Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108), 328 pp., Paper, 1996. ISBN: 0807062057, $15.

By Tim W. Brown

A year-and-a-half ago I had occasion to fire off a letter-to-the-editor to Harper's

Magazine. Provoking my ire was an essay written by Jane Smiley (the Pulitzer Prize-winning

author of A Thousand Acres and Moo) in which she made the preposterous claim that Uncle

Tom's Cabin was a superior book to Huckleberry Finn.

Much of the difficulty I had with Smiley's piece related to the fact she was pitting apples

against oranges, a sentimental novel written at the height of the antebellum abolitionist

movement versus a comic novel written after the Civil War had been fought and slaves had been

freed. Still, even in a head-to-head comparison, her essay was wrong-headed on many counts:

she claimed Stowe's novel possessed a more refined plot (wrong -- Twain's episodic structure

was ahead of its time, prefiguring plot-free Modernist novels); featured better characterization

(wrong -- granted, both novels contain grotesques, but Twain's characters are rounder); and

relayed a more progressive vision (wrong -- or maybe right, depending on whether you think

human nature can be reformed).

Leaping to my attention more than anything, however, was Smiley's contention that

Huckleberry Finn was not a "serious novel," her fundamental problem with the book. In my

letter I took great pains to explain that Smiley was missing what I believed was an obvious

point: deadly serious intentions are often behind comic or satiric writing, and, in any case, the

greatest writing is not merely "serious," but encompasses a fuller range of moods, from comic to

tragic. I stopped short of commenting on the irony of having a last name like "Smiley" and

taking such a sourpuss view of literature.

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Alas, Smiley is not alone. It has been my experience that many readers and editors hold

comic literature in low esteem. They could be the most politically progressive and culturally

aware people you will ever meet. They probably appreciate angry, frontal attacks on such things

as greed, brutality and ignorance. But they don't take you seriously if you address these topics

through comedy or satire. I know this from trying to publish my two novels, On Sangamon and

Deconstruction Acres. Both books barbecue a number of institutions, including academia, big

business, landlords, city government, culture snobs, God himself. This probably is why

publication has been slow in coming: I'm pissing off people who grew up among and are fully

vested in these institutions.

Yet it's interesting to note that Americans generally have an almost insatiable appetite for

comedy, reflected in the glut of sitcoms on television and lowbrow comedies at the cinema.

Television producers are tripping all over each other to locate the proper vehicle for the latest

stand-up phenom; movie execs are signing comic actors like Jim Carrey to unprecedented multi-

million dollar contracts. The current interest in comedy is not restricted only to TV or film;

stand-up and improv comedy remain as popular as ever. Even performance poetry, literature of a

sort, regularly stirs laughter. Why have writers for publication not learned from their

performance brethren about comedy's effects on an audience? Why is the world of letters

dominated by a bunch of humorless fucks in New York and a few select college towns?

Answers to these and other questions you had about laughter and literature can be found

in Sudden Glory: Laugher as Subversive History by Barry Sanders, who maintains that laughter

is dangerous stuff, especially to those in positions of power, be they royalty, clergy or

corporations.

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Sanders attempts no less than a history of laughter spanning the entire length of (western)

civilization. He begins with the Israelites of the Old Testament, who, considering later peoples in

his history, were a pretty humorless group. Living under a sentence of death from an angry God

owing to Adam and Eve's sins brought them little joy, although Sanders credits the invention of

irony to Jews who wanted to joke and laugh but who, religion dictated, had to keep up a grave,

sober appearance.

A more realistic attitude toward laughter emerged during the Classical Period. Sanders

quotes Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero on man's propensity to laugh at humorous situations.

Indeed, as Sanders points out, Aristotle referred to the human species as animal ridens, "the

beast who laughs." But, given laughter was often drawn by finding someone else's misfortune

funny -- the "sudden glory" of feeling yourself on top and your neighbor on the bottom -- each

of these philosophers urged moderation, so as not to seem uncharitable. Plato was particularly

emphatic on this point, for uncontrolled laughter could seriously undermine the authority of

those who ruled over his idealized republic.

Sanders argues laughter took a giant step forward in the Medieval Period, mainly through

the person of Geoffrey Chaucer. Despite the best efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to

enforce limits on its parishioners' behavior (laughter being unseemly to God according to

Medieval theologians), people laughed anyhow, their way of surviving life under oppressive

popes and capricious kings. Sanders writes that the laughter heard during this period erupted

mainly from the throats and lungs of peasants. This leads Sanders to one of the book's important

conclusions: throughout history, laughter has tended to rise from the lower classes, much to the

embarrassment of the upper classes. Laughter acted as check against the worst excesses of the

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ruling class; if a priest or nobleman wasn't careful in his dealings with the local peasantry, the

resulting mockery could render him impotent.

It's widely acknowledged that Chaucer's great accomplishment was to bring the voice and

attitude of the commoner into the Canterbury Tales. Of greater significance to Sander's study,

Chaucer invented a whole new genre by placing a humorous story in a literary context. Through

a lengthy exegesis of "The Miller's Tale," Sanders shows that Chaucer was no less than the first

writer of fiction in English. Moreover, the first English fiction was comic in tone.

Chaucer is clearly the hero of Sudden Glory; Sanders' argument culminates with the

chapter in which he is discussed. Ensuing historical periods are handled in more cursory fashion.

Persuaded by newly discovered classical texts or bullied by Puritans eager to stamp out sin,

humans returned to their old humorless selves during the Renaissance and Reformation. Things

brightened a little during the Enlightenment, when wit and irony made big comebacks in

literature, especially in the work of Jonathan Swift. And so things went with the social stew, the

lid clamped a little tighter or a little looser from century to century, until Sigmund Freud blew

the lid completely off in the twentieth century, releasing hilarity among other pent-up feelings

and desires. Sanders concludes his book with a personal reflection on the career of Lenny Bruce,

who in our own time pissed off the authorities with his caustic brand of humor and suffered fatal

consequences. (Sanders wonders if Bruce's fatal heroin overdose wasn't a hot shot cooked up for

him courtesy of the police.)

Surveying the history of laughter in exactly the right proportions, Sudden Glory rarely

fails to engage the reader's interest. Sanders immerses the reader in a multitude of sources,

including the Bible, classical fragments, monastic manuscripts, books on manners, psychology

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journals, popular novels and theoretical texts. He also examines visual art to help him take a

given time's comic pulse. This leads to an interesting aside: at least one of the artists drawing on

cave walls at Lascaux 30,000 years ago had a funny bone. Sanders writes that a drawing has

been discovered depicting a bent-over man about to get reamed in the ass by the horns of a

charging bull. Further interesting information can be found in the book's copious notes. Here

Sanders inserts a number of comments on etymology. For example, buttressing his argument

that fiction arose from the comic tradition, Sanders notes that the Middle English "geste" ("jest"

today) originally meant either "joke" or "story."

This book, my favorite of 1996, couldn't have come at a better time for me. Like many

poets and writers, I spend an unhealthy amount of time brooding over my career. Sudden Glory

boosted my spirits through honoring the type of writing I practice and enjoy reading. One hopes

that the very unfunny folks who run publishing companies or teach at stuffy universities will

read this book and lighten up a little. They are the first to lament the demise of reading, yet they

refuse to offer the public anything but dreary, predictable books.

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