A Laughable Empire: The US Imagines the Pacific World, 1840–1890 9780271096629

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A LAUGHABLE EMPIRE

Humor in America Edited by Judith Yaross Lee, Ohio University Tracy Wuster, The University of Texas at Austin Advisory Board Darryl Dickson-Carr, Southern Methodist University Joanne Gilbert, Alma College Rebecca Krefting, Skidmore College Bruce Michelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nicholas Sammond, University of Toronto The Humor in America series considers humor as an expressive mode reflecting key concerns of people in specific times and places. With interdisciplinary research, historical and transnational approaches, and comparative scholarship that carefully examines contexts such as race, gender, class, sexuality, region, and media environments, books in the series explore how comic expression both responds to and shapes American culture.

A LAUGHABLE EMPIRE The US Imagines the Pacific World, 1840–1890

Todd Nathan Thompson

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thompson, Todd Nathan, author. Title: A laughable empire : the US imagines the Pacific world, 1840–1890 / Todd Nathan Thompson. Other titles: Humor in America. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Series: Humor in America | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores humor and satire as a comic contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world from 1840 to 1890. Considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022061475 | ISBN 9780271095042 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: American wit and humor—19th century—History and criticism. | Satire, American—19th century—History and criticism. | Pacific Islanders—Humor—History—19th century. | Pacific Islanders in literature. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. | Imperialism in literature. | Islands of the Pacific—Humor—History— 19th century. | Islands of the Pacific—In literature Classification: LCC PS437 .T46 2023 | DDC 817/.409—dc23/eng/20230208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061475 Copyright © 2023 Todd Nathan Thompson All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48-1992.

For Sara Stewart: national treasure / my person

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 1. The Backwoodsman Abroad: The Pacific Imperialism of Nineteenth-Century American Humor  25 2. Comic Currents: Polynesians in Periodicals  62 3. “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”: The Politics of Boiled Missionaries  97 4. Collecting the Pacific: A Cabinet of Comic Curios  127 5. “Didn’t Our People Laugh?” Humor as Resistance  161 Conclusion  185

Appendix: Detailed Information on Reprinted Jokes  191

Notes  197 Bibliography  211 Index  223

Illustrations 1.

“The Order at the Bar”  5

2. “Van Demon’s Land”  31 3. “King of the Cannibal Islands”  32 4. Back cover of Fisher’s Comic Almanac 1841  33 5. “Crockett Among the Cannibals”  38 6. “John Tabor’s Ride”  41 7.

“Battle Between Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda”  43

8. Burton, “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids”  47

9. “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands; or, Young American Diplomacy”  52 10. Wharton, “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal”  109 11. “Percentage of Illiteracy Small”  123 12. Page 1 of New York Arcadian, December 24, 1874  152 13. Cover of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, December 5, 1874  153

Acknowledgments I researched and wrote this book largely in stolen moments throughout 2016–2022, during which time personal, familial, professional, national, and global traumas stacked up like a wobbly Jenga tower. I could not have kept up the work without help, support, and encouragement from too many people to list here, so I will just name a few and hope that the rest of you know how grateful I am for everything. First, I offer thanks to the Kānaka Maoli and all other Indigenous Pacific Islanders for their enduring strength and humor, both of which I hope that this book represents and celebrates. I would also like to thank the staff at Penn State University Press, especially Ryan Peterson, Josie DiNovo, and Andrew Katz, for their valuable suggestions, support, and patience from start to finish. Judith Yaross Lee and Tracy Wuster, editors of the Humor in America series, have been enthusiastic in their encouragement and wise in their council. Many, many thanks, as ever, to the entire staff at the American Antiquarian Society, my lit-nerd-Xanadu where I completed archival research in 2017 as a Peterson Fellow. I am also grateful to the Center for Mark Twain Studies (especially Joseph Lemak and Matt Seybold), which has been supportive and collegial for several years, granting me a Quarry Farm Fellowship in 2019 that gave me time and beautiful space to develop my work on Twain and twice inviting me to deliver lectures on Twain and the Pacific as part of the “Trouble Begins” series in Elmira, New York. I am thankful to my colleagues and students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, particularly students in my graduate and undergraduate courses on nineteenth-century humor, on satire, and on the Pacific turn in American studies. IUP’s former College of Humanities and Social Sciences awarded me special projects funding that allowed me to complete research in archives in Honolulu. The Department of English and the University Senate Research Award Committee funded travel to present early drafts of this work at several conferences, where I received valuable feedback and advice. Graduate assistants Kaitlin

