Southwestern humor is geographically misnamed, as its most prominent writers (not all of them Southwesterners) resided in states and territories as far east as Georgia and as far north as Tennessee. It is sometimes called “frontier” humor because its plots and characters typically reflect rural values and offer critiques of mid-century ideas of civilization.

The movement flourished at the height of American Romanticism, from the 1830s through the 1860s, and coincided with both the rise of sectarian conflict in the United States and the development of a magazine culture. In fact, one of the most prominent “sporting magazines” (so named because they often included stories about hunting and fishing), William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times (1831–1861), was published in New York; it became the chief outlet for Southwestern humor, publishing many of the movement’s most important writers before they went on to collect their tales in book form.

Southwestern humor is indebted to an antebellum interest in American regionalism, as well as the popularity of the David Crockett Almanacs (1835–1856), narratives written in the first person as if by Crockett (though not by him; he died in 1836), which mythologized the hero of the Alamo and promoted exaggerated tales of his bravery, prowess, and heroism.

Characters in Southwestern tales are usually extreme, from the ribald vengeance of Sut Lovingood (made famous in a series of tales by George Washington Harris) or the scheming selfishness of Simon Suggs (a creation of Johnson Jones Hooper). Plots usually revolve around the exaggerated conflict, violence, and improbabilities associated with the tall-tale tradition. The protagonists are frontier types, usually poor and uneducated, who are shown to be superior to the ostensibly more powerful members of their society by tricking them and thus revealing the illusory nature of social power and rank.

The disparity between appearance and reality is also reflected in the form of most Southwestern humor—the framed tale, a story within a story reported by an outside narrator in which the differences between the two narrators are revealed. In his Native American Humor (1937), Walter Blair identifies three underlying incongruities that often define Southwestern humor narratives:

• Between grammatical language of the frame and dialect of the internal tale

• Between situation of the tale and situation of the telling

• Between the realism of the frame and the fantasy of the tale itself

One of the most famous tales of the genre, “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1841) by Thomas Bangs Thorpe, illustrates some of these features. Its frontier narrator entertains a cabin full of travelers on their way down the Mississippi River with an increasingly outlandish hunting tale about a mythical bear who manages to elude him year after year.

From The Hive of “The Bee-Hunter,” A Repository of Sketches, Including Peculiar American Character, Scenery, and Rural Sports. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1854.

The frontiersman’s story is itself narrated by an unnamed traveler, whose language clearly marks him as educated but unfamiliar with frontier ways. Like the other travelers, he is naively tricked into listening to the outlandish tale until the anticlimactic ending—the bear gives up and dies simply because its time had come. While the narrator interprets the story as the simple superstition of frontier “children of the wood,” in fact it is the supposedly sophisticated travelers who are gullible enough to listen to the tale and then reward its teller with drinks. The joke is finally on them; the humor resides not in the tale but the telling of it; the powerful are shown to be foolish and the unsophisticated to be shrewd and powerful. In many ways, Southwestern humor reflects Romantic anxieties over the power of the individual and critiques the viability of pluralism as an American value.

Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–1862) and George Washington Harris (1814–1869) are arguably the best exemplars of the tradition of Southwestern humor. Hooper, a lawyer and newspaper editor, is today best known for his 1846 collection, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census,” and Other Alabama Sketches. Harris’s work ranges from playful sketches of rural Tennessee life to scathing political satire to the extravagant humor of his most enduring creation, the titular hero of Harris’s 1867 collection Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool”.

With their comic exaggerations, tall tales, rural dialects, and subversive challenges to authority by backwoods tricksters, the tales by Hooper and Harris have earned a minor, but firm, place in the history of American literature.

The tales of Hooper, like Harris a Southerner and secessionist, originated in topical criticism of recent political events, mostly from the Andrew Jackson presidency. But like Harris’s Sut Lovingood, Hooper’s Simon Suggs transcends the narrowly political to make a statement about the human condition. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1815, Hooper lived most of his life in Alabama; a lawyer and newspaper editor, he published his first humorous sketch in 1843. The tale was reprinted in William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times. In 1844, Hooper published the first of his Simon Suggs stories, and their popularity led to the collection Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs.

For the remainder of his career Hooper divided his time between writing, the law, and newspaper journalism. His later tales are collected in A Ride with Old Kit Kuncker (1849), enlarged as The Widow Rugby’s Husband (1851).

