The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2024

Each year, Studies in American Humor devotes this feature to surveying the scholarship on American humor published in the previous twelve months. The field, however, has expanded so widely that a straightforward inventory of “everything” now risks overwhelming both writer and reader. This abundance is good news for the study of humor, but it has also invited us to rethink how we present the year’s work. For this year’s review, we are experimenting with a more curated approach—something akin to the “staff picks” table at your local independent bookstore.Staff selections may reflect a timely theme, a quirky interest, or simply the pleasure of the read. Their purpose is not to represent the works as objectively the best or most essential but to offer a personal, curated glimpse into what caught one reader’s eye. We approached this year’s review in the same spirit. Just as staff picks do not display every worthy title in the store, our selections should not be mistaken for an exhaustive “best of” list. Instead, they highlight a handful of works that caught our attention, resonated with scholarly curiosities, or provoked fresh questions in our research. Like a bookseller’s handwritten recommendation card, our notes here reflect individual taste, disciplinary perspective, and the serendipity of discovery.We both read widely across the humor scholarship published in 2024, and this review gestures broadly to that larger body of scholarship, ensuring that the field’s breadth remains visible; citational practices and recognition remain important to the field’s vitality, after all. But we were also each drawn to certain works we wanted to feature more fully: pieces that lingered with us after reading, that we found ourselves describing to colleagues, or that provoked fresh questions in our own research and teaching. They are rooted in our own vantage points, curiosities, and delights and the interpretive choices that come with them. In short, this review balances breadth with depth: it acknowledges the remarkable range of current work while offering a curated glimpse—like that shelf at a neighborhood bookstore—into the pieces that sparked our enthusiasm this year. We have organized the work from 2024 into six thematic clusters to help readers identify essays most significant to their work: Mark Twain, literary humor, historical legacies of humor, identity and representation, humor’s interventions in politics and institutions, and genre.These are our “staff picks” from the shelves of 2024’s scholarship.Four 2024 publications stand out in the field of Twain studies, two of which are important new editions of Twain’s work that deserve close attention. Benjamin Griffin’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Manuscript and Revised Versions with “Those Extraordinary Twins,” part of the Mark Twain Project’s efforts to provide a complete set of comprehensive critical editions, is a stunning achievement. For the first time, a single volume contains the “Morgan manuscript” of Pudd’nhead, the “revised” version (published as a stand-alone text in 1894), and “Those Extraordinary Twins,” made up of what Twain pulled from the Morgan.Griffin’s introduction carefully takes readers through the texts’ “torturous” publication history (xvii). The volume features rich supplemental material: illustrations (including versions of Puddn’head’s calendar and advertisements for the book), thorough explanatory notes, and appendices that trace emendations and collate them with Twain’s original notes. Griffin discusses the revised version’s reception over time, providing essential background for understanding why this new edition matters. After all, the revised version is the most frequently read, taught, and studied. Now, he notes, readers who are “justifiably interested to read the famous suppressed text” will finally get their chance (598).Thomas J. Reigstad’s The Illustrated Mark Twain and the “Buffalo Express,” a smaller anthology of Twain’s writing, is both entertaining and valuable. Reigstad explains that the volume’s significance lies in how it draws attention to an understudied era in Twain studies—1869 to 1871—during which he not only wrote for the Express but also was co-owner and managing editor. These experiences shaped Twain’s writing, Reigstad argues, particularly his humorous works. The volume comprises ten pieces from this period, including Twain’s articles on Niagara Falls and Prince Arthur’s 1869 visit to the area, along with his “Last Words of Great Men,” and “To Raise Poultry,” an especially entertaining read.The volume’s immediate draw, though, is Reigstad’s careful curation of the illustrations created over the last 150 years to accompany Twain’s writing. Illustrations contemporary to the pieces’ original publications include a number by Twain himself as well as by John Harrison Mills and True Williams, Twain’s “favorite . . . illustrator” (xiv). The volume also reproduces the images that Tom Toles created in 1978 for the reprinting of Twain’s pieces by the Buffalo Courier-Express Sunday Magazine and Bill Watterson’s 1983 drawings for the Mark Twain Journal and features drawings by Adam Zyglis commissioned specifically for the anthology. This collected artwork invites us to think anew about the relationship between author and illustrator, written text and image.Another 2024 anthology of Twain’s works, R. Kent Rasmussen’s Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre and Mysterious, stands in an uncomfortable relationship to Reigstad’s when it comes to illustration. Combining excerpts from texts like Life on the Mississippi with, for instance, a burlesque from Christian Science, Rasmussen has created what he calls “a fun book” that also calls attention to some of Twain’s “least known and unjustly overlooked writings” (xi). Yet his decision to use a generative artificial intelligence program to create the only illustrations in the book seems ill advised, especially when one compares them to the illustrations in the Buffalo Express anthology. Zyglis’s new drawings have real life and energy and are far more powerful than the off-putting and uncanny AI images in Rasmussen’s collection.Bruce Michelson addresses the topic of Twain studies and AI in “Mark Twain’s Legacies in the Dawn of Gen AI,” combining a close reading of Twain’s work with an account of the historical and biographical contexts out of which they emerged. Much more than just an attempt to answer the question of what Twain would think of the is a on what life and Twain’s work us about the of In an so are to out to through Twain, us think about what is at when we do that to us is not a of so as a of We who we we and our own by for the and the we are not just but and how both Twain’s texts and critical about them our attention to of to of and their own of works like in and he the of . . . 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