Tonti, Jed Fetterman, Aaron Heinrich, Brandi Billotte, Shirley Petropoulos, and especially Carl Sell conducted extensive research for this project to the extent that they probably never want to see another cannibal-​ and-boiled-missionary joke again; I appreciate their hard work. IUP alumnus Jessica Zabinsky codeveloped the methodologies I use here for comparative contextual readings of periodical reprints and has been a wonderful scholarly cowriter, editor, and friend. Special thanks to all the participants in the 2018 and 2022 Pacific seminars at the C-19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conferences, who have helped to shape my thinking on the Pacific and its peoples. In the American Humor Studies Association and its journal, Studies in American Humor, I have been warmly welcomed into what I now consider my scholarly home. In addition to the aforementioned Tracy Wuster, I am particularly obliged to James Caron and Larry Howe for their invaluable mentorship. I also owe lasting debts to Robin Sandra Grey and David Downing for mentoring me and supporting my academic endeavors over many years. Finally, thanks to my family and friends for putting up with me, attempting to assuage my anxiety, listening to me kvetch about the work, and pretending to enjoy hearing newspaper jokes from the nineteenth century: my mom, dad, brother, and their partners; my whole familyin-law; Garrett and Madeleine; Tony and Melinda; Nate, Simeon, and Jim; and many, many more. And, of course, the biggest thanks of all go to my wife-partner, Sara Stewart, who wrote alongside me at Quarry Farm, who patiently read multiple versions of the manuscript, who celebrated and mourned all the ups and downs of the past six years with me, who makes me laugh out loud every day, who makes me get some sleep when I am overworked, who showed colossal bravery and never lost her sense of humor even in the dregs of chemotherapy, and whose pride in me taught me to be proud of myself. May we amble the woods together eternally. Portions of the introduction and chapter  1 are excerpted with permission from “Form: An Empire of Jokes in the American Age of Expansion,” in A Cultural History of Comedy in Age of Empire, edited by Matthew Kaiser (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 19–42. Portions of the introduction and chapter 2 are excerpted with permission from “Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting,” Studies in American Humor, ser. 4, vol. 7, no. 1 (2021): 61–85. xii  Acknowledgments

Introduction

1880s Haole Satire and Political Insurrection

The copy of Sanford Bradford Dole’s sixteen-page satirical play Vacuum: A Farce in Three Acts (1885) that I read at the University of Hawai‘i– Manoa’s special collections includes a handwritten note identifying the real-life referents of the play’s characters. Most important of these are “Skyhigh—Emperor of the Coral Reefs and Sand Banks of the Big Blue Sea,” a stand-in for Hawaiian King David Kalākaua, and “Palaver,” leader of the emperor’s advisers, a fictionalized version of the notorious government minister Walter Murray Gibson. The emperor’s other advisers are dubbed “Their Extravagancies the Incompotents.” The play mocks the supposed ineptitude of Kalākaua’s government and especially his ministers. Indeed, the Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu) described the pamphlet as “a political sketch. The characters are evidently representing the ministry and their surroundings. The gold law and the government party are happily satirized.”1 In the first act, they all respond idiotically to a fire in Honolulu, in part by instructing the fire company to blow air onto it; this is particularly damning because Kalākaua had, in his younger years, been a firefighter. In the second act, Emperor Skyhigh learns from “Their Extravagancies the Incompotents” that the Hawaiian treasury is out of gold, an incident satirizing a controversy over recently produced Hawaiian silver coins. In the third act, the Incompotents rack their collective brains to come up with some new policy, any new policy. Palaver/Gibson proposes the policy of “keeping in office” and supports

it with a sleazy, self-revealing monologue about his schemes to gain power. He soliloquizes, in part: At last my hopes are realized; the toil and the disappointments by the way are past; I have reached the goal of my ambition; I have power, and with that I care not for friendship nor the confidence of men, for I have that with which to compel their obedience or their submission. I am the real ruler; our Emperor over there thinks that he is sovereign and that I am his devoted servant, but he is mistaken without knowing it, and he will never find it out; as long as he is humoured with money, state ceremony, salutes, flags, royal orders, and other fol de rol, he is happy and imagines he is governing the empire. The other Incompotents respond enthusiastically to this monologue, one through snippets of Brutus’s speech from Julius Caesar, but the play abruptly ends shortly after they receive a letter from Emperor Skyhigh that they have been dismissed.2 Less than two years later, this satire’s author would help to make his play’s fantasy of the cabinet’s dismissal come to pass. In 1887, Dole, whose cousin James Dole founded the pineapple company that would later become Dole Food Company, drafted what came to be known as the Bayonet Constitution, which was forced on King Kalākaua and required the dismissal of Gibson and other ministers. A few years later, during an 1893 coup that overthrew the kingdom entirely, Dole helped to draft the accompanying declaration and was named president of the Provisional Government of Hawai‘i. A year later, he became the president of the Republic of Hawai‘i, which ran the country until it was annexed by the United States in 1898. Most political histories of Hawai‘i feature Dole but do not mention this satirically self-​fulfilling prophecy delivered through farce. Studying the play alongside the subsequent uprisings in Hawai‘i adds nuance to historical study of this tumultuous time period. Vacuum: A Farce in Three Acts was one of three emblematic pieces of popular print satire—besides this dramatic farce, there was also a burlesque operetta and a set of mocking ballads—about politics in Hawai‘i that appeared in print between 1885 and 1887, just before a group of haoles (foreigners) forced Hawaiian King David Kalākaua to accept a new constitution and dismiss his head minister. Together, these 2  A Laughable Empire