Simon Suggs is the ultimate political scammer who exposes fraud and hypocrisy while at the same time benefiting himself financially or socially. Among the most famous of the adventures are “Simon Becomes Captain” and “The Captain Attends a Camp-Meeting.” In the first, Suggs capitalizes on false rumors of an Indian insurgency to establish martial law and set himself up as head of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, a group of predatory scoundrels. (The frame narrator wryly comments that their nickname, “The Forty Thieves,” was inaccurate because they never numbered more than thirty-nine.)

Trading on the community’s gullibility and fear, Suggs is opposed by a cowardly skeptic named Yellow Legs (Suggs calls him a “durned, little, dirt-eatin’ deer-face”) and the belligerent Widow Haycock, who is mistakenly shot in a mock battle whose only other casualties are “a poney and a yoke of steers, haltered to their owner’s carts in the road.” In “The Captain Attends a Camp-Meeting,” Sugg dupes a local gathering of religious revivalists into donating money for the reform of pirates. Fools and hypocrites all, from the lecherous preacher to the pious slave owner, the crowd is an easy and deserving mark for Suggs, as is the Reverend Bela Bugg, a fraud himself. Amoral and conniving, the ultimate confidence man, Suggs takes as his motto, “It is good to be shifty in a new country.”

George Washington Harris was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on March 20, 1814, but spent most of his life in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was apprenticed in his brother’s jewelry-making business. He married in 1835, and during his lifetime he was variously employed as a steamboat captain, gentleman farmer, metalworker, surveyor, and businessman. After an apprenticeship as a contributor to local newspapers, in 1843 Harris published his first full-length story in the most important venue for the Southwestern humorists, Porter’s The Spirit of the Times.

Writing as “Mr. Free” and “Sugartail” (a local name for a jackass), Harris wrote sporadically for Porter’s magazine until 1854, when he wrote his final piece for Porter and the first to feature the backwoods rascal who would make Harris famous: “Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse.” With the plowing horse dead and planting time come, Dad decides to play the horse’s role to prompt the other family members to get to work, and he takes the acting too far. As Sut’s mother tells Dad, “Yu plays hoss better nur yu dus husban.”

Barging through a stand of sassafras, Dad upsets a hornets’ nest, strips off the horsehide disguise, and heads naked for the safety of the creek, kicking and squealing “jis es natral es yu ever seed any uther skeer’d hoss du” as the hornets swarm around him.

The tale, which opened the 1867 Yarns, introduces some of the signature features of the Lovingood collection: the powerful made powerless, the bestial nature of mankind, Sut’s tendency to perpetrate “skeers” as a way of asserting his place in society, and the citified outside narrator who frames Sut’s stories. In later yarns this narrator is called “George,” probably a thinly veiled persona for the author himself, and he is occasionally a character as well as a scene setter. In this story, his role is merely to prepare the reader for Sut’s entrance and provide a vivid description of Sut: “a queer looking, long legged, short bodied, small headed, white haired, hog eyed, funny sort of a genius.”

Two of Harris’s most often discussed Lovingood stories are “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards” and “Hen Baily’s Reformation.” In the first, Sut plots revenge on the minister who has humiliated him when he catches Sut in the huckleberry bushes with a young woman. Sut attends one of the parson’s camp meetings, pretending to be moved to conversion so he can sidle close to the stage; at the moment of the parson’s greatest triumph—the regeneration of the sinner—Sut stuffs lizards up Bullen’s pantlegs, tormenting him with a real-world equivalent of the devil’s serpents in Bullen’s sermon.

Bullen’s gyrations, the antics of the lizards, and the crowd’s prurient joy when the parson strips off his clothing and runs off in terror call forth some of Harris’s most breathless and lively prose. “Hen Baily’s Reformation” recounts another representative “skeer.” A secret drunkard, Hen mistakenly drinks turpentine and swallows a live lizard while quenching himself with a gourdful of water. In a bizarre “cure,” Sut and his cohorts stuff a mole up Baily’s pantleg—hoping, they claim, that Hen will mistake it for an escaping lizard. But the mole enters Hen through his anus, chasing the lizard out his mouth, and the terrified Baily afterward joins a temperance society, where he claims (“the cussed hippercrit!”) to have been avoiding liquor all along.

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. A major theme in Southwestern humor is the democratic reversal of power, seemingly a testimony to faith in the “common man.” The plots, however, are often racist and misogynistic. In what ways do the tales critique the evils of racism and misogyny, and in what ways do they reflect them? See Richard Boyd Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism (1971), for some of the political and social subversions of American humor.

2. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill in America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (1978) discuss “the most enduring American comic type: the homespun, unlettered, but shrewd man of common sense.” Does this description seem to fit the protagonists of the Southwestern humor tales? Consider how much of their humor turns on the reversal between those who are “unlettered, but shrewd” and those who are educated but gullible, and examine this put-down of education in the context of the rise of public school education in the United States.

