of our endeavors, the search for new insights into the southern identity may well prove to be a laughing matter after all."
Norton, 1994
University of North Carolina Press, 1992
Texas Tech University Press, 1993
University of Georgia Press, 1993
University of North Carolina Press, 1994
University Press of Kentucky, 1993
University Press of Florida, 1993; University of Illinois Press, 1993
Louisiana State University Press, 1994
University Press of Florida, 1993
Norton, 1993
University of Georgia Press, 1993
Louisiana State University Press, 1994
University Press of Mississippi, 1993
University of Tennessee Press, 1993
Morris Communications Corporation, 1992. 246 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $24.95.
"Do you ever eat grits? (If yes) How often do you eat them?"
"But first things first."
"a pool, lighted tennis, Jacuzzi, and serene pond . . ."
Morris Communications Corporation, 1992
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