works of humor reflect and comment on the volatile political environment in the decade-plus preceding the United States’ 1898 annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, a period in which multiple factions representing diverse international interests vied for political ascendancy on the islands. These satires demonstrate the surprisingly key roles that humor and satire played in perceptions of and debates about US presence in the Pacific world during the nineteenth century. Reconstructing debates through readings of satires written and circulated in Hawai‘i during this time helps contextualize the crisis of authority there in the 1880s. Though all three pieces mock Hawaiian King David Kalākaua and his adviser Walter Murray Gibson, their multidirectional attacks—on Hawaiian monarchs, American ministers, British meddlers, and missionaries’ descendants—also use humor to rail against other competing power centers’ interference in Hawaiian politics and social life while justifying their authors’ own interference in these realms. Another of these satires, The Grand Duke of Gynbergdrinkenstein: A Burlesque in Three Acts, Respectfully Dedicated to the Public of Duchy, is a versified Hawaiian parody of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. Soon after its publication in 1886, the Hawaiian Gazette described the pamphlet as revealing “how utterly absurd the affairs of this kingdom are.”3 Like Vacuum, Gynbergdrinkenstein satirizes King Kalākaua (here known as the Grand Duke of Gynbergdrinkenstein) and his cabinet, especially Gibson (here known as Nosbig), as a gallery of rogues. And like Vacuum, it fantasizes a scenario that its authors would later help to enact. In the burlesque, the Duke, Nosbig, and other government ministers plot to commit graft from the public treasury even after being warned by Herr Von Boss—a stand-in for Claus Spreckels, Hawai‘i’s hugely influential sugar baron—to be more thrifty. They sing, for instance, a song set to the tune of “Jingle Bells” and called “Jingle-Em,” which begins, “Dashing at expense, like a one horse little State,” and whose chorus is: Jingle ’em, jingle ’em, jingle all the day, It’s nice to spend the public cash in a free and easy way. Jingle ’em, jingle ’em, jingle all the day, Never mind the piper or the man who has to pay. The end of the musical offers a reverie of the administration’s demise, as the pilfering of the Duke and his ministers is discovered, and they Introduction  3

abscond quickly. The Grand Duke sings on the last page, “The Opposition braced right up, we didn’t stay to fight.”4 Authorship of both Gynbergdrinkenstein and the Gynberg Ballads, a satire that I discuss shortly, has been ascribed to either one or both of two people: Alatau T. Atkinson, a Kazakh emigrant via Britain and the Hawaiian Gazette’s editor, later the general inspector of schools, and/or Edward William Purvis, a British émigré who served as the vice-chamberlain of the royal household until he resigned in August 1886. In 1887, Atkinson would join Dole in the opposition as founding member of the Hawaiian League, a secret organization formed soon after the publication of Gynbergdrinkenstein that would, with the help of the Honolulu Rifles, force the Bayonet Constitution on Kalākaua. A sequel to Gynbergdrinkenstein, titled The Gynberg Ballads, was published in San Francisco before being distributed in Honolulu in May 1887. Unlike the two dramatic farces, this illustrated pamphlet eschews narrative in favor of eight separate ballads, each treating a folly of the Kalākaua administration, including a scandal about the distribution of opium licenses and a misguided attempt to make Hawai‘i an imperial power by creating and sending a one-boat navy to protect Samoa. Several of the ballads, like Vacuum and Gynbergdrinkenstein, mock Kalākaua’s alleged weakness for gin, a charge elsewhere leveled at Kalākaua in the sobriquet “The Merry Monarch.” The image accompanying one of these ballads, “The Order at the Bar” (fig. 1), puns on “bar” as both a legal term and a site for drinking. In it, bottles of champagne, wine, and gin fill the shelves, while Kalākaua stands next to a giant decanter of gin and uses a huge wine-bottle opener as a staff. Kalākaua is dressed in a loin cloth decorated with a graven image of himself, presumably a caricature of his image on newly printed Hawaiian currency. In The Gynberg Ballads, Gibson, once again called “Nosbig,” is similarly dismissed as a “rascal of the deepest dye—unmitigated fraud!” Also echoing Vacuum and Gynbergdrinkenstein is The Gynberg Ballads’ foretelling of the administration’s, and especially Gibson’s, downfall. One ballad warns Nosbig, “Already you have lost your hold, fast waning is your star, / Go—clothed in nature’s meanest garb—a human ‘pariah.’ ”5 This pamphlet was immediately popular, despite the fact that copies arriving from San Francisco were briefly held in customs in an attempt to stop their circulation. Atkinson’s Hawaiian Gazette wrote in late May

4  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 1  “The Order at the Bar,” from Alatau T. Atkinson and Edward William Purvis, The Gynberg Ballads (San Francisco, 1887). Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

1887, “The ‘Gynberg Ballads’ have gone off like hot cakes. Nearly every one not feeling right till he had a copy in his possession, and then retired to a quiet nook to have a good read and a hearty laugh over the subject matter and the ‘quaint’ cuts with which the work is embellished.”6 Given this report of the ballads’ widespread readership and the timing of their publication—about a month before the Hawaiian League and Honolulu Rifles forced the Bayonet Constitution on Kalākaua on June 30, 1887— this pamphlet may have helped sway public opinion in Honolulu against the administration and in favor of the so-called reformers, though it is impossible to measure or prove such influence.

