How the Other Half Laughs

<p>Taking up the role of laughter in society How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture 1895-1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse audience had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction vaudeville and the comic strip the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.</p><p>Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity--how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity commiseration and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized.</p><p>Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art journalism and literature and the people who produced them--including George Herriman R. F. Outcault Rudolph Dirks Jimmy Swinnerton George Luks and William Glackens--and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction illustration and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.</p>