Humor and Masculinity in U.s. Fiction: Intersections, Performances, and Functions

Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.

Joseph L. Coulombe is a professor of American literature in the Department of English, Rowan University, New Jersey, United States. He is the author of two additional books, Reading Native American Literature (Routledge, 2011) and Mark Twain and the American West (U of Missouri Press, 2003), and multiple articles on various American writers, texts, and genres. His scholarship explores how literary narratives position readers in relation to shifting ideologies of gender, region, and race. Professor Coulombe earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1989. He originally hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town.