Introduction  5

Despite the wide circulation of these satires as well as the political prominence of their authors, most histories of Hawai‘i ignore them or, at best, only mention them in passing as they narrate the swirl of political crises in the kingdom in the mid- to late 1880s. For instance, Ralph S. Kuykendall’s mammoth, three-volume The Hawaiian Kingdom (the third volume, on the Kalākaua Dynasty, itself weighs in at over 750 pages) does mention all three satires but only in four paragraphs over a page and a half. Kuykendall concludes only that “the obvious purpose of all this propaganda was to convince the public that the administration of the kingdom was not only corrupt and unworthy of trust, but also ridiculous.”7 This assessment is, of course, true, though Kuykendall has come under fire for ignoring not only Hawaiian-language sources but also, largely, Native Hawaiians in his tome.8 Indeed, in recovering and studying these works, their authorship and context of production, and their circulations, we could do much more; that is, we could use satire to track public opinion on the Hawaiian Kingdom while underlining the centrality of humor and satire to serious political discussions in late-nineteenth-century Hawai‘i. There are larger, methodological stakes for humor scholars here as well. These related satires reveal the importance of using print archives to study humor and satire as a way to track the circulation of political debates during heated historical moments that fostered a surfeit of satiric output, leaving notable traces in the archival record. Bob Nicholson, a historian of Victorian England, reminds us why we should be looking for and at long-lost humor in the first place. He writes that, because jokes traffic in references that their audiences are “expected to recognize,” “even the briefest of one-liners are often encoded with the attitudes, knowledge, and experiences of their intended audiences.” Analyzing jokes, Nicholson concludes, allows scholars to more fully “access the minds” of their audiences.9 As Nicholson implies here, we can, and must, lean on history in order to help us get the joke. But, just as important, studying humor that is gathering dust in archives can help us to reconstruct better cultural histories, especially those involving political quarrels carried out through humor and satire. Putting the works of humor and satire that we find in archives into conversation with each other enriches the study of complex historical moments. This is the project of A Laughable Empire, which attempts to make sense of the significant archival footprint left by nineteenth-century American humor about not just Hawai‘i but the entire Pacific world. 6  A Laughable Empire

Comedy as Contact

In the essay “American Humor and Matters of Empire: A Proposal and Invitation,” Judith Yaross Lee issues a call for humor scholars to consider the complex relationships between American humor and “matters of empire” through transnational approaches that counter and “expose the nationalist bias behind the genteel-vernacular binary that has framed American humor studies since 1925.” For Lee, considering American humor and US imperialism together can teach us more about both. “Understanding the vernacular tradition in the context of imperialism,” she writes, “not only highlights the deep cultural significance of the comic conventions themselves . . . but also suggests a larger schema of imperial relationships.”10 In RSVPing to Lee’s invitation, A Laughable Empire considers both the comedy of contact and, for the vast majority of Americans who never traveled to and through the Pacific but gobbled up humorous accounts of it in print, comedy as contact. Surfacing the surprisingly globalist elements inherent in nineteenth-century notions of US identity helps to undercut notions of US exceptionalism that still persist into what has been dubbed the “Pacific Century.” Along the way, I offer historicized and theoretical insights into the social mechanics of widely circulating humor in the nineteenth-​ century United States. An article titled “Immortality of Jokes,” which the English-language newspaper the Honolulu Polynesian reprinted in July 1854 from the Portland (ME) Transcript, gushed about the power and “ubiquity of jokes”: “They are as universal as John Smith and a great deal more popular. The same joke that moves to cachination the lantern jaws of the Yankee, has also tickled the bluff Englishmen, delighted the sprightly Frenchman, moved to mirth the phlegmatic German, and softened the sombre Spaniard. Oh, a glorious ‘institution’ is a joke. Jokes must be immortal. We’ll ask the spirits!”11 Though the article is probably a bit too sanguine (or ethnocentric) in its assumptions about the universal appeal of a particular sense of humor, its excitement about the “immortality of jokes” reflects nineteenth-century assumptions about the ability of humor to unify across national and cultural divides. As the article points out, jokes and other forms of humor tend to get repeated across different eras, ethnic groups, belief systems, and nations. Studying humor with attention to both form and specific historical context(s) can reveal how it works over and across time either to connect people through shared laughter or to separate them through us/them othering. Introduction  7

Take, for instance, a rather pedestrian joke in Mark Twain’s 1880 travelogue A Tramp Abroad. Twain writes, “Foreigners can’t enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bills of fare until I was tired; but after all, a Scotchman would shake his head and say, ‘Where’s your haggis?’ and the Fijian would sigh and say, ‘Where’s your missionary?’ ”12 This joke certainly reproduces the stereotype, which I analyze in detail in chapter 3, of the Pacific Islander cannibal devouring a well-​meaning missionary. But there is also a cultural relativism and cross-cultural identification at work here that undoes, or at least undercuts, the work of the othering stereotype. The doubleness of humor allows its practitioners to signify on stereotypes in ways that force its readers and auditors to consider connections or parallels across cultures, making the familiar seem foreign and the foreign familiar. If stereotypes are, as Homi Bhabha argues, “a major discursive strategy” of colonial rhetoric, jokes can also render stereotypes patently ridiculous, or at least culturally relative.13 By mashing together seemingly incongruous cultural signifiers, jokes like this are contact zones, as defined by Mary Louis Pratt in Imperial Eyes, where she uses the term to describe spaces of “imperial encounters” in which “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” “Contact,” for Pratt, involves not just domination but also “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by accounts of conquest and domination told from the invader’s perspective.” Contact zones are chaotic, often violent, and feature unequal power relations, but all parties are indelibly changed through the exchange. In focusing on contact, Pratt advises, scholars should consider exchanges between travelers/colonizers and the colonized “not in terms of separateness” but rather “in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”14 In researching this project, I have found time and again (admittedly, because I was looking for it) the inextricability of comedy and contact. When alien cultures come together and regard each other, for the first time or in subsequent meetings, each side looks at the other through the time-honored lens of its own ethnocentrism and epistemological assumptions. And when we judge other cultures on the basis of our own dress, speech, and customs, they can seem hilarious. In Herman 8  A Laughable Empire

Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Queequeg puts his luggage in a wheelbarrow and then lifts and carries the wheelbarrow; when laughed at for his misunderstanding, he tells a story about a white sea captain unwittingly using an awa calabash as a finger bowl at a banquet on his home island.15 Similarly, Captain Cook wrote in his journal about a play that Tahitians put on for Cook and his crew; he was not sure what was happening in the play, but he was pretty sure that it was making fun of him.16 (I revisit both of these examples in more detail in chapter 5.) Such shifting perspectives and social relations, especially between sides with an imbalance of power, are apparent not only in physical contact zones but also in the mechanics of humor. Immanuel Kant writes in Critique of Judgment (1790), “Humour in the good sense means the talent of being able voluntarily to put oneself at a certain mental disposition, in which everything is judged quite differently from the ordinary method (reversed, in fact).”17 Other scholars have emphasized how humor forces us to see people and situations in a new light. In Coyote at Large, a study of humor in US nature writing, Katrina Schimmoeller Peiffer sees perspective shifting as an essential element of humor. As Peiffer describes the perspective-shifting process, “Humor jogs us to step partly away from ourselves in order to see our situation clearly” and “enables us to escape habits of perception that condition our responses and reduce our flexibility.” Peiffer extolls humor’s ability to force us to temporarily inhabit “the view of the outsider” while retaining our “customary” identities and perspectives. This shift does not just “unsettle our previously held perspective” but can also “clarify it,” because “humor allows us to become an outsider to ourselves.”18 Umberto Eco, in his essay “The Comic and the Rule,” similarly describes the psychological process of humor engendering a perspective shift that leads to identification with instead of estrangement from the other. He points to moments in humor in which he “no longer feel[s] superior” to the butt of the joke but, on the contrary, “begin[s] to identify with him”: “I suffer his drama, and my laugh is transformed into a smile.”19 Because such identification can be used either to justify violence or to facilitate mutual understanding, whether humorous perspective shifting actually results in any concrete social change is an open question. Some humor theorists, like Elliot Oring, cite humor’s “fundamental” ambiguity as the reason that, though humor certainly conveys social messages, precisely what those messages are, and whether their intention is ultimately serious, is less clear.20 Divining the sociopolitical intent Introduction  9

of some pieces of humor is probably impossible. But by contextualizing the historical moment and publication contexts in which a particular piece of humor was consumed by its audience, humor scholars can at least make educated guesses about that humor’s impacts on the attitudes of its contemporary audiences. In the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and bon mots about Pacific islands and Pacific Islanders attempted to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or, on the contrary, completely other and unassimilable to American readers. They were used to justify as well as to critique US and European Pacific imperialism, colonialism, and missionary efforts. A Laughable Empire characterizes humor and satire as a comic contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world, demonstrating how jokes and other humor functioned sometimes in the service of and sometimes in resistance to the United States’ pre-1900 imperial ambitions. I consider how nineteenth-​ century Americans and Pacific Islanders alike used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them, to other the unknown or to interrogate, laughingly, the process by which othering occurs and is disseminated. In a humorous cultural exchange, the ensuing chapters argue, some humorists mapped familiar American traits onto Pacific Islanders, whereas Pacific Islanders laughed at foreigners whose acts and appearance were at odds with their own epistemologies. Viral Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting

The newspaper squib “Immortality of Jokes,” discussed earlier, celebrates not just the “immortality” of humor but also the power of the press as a medium for that immortality: Somebody, we believe it was Colesworthy—once said, “a printed thought never dies.” If he had said a joke, printed or unprinted, never dies, he would have come nearer the mark. A joke is the most vital of all earthly things. Not only does it never die, it never grows old, or rather it is ever renewing its youth. Here, for instance, in the first paper at hand, is the joke about Jona’s [sic] feeling rather down in the mouth while in the whale’s belly, which we laughed over in our boyhood. Regularly, every year or two, it comes up again fresh, and good as new. There is just as much laugh in it as ever. So the joke of two Irishmen who reckoned they had ten miles to go, it was just five 10  A Laughable Empire

miles apiece, is as old as the poles, but comes round to us yearly as jolly as ever. Thus jokes go the rounds of newspapers, get revamped and rejuvenated, and flourish in immortal youth!21 Instead of bemoaning the fact that a particular joke reappears “every year or two” as it makes “the rounds of newspapers,” “Immortality of Jokes” celebrates that repetition. The article’s author reasons that, each time jokes are reprinted, they are “fresh, and good as new” because, through their updated publication contexts in newspapers, they “get revamped and rejuvenated.” Two decades earlier, another newspaper (again excerpting a different newspaper) delighted in the evolution and “newness” of reprinted material as it circulated over time and space. In March 1831, the Rutland (VT) Herald, quoting the New York Commercial Advertiser, claims, “It is amusing to watch the progress of newspaper articles, and light stories, as they travel the grand rounds, and the changes of attire which they from time to time assume as they once in some half a dozen years or oftener start forth anew before the public, and travel the whole newspaper circle, with as bold a swagger as tho’ they had never been seen before.”22 Apparent in both these accounts is a probably self-serving—given editors’ penchants for reprinting material gleaned from other sources—but boisterous joy regarding the continued vivacity of material, especially “jokes” and “light stories,” as they appear and reappear, “as jolly as ever,” “with as bold a swagger as tho’ they had never been seen before.” A Laughable Empire, particularly in chapters 2 and 3, utilizes a unique methodology of comparative, contextualized readings of reprinted jokes and humorous excerpts to explore the swaggering, “jolly” reappearances of humorous, mid-nineteenth-​ century US treatments of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders. Nineteenth-century Americans were addicted to newspapers and magazines, which circulated widely and cheaply throughout the nation. But so were many Pacific Islanders. Just as European visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville described the “immense” sway of newspapers over Americans, Native Hawaiians, too, were known as “poe pui nupepa”—“a people who craved newspapers.”23 Midcentury US postal laws allowed for the free exchange of newspapers between editors, and newspapers could be mailed anywhere in the country at a maximum postal rate (which had been set in 1792) of one and a half cents, free if delivered within thirty miles of where the newspaper was published.24 News accounted for approximately 95 percent of the total weight of US mail Introduction  11

