Description
Book SynopsisAmerican Cornball is Christopher Miller''s irresistibly funny illustrated survey of popular humor—the topics that used to make us laugh, from hiccups and henpecked-husbands to outhouses and old maids—and what it tells us about our country yesterday and today.
Why has our sense of humor changed over the years? Why did our grandparents think things like safes falling out of high windows or angry housewives waiting with rolling pins for their drunken husbands to come home were so funny? While we snicker at pop culture references, Americans in time past gravitated towards slapstick and jokes that...don''t seem so funny in retrospect.
Miller revisits nearly 200 comic staples that have been passed down through our culture for generations, many originating from the vaudeville age. He explores the (often unseemly) contexts from which they arose, why they were funny in their time, and why they eventually lost their appeal. The result is a
