Title
The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire's Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions
Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
English
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
By reading antebellum-era jokes about Cuba in conversation with Judith Yaross Lee's argument that imperialism has persistently shaped American humor, this essay considers how US humorists located pleasure in the nation's fraught foreign relations. Examining a variety of comics, anecdotes, and malapropisms from Yankee Notions demonstrates how this popular, long-running magazine mocked US Americans' efforts to assert their cosmopolitan knowledge of Cuba while nonetheless naturalizing US global power. Together, such jokes participated in a larger cultural project that shaped late nineteenth-century images of Cuba in a way that was designed to generate support for the idea of US intervention. More broadly, the magazine demonstrates how jokes about ignorance and knowingness became a way to justify US imperialism and resist foreign power.
Recommended Citation
Sillin. “The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire’s Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 7, no. 2, 2021, p. 304. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.0304.
Journal
Studies in American Humor
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Comments
This article was originally published in Studies in American Humor. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.
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