3. As Jesse Bier points out in The Rise and Fall of American Humor (1968), common targets of Southwestern humor are pretension, complacency, and conformity. But the protagonists are themselves sometimes petty, cruel, and selfish. Are they examples of Romantic individualism and antisocialism, or are they merely eccentric?

4. While the Southwestern humor tradition seems to have died out after the American Civil War, its legacy clearly extends to works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In form and theme, how did the tradition of Southwestern humor influence later writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor?

5. Critical reception of the Southwestern humorists has always been divided between those like Edmund Wilson, who dismissed Harris’s tales as “crude and brutal” in his Patriotic Gore (1962), and those like Brom Weber, who praised them in his 1954 edition of Sut Lovingood for representing “traditional and wholesome values” like justice and protection of the weak. With reference to the stories, to the criticism, or to both, what are the arguments on both sides?

6. The boundary between historical fact and fiction is particularly permeable in Harris’s and Hooper’s work. Like much of the Southwestern humor tradition, it relies on exaggeration rather than imagination. Sut Lovingood’s tall tales are in the tradition of the David Crockett Almanacs, which retold and stretched the exploits of the real-life Crockett and the riverboat man Mike Fink. Some of Suggs’s military adventures are satiric reimaginings of episodes in the early career of Andrew Jackson, and the entire collection has been seen as a burlesque of nineteenth-century campaign biographies. How are historical events represented in the tales, and to what effect?

7. Students might investigate the ways in which Harris and Hooper influence later American writers. Mark Twain, whose brief review of the Lovingood Yarns commended the book’s humor but predicted—rightly—that Eastern readers “will find it coarse and possibly taboo it,” put the trickster figure to good use in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), particularly in the figures of the fraudulent King and Duke. Simon Suggs lives on in the scheming members of William Faulkner’s Snopes family and in the comic avengers who populate the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

Resources

Primary Works
George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Warped and Wove for Public Wear (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1867).
Johnson Jones Hooper, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census,” and Other Alabama Sketches (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1846).

Biography
W. Stanley Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper (University: University of Alabama Press, 1952).
The standard biography.
Milton Rickels, George Washington Harris (New York: Twayne, 1966).
An accurate biography combined with an analysis of the works.
Paul Somers, Johnson J. Hooper (Boston: Twayne, 1984).
Combines biography and criticism.

Criticism
Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).
Traces the history of American humor as antithetical to American values.
Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Part Two, “The Golden Age of American Humor,” examines exaggeration, antiintellectualism, and native speech in antebellum humor.
James E. Caron and Thomas M. Inge, eds., Sut Lovingood’s Nat’ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris (Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 1996).
Essays on a variety of perspectives; includes a useful bibliography of work on Harris.
M. Thomas Inge, The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1975).
Reprints twenty important essays on the Southwestern humorists, prefaced by a valuable introductory survey of the group. Excellent bibliography of criticism through the early 1970s.
M. Thomas Inge and Edward J. Piacentino, eds., The Humor of the Old South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001).
Essays exploring the influence of Harris and Hooper on later American writers and comic traditions.
Lawrence E. Mintz, ed., Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988).
Essays on a variety of approaches, including film, ethnic humor, and women’s humor; see especially the sections on literary humor and humor in periodicals for some contexts for Southwestern humorists.
Noel Polk, “The Blind Bull, Human Nature: Sut Lovingood and the Damned Human Race,” in Gyascutus: Studies in Antebellum Southern Humorous and Sporting Writing, edited by James L. W. West (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), pp. 13–49.
Johanna Nicol Shields, “A Sadder Simon Suggs: Freedom and Slavery in the Humor of Johnson Hooper,” in Humor of the Old South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 130–153.
Argues for Hooper’s political vision of “a new moral order in which good men must earn the right to organize a progressive society.”
Edmund Wilson, “Poisoned!” in his Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 507–519.
A generally unsympathetic view of the Southwestern humorists.

Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature

Tags: 19th century American literature, American folklore, American humor literature, American Romanticism, American satire, antebellum literature, backwoods humor, comic exaggeration, David Crockett Almanacs, dialect humor, early American magazines, framed tale narrative, frontier humor, frontier storytelling, George Washington Harris, humorous sketches, Johnson Jones Hooper, literary trickster figures, political satire, regionalism in American literature, rural dialect in literature, Simon Suggs, Southern literature, Southwestern humor, Spirit of the Times magazine, Sut Lovingood, tall tales, The Big Bear of Arkansas, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Walter Blair Native American Humor