| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. By Stephen E. Kercher. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xii, 575 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-226-43164-9.)

Many fans and maybe even a few of the humorists chronicled in Stephen E. Kercher's history of postwar comedy may initially bristle at the politically charged modifier "liberal" in front of "satire" in the title and throughout the text of this book. However, Kercher's examination of American humor from the late 1940s until the early 1960s persuasively shows how satire tapped into the period's simmering discontent and cultural taste for irreverence, while articulating liberal social and political concerns. Relying on meticulous primary research and a savvy critical eye, he charts the trajectory of liberal satire from its status as subterranean counterculture to an affirmation of New Frontier politics to its eventual dispersal as an ironic attitude permeating American popular culture.

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