So a few years ago I bought a 2-year subscription to a Penn State journal called Studies in American Humor. I now have about four issues and I’ve only read one of them so far. They’re very dry. And less funny than you would think.
This would show I do not actually ‘subscribe’ to the idea that to study comedy is to kill it. There is no small amount of the unknown about art and our responses to it, but to me the mysterious element just proves (like the mysterious universe itself) that we just haven’t studied it enough.
Anyway, one of the journal articles inside Vol. 7, No. 1 proved very fruitful for this blog. It was called “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting” by Todd Thompson (2021).
Because we can now study large sets of content electronically through searchable databases, we can see patterns we were never before able to see. We call this “distant reading” as opposed to a “close reading.” And this author here was interested in how jokes travel from newspaper to newspaper across the United States in the 19th Century. For example, “one viral joke was reprinted more than a hundred times in American periodicals between 1856 and 1877.”
Scholars and anthropologists can now do this research with recipes, old songs, marital advice and even poems, as we will see below. Many of the more popular items “circulated for decades.” And we can now see how content often needed contextual understanding from the audiences reading them.
The joke Thompson studies is called “A Yankee Boast” or “Not to Be Outdone” and his whole effort here was based on a poetry study already done on searchable databases called “Fugitive Verses: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” by Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen.
The basis of the joke was “a friendly argument between the United States and Britain” that first appeared in the Boston Transcript on 24 December 1855 and the gist of it was how Americans can get ridiculous in the game of one-upmanship. Constance Rourke describes the situation: “Half bravado, half cockalorum, this Yankee revealed the traits considered deplorable by the British travelers; he was indefatigably rural, sharp, uncouth, witty. Here were the manners of the Americans!” The joke plays on “the aggressive exaggeration about frontiersmen’s superhuman abilities to conquer their natural surroundings in the service of westward expansion and empire building.”
And the joke kept getting resurrected in bursts as the United States expanded, for example when the U.S. annexed Alaska. In the essay on poems below, the authors call this “multiple waves of popularity.”
The joke “elides the fraught politics of expansion in the late 1850s” and traces how the joke changed over time in reprints, by accident or by editorial interference, in one case eventually being used to make a serious editorial case in favor of manifest destiny.
And when studying a piece contained in a larger newspaper, the frame of content around that subject matters, so Thompson also studies where in the newspaper this joke would appear, what page, what ads and editorials where nearby, “how a joke’s meaning shifts….based on its collocation with other news items….the joke’s relative elasticity allows it to mean something different to readers who consume it alongside one or more…recurring themes.”
He also studied historical humor themes: “Comic exaggeration and the immensity of America’s natural features tended to go hand in hand in nineteenth-century American humor.”
So then I went to JSTOR and downloaded “Fugitive Verses: The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” (which appeared in American Periodicals in 2017).
And this study was interesting to me for one reason: most poetry studies I read deal with the meaning or the development of a work in the literary canon as it exists appreciated in modern times. Okay, well maybe someone will sometimes delve into an obscure artist, but even then everything is based on our sense of taste today either collectively or individually. Rarely have we gone back to see what people found interesting in their own historical culture.
Often you see lists of names, long forgotten poets who were allegedly hugely popular during their day, but never anything much to explain or quantify the context of their popularity.
Distant reading can help with that.
And just as Thompson did with the American/British joke above, Cordell and Mullen follow the changes in poems over time. They explain how people once would cut poems out of newspapers and make scrapbooks from them. I would imagine they did this with jokes, songs and recipes, too.
The first poem they track is “a largely forgotten nineteenth-century poem” called “The Children,” a poem “not collected in The Norton Anthology of American Literature,” i.e. the canon, “but it was exceedingly popular in its day…reprinted at least 171 times…between September 22, 1864 and December 3, 1899, making it one of the most widely reprinted poems from the nineteenth century.”
A funny thing seems to happen when a poem gets reprinted so many times in so many places. It takes a life of its own through “remediation” and the poem separates from its author (often being attributed mistakenly to the wrong people or as an anonymous poem). The author loses the thread. Even for kingpin poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s best seller. Even his poems lost track of him occasionally.
These were “messy realities of nineteenth-century print culture.” There were “mistakes of fact or typesetting that ripple through the newspaper exchanges, to debates over authorship.”
Sounds fun.
And again, context supplied additional meaning. Was the poem printed on a literary page or on the front page surrounded by related news. Imagine that, a front-page poem!
Anyway, “The Children” was written by Charles M. Dickinson. Foreshadowing that this familiar name would complicate authorship someday, as well as Dickinson’s use of a pen name sometimes. Most early reprints of the poem had the author mistakenly listed as “Dickens,” some as “Dickinson,” some as “The Village Schoolmaster” (his pen name) and some as anonymous.
And then a false story went around that the poem was found on the desk of Charles Dickens when he died. Sounds far-fetched but most people believed that story as it was reprinted so often. As a Charles Dickens poem, the poem took on extra meaning because you would naturally attribute Charles Dickens’ literary preoccupations to it.
The authors quote D. F. McKenzie to label that kind of meaning-making “the poem’s social text.” And unfortunately the way people read the poem also started to affect how readers then viewed Charles Dickens.
This is how the poem becomes “fugitive.” On the run from its ownership, “that it has escaped its owner” and begins “circulating surreptitiously.”
This seems like a nightmare for anyone who has the idea of a romantic auteur about themselves. But “the nineteenth century developed the nearest thing that publishing poets have ever had to mass readership…the broadest and least controllable distribution channel for poets during the period…a highly variable network over which typical literary authorities had little say.”
So yeah…a mixed bag.
Authors protested misattribution but those protests appeared mostly in literary magazines and books; and who reads those?
And poor son of Charles Dickens who kept having to say the poem was not written by his father and having to write “a large number of letters” over “seventeen years” to try to clear up the mess.
This is funnier than the Yankee Boast, to be honest. But I’m saying that from 2025.
The article then traces another poem, “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox that was first printed in the U.S. in 1832 and got confused as a poem Abraham Lincoln had written just because he liked it so much. Through recitation and reprinting, stanzas got omitted and words changed. The most popular version should maybe be considered a “reauthorship,” according to this essay. And then after Lincoln died and the poem was included in his biography, the title was changed to “O Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud” which caused a further shift in the poem’s meaning.
And then poems were often printed with little editorial intros which affected how they landed in readers’ minds.
“Between 1859 and 1895, a poem named ‘Beautiful Snow’ circulated through more than 276 periodicals, across continents and across oceans.” It’s a poem the authors say is not found in any scholarship or anthologies but was a very popular poem about a fallen woman; and for years editors and readers debated its potential authors among actors, socialites, newspaper editors, writers and prostitutes.
“One British paper wryly observed, ‘In the United States of America there are 6,000 people who wrote the poem “Beautiful Snow” under a nom de plume, and they are increasing at the rate of forty-three monthly.'”
Cue the parodies. This poem became so talked-about that it was called “a beautiful vagabond” and “not a poem, but a series of events.”
To paraphrase the authors, poems that were printed in newspapers had a life of “uncertainties and slippages.”
So there was no easy life for poets back then as now. Imagine this: you might have the most popular poem of the today but then it would be attributed to Taylor Swift.
You don’t need JSTOR, you can read a draft of this article: https://viraltexts.org/2016/04/08/fugitive-verses/
