| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel Wickberg. The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 267. $35.00.

It is easier to articulate what David Wickberg's monograph is not than what it is. The book is not a study of American humor in the usual sense. Wickberg does not examine a set of texts, and he is not primarily concerned with styles and forms of humorous expression. Nor is this a psychological study, although those who have studied the role of humor and laughter in human personality and behavior, such as Sigmund Freud, do make occasional appearances, and this is not, strictly speaking, a study of "modern" America; much of the book concerns the period from 1870 to 1930, when, Wickberg maintains, the sense of humor began to acquire its current status as the personality trait no one wants to be without. It is, instead, the history of a concept frequently taken for granted—a history that involves semantics, concepts of selfhood, cultural values, understandings of physiology, and social institutions. If the result sometimes has an air of dogged determination, the reader who follows Wickberg's quest for understanding will be rewarded with an enriched understanding of how and why the sense of humor has come to be ubiquitous in twentieth-century American life. . . .

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