by the 1830s, by one estimate.25 Such statistics demonstrate the massive circulation of news throughout the nineteenth-century United States, creating what Meredith McGill has labeled the “culture of reprinting,” wherein the content of newspapers was largely culled from other newspapers.26 But only in recent years have scholars begun to examine literature and entertainment in periodicals with special attention to their circulation. This new scholarship shows that “circulation itself was an essential, organizing technology that mediated experiences of textual production and reception,” which in turn leads to new understandings of nineteenth-century US literature and culture.27 Of course, periodicals did not just house news, opinion pieces, and poetry; they also abounded in humor. The 1870s saw a “tremendous expansion” in humor appearing “across the entire range of newspaper and magazine publishing,” featuring cracker-box philosophers like David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby), Mortimer Thomson (Doesticks), Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings), Robert Henry Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr), and Edgar Wilson Nye (Bill Nye), many of whom relied on dialect and cacography for their humor.28 But character-driven comic sketches had been finding homes in newspapers since the 1830s with the advent of Seba Smith’s Jack Downing and continuing with pseudonymous creations like Frances Whitcher’s Widow Bedot, Sarah Payson Willis Parton’s Fanny Fern, and Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber’s Mrs. Partington. Walter Blair has situated newspapers as a midcentury medium for comic circulation that carried “humorous material into every part of the nation,” often through humor writers on newspapers’ staffs.29 In addition to the comic character sketches of such literary comedians, nineteenth-century newspapers ran regular columns of humorous miscellany featuring circulating jokes, anecdotes, and excerpts from mostly anonymous sources in addition to well-known comic lecturers. Jokes and bon mots provided filler in newspaper columns, constituted regular “Wit and Humor” sections, or commented pithily on adjacent news items. Such comic ephemera were very often reprinted by editors, a form of journalism often referred to as “scissors-and-paste journalism.” Ryan Cordell lists “regional humor” as one of the “prominent threads” of reprinted material identified by the Viral Texts Project’s algorithm.30 Newspaper accounts of comic lectures delivered by comedians initially made famous through their newspaper and periodical humor, such as Mark Twain, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Artemus Ward, also demonstrate

12  A Laughable Empire

the self-perpetuating circulation at work among the various comic genres discussed throughout this book. Tracing reprints of comic material in periodicals unearths popular nineteenth-century American humor and reveals the populace’s contemporary fascinations and fears through the jokes it read and recycled. In addition, focusing on reprinted humor enables us to identify comic material that mattered most to nineteenth-century Americans, not just what has passed the test of time. Such attention suggests a marked shift away from humor study’s usual focus (to which I plead guilty in some parts of this book) on now-canonical humorists. Partly due to a continued investment in the concept of authorship, most humor scholars have paid more attention to sketches attributable to well-known comic authors such as Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain), James Russell Lowell (as Hosea Biglow), Sarah Payson Willis Parton (as Fanny Fern), and David Ross Locke (as Petroleum V. Nasby) than to the print circulation of anonymous jokes and sketches. This commitment to the author function has led critics to value the sustained productions of individual humorists over the quick and scattershot dissemination of jokes and bon mots. The omnipresence of such humor in all formats, however, implies that nineteenth-​ century readers did not share these prejudices in their laughter. Throughout this book, especially in chapter 2, I seek to reverse that bias by focusing largely on ephemeral, “network authored” humor appearing and reappearing across multiple, cheap media. Such a shift in emphasis is made possible by increased access to digital archives of periodicals as well as by recent scholarship in periodical studies urging the reconsideration of “viral texts” that circulated widely in nineteenth-​century print.31 As Nicholson has pointed out, newspaper jokes and other ephemera were not nearly as ephemeral as we might think. Whereas political and financial news, he writes, “depreciated by the hour,” jokes and other more timeless content in newspapers “enjoyed a remarkably long lifespan. Many of them circulated for decades.”32 In studying jokes, we study the circulation and prominence of ideas and attitudes; by reconstructing their referents, we reconstruct, according to Nicholson, the “characters, situations, and attitudes that millions of readers were expected to recognize in order to ‘get’ the joke.” Analysis of humor offers insights into how people and politics were received and conceived of by everyday readers, who, Nicholson notes, tend to be “under-represented in the historical record.”33

Introduction  13

The Pacific World in the US Imagination: Methodologies and Motives

For Euro-American travelers and readers since the 1700s, the Pacific was simultaneously completely other, both geographically and culturally, and, because it offered key ports and stop-offs in burgeoning global trade and Enlightenment exploration, increasingly familiar. Pacific islands were inaccessible but also constantly visited and written about; for Europeans and, by the nineteenth century, Americans, these islands were at the ends of the Earth but in the middle of everything. In 1513, the Spanish explorer Balboa crossed the Panama isthmus and dubbed the ocean he found on the other side the “Sur de Mar.” A few years later, Magellan came up with the name “Pacific.” For nineteenth-century Americans, the term “South Seas” usually meant the South Pacific Ocean with its myriad islands, but it was sometimes a stand-in for the entire Pacific Ocean, including Pacific Rim countries, as well. This book follows Matt K. Matsuda’s “Oceanic approach” to Pacific history, concentrating less on the Pacific Rim economic powers of Japan, China, Korea, and the Americas and more on the historical imagination of and about “small islands, large seas, and multiple transits.”34 Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated with this island world, imbibing travel narratives, missionary accounts, and fiction that offered alluring portrayals of Pacific islands and their peoples. Paul Lyons has noted the pervasiveness of portrayals of Pacific Islanders in nineteenth-century US culture. A list that Lyons provides shows just how fully the imagined Pacific permeated US literature and culture in the 1800s. Serious and comic representations of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders appeared in “newspaper items, trade and consular reports, magazine articles, missionary and explorer narratives, paintings, plays, poems, material artifacts in museum exhibitions from the Smithsonian to Barnum’s hooplaed Fiji cannibals, scientific and pseudo-scientific monographs, photographs (Barnum’s ‘cannibals’ posed for photographer Matthew Brady in 1872), sensational pamphlet novels, popular lectures by authors such as Herman Melville or Mark Twain, and ballads, such as the enormously popular ‘King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands.’ ”35 Americans’ fascination with the Pacific peaked in the middle decades of the century, especially in the years immediately after the US-​Mexico War and after the Civil War, when US fantasies of westward expansion, annexation, and filibustering came to include Hawai‘i and other 14  A Laughable Empire

Pacific islands. Edward Sugden has detailed how, beginning around 1848, Americans began to view the Pacific world “through the lens of ” Manifest Destiny, assuming as inevitable “the colonization of the Pacific by US forces, and the subsequent establishment of their own nationstate there.” Sugden coins the phrase “the Pacific 1848” as a historical marker of the moment that the Pacific Ocean became a relatively stable, US-dominated “cultural system” that emerged from the confluence of several circumstances, including US expansion to the West Coast, US imperial ambitions, the rise of San Francisco as a global port, and a gold rush in California. This new geopolitical dynamic became apparent in several, sometimes interrelated, international events that took place in the 1840s and 1850s: the end of the first Opium War in China in 1842, which opened up China to British trade; the 1847 Tahitian War of independence, which led to French colonial rule there; the 1848 Māhele in Hawai‘i, which imposed Western notions of property rights on Hawaiian land; and the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa (also known as the Japan-US Treaty of Peace and Amity), which opened up trade and diplomacy to the Western powers for the first time. These occurrences and others saw “Western interests, whether through trade, colonization, or missionary societies, increasingly entering into the ocean.”36 In the United States, increased interest in the Pacific centered on the acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands as a gateway to the rest of the Pacific world. The fact that newspaper accounts in the 1860s and 1870s consistently asserted Mark Twain’s credentials as an expert on Hawai‘i on the basis of his popular seriocomic lectures and letters to the New York Tribune about the islands and their inhabitants shows just how intertwined serious and comic accounts of the Pacific world were for American readers. Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, rampant jokes captured the air of international intrigue that accompanied constant periodical chatter about US designs on Hawai‘i. For example, in 1852, the New York Lantern printed an extract from the New York Times while chiding its editor, who had recommended that Admiral Perry and his US Navy fleet abandon their attempt to force Japan to open up to trade with the West and instead focus on acquiring Hawai‘i. The Lantern offers its serious critique through bad puns: “Our young friend [New York Times editor Henry Jarvis] raymond has strange notions of morality. He doubts the policy and morality of nibbling at Japan, but recommends swallowing a Sandwich. The Ministers evidently intend to put the Sandwich into the Japan case, when they get it—or when the Commodore returns from his Perry-grinations!”37 Introduction  15

A similar pun equating eating a sandwich and annexing Hawai‘i, reprinted from London Punch, made the rounds of US newspapers in late 1854 and early 1855: “The London Punch says: ‘It appears that the Sandwich Islands have recently become annexed to America. The natives, no doubt, knew from conviction on which side their bread was buttered, and asked the United States if they would like to take a Sandwich.’ ”38 This joke, which inaccurately assumes an imminent US annexation of Hawai‘i, appeared in magazines such as the New York People’s Organ, Gleason’s Pictorial, Country Gentleman, Arthur’s Home Magazine, and Musical World and in newspapers such as the Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch, the Terre Haute Wabash (IN) Courier, the Middletown (NY) Whig Press, the Norwich (CT) Examiner, the Alabama Planter, and the Bath (ME) Eastern Times. It even appeared, in August 1855, in the Honolulu Friend, a temperance newspaper for sailors, and in several Australian periodicals. Its dumb pun reveals not only the global circulation of nineteenth-century humor but also the geopolitics of a moment when European powers such as Britain, France, and Germany vied for imperial ascension in the Pacific along with an emergent United States. Such jokes, it seems, resurfaced whenever Hawai‘i reentered public and congressional conversations as a target for annexation. For instance, thirteen years later, in July 1868, the Wheeling (WV) Daily Intelligencer quipped, “Everybody wonders, seeing Secretary Seward so hungry for more territory, why don’t he take a Sandwich. The big earthquake, which has lately convulsed the principle [sic] island, is just the tonic for his greedy annexing stomach.”39 The endurance of such jokes about consuming the Hawaiian Islands demonstrates the role that levity played in the popular press’s treatment of Pacific imperialism. Indeed, if this book seems overstuffed with examples of popular humor about the Pacific world, it is because this underexplored comic archive is, in part, the argument. Despite the prevalence of such jokes and their relationship to serious Pacific policy proposals, no scholarly study has considered in any depth how humor adumbrated the Pacific for American readers, guiding their understandings and misunderstandings of these far-flung parts of the world. As a recent “Pacific turn” in American studies has augmented other “transnational iterations of American studies,” such as the transatlantic and hemispheric approaches, scholars across several disciplines have begun to study US literary and journalistic treatments of the Pacific world.40 But in doing so, they have largely ignored humor. 16  A Laughable Empire

In researching this book, I combed through countless nineteenth-​ century periodicals, jest books, almanacs, and travel narratives, in which I often found jokes and bon mots about the Pacific world right alongside more serious, descriptive, geographical, and ethnographical treatments of Pacific islands and Islanders. To give just one brief example, the Honolulu newspaper the Pacific Commercial Advertiser—an English-​ language, pro-American newspaper founded in July 1856 by Henry M. Whitney, the son of one of the first New England missionaries in Hawai‘i—ran a regular column (titled “What They Say About Us”) that excerpted and commented on US and European newspaper items about Hawai‘i.41 The February 22, 1873, column was published at a time when speculation about the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s future was rampant, after the death of King Kamehameha V led to questions about succession. This column, in the space of a few paragraphs, does all of the following: (1) it offers faint praise of Mark Twain’s recent New York Tribune essay on Hawai‘i, reporting that Twain “so eloquently and somewhat truthfully discoursed about us”; (2) it reprints a bad pun from the New York Tribune about claims to the Hawaiian throne; (3) it complains about “the blundering statements of the various editors” who “seem to think it very witty to speak of us as ‘the cannibal islanders,’ and in the same connection to allude to the stereotyped ‘baked missionary”; and (4) it reprints a dialogue between the London Standard and the New York Tribune about whether England would seek to acquire Fiji if the United States were to annex Hawai‘i.42 Taken together, these excerpts demonstrate the global politics of multinational entanglements in the Pacific as well as the combination of gravity and levity with which they were treated in popular print media. This sometimes startling juxtaposition of comic and serious treatments of the Pacific has led me to hypothesize that such humor helped its readers to express, then dismiss through laughter, their anxieties about contact with non-European peoples who held entirely different epistemologies. Learning about these people and places showed Americans just how much larger the world was than the urban apartments or parlors and rural farmhouses in which most of them read these accounts. Despite, or maybe because of, Americans’ thirst for information about Pacific islands and Islanders, nineteenth-century Americans tended to conflate the disparate peoples and cultures that dotted the Pacific. It is true that, as the title of Lisa Kahaleole’s essay in a special 2015 issue of American Quarterly on the Pacific phrases it, “Hawaiians and Introduction  17

Pacific Islanders are not Asian Americans, and all Pacific Islanders are not Hawaiian.”43 But the average nineteenth-century American reader tended to view Fijians, Māoris, Marquesans, Samoans, Tahitians, and Hawaiians through the same lens and applied to them the same stereotypes, many of them propagated through humor. Many Native Pacific Islander scholars also see and celebrate cultural connections across Oceania. Most famously, Epeli Hau’ofa, in “Our Sea of Islands,” labels Pacific Islanders as “Oceanic peoples” who share a “kinship across vast distances because of migration.”44 T. Damon I. Salesa has coined the term “Brown Pacific” (adapted from Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”) to describe the movements of nineteenth-century Pacific Islanders from one island to another as a “Pacific island circuitry that was filled with people who were not white, nor European, nor American.”45 The historian Gary Okihiro connects the islands and continents of the Pacific through the shared geology of tectonic plates, arguing that Pacific islands “are more related than seen in the customary view at sea and shore level.”46 In treating comic depictions of separate, though culturally and genealogically connected, peoples and cultures, I seek to recognize important differences among Pacific Islander cultures while understanding that most Americans did not. As I explore in more detail in chapter 1, most popular humor about the Pacific islands and Islanders works by connecting the unknown and exotic to the known and classifiable through stereotypes. By transferring, say, prevalent Native American or African American stereotypes to Pacific Islanders, as was often the case, humor could enable its readers’ imperial gaze, satisfying their curiosity about the exotic other without making them think too deeply about it. As Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon put it in their reception history of the South Seas, those who traveled to and wrote about the Pacific “went forth not so much to ‘discover’ but to ‘find,’ and to reinforce ideas they had assumed to be true.”47 Lyons describes how stereotypes function as colonizing representations that “paradoxically” alter “essentializing appraisals . . . from generation to generation” to serve the evolving requirements of nationalist and imperial narratives. Even with these changing needs, Lyons points, out, the twinned conceptions of the Pacific that have persisted for Americans are, first, that Pacific islands are “stepping stones” between the United States and Asia and, second, that Pacific islands constitute an out-of-the-way escape from civilization, modernity, and morality. Lyons writes, “The double logic that the islands are imagined at once as places to be civilized and as escapes from civilization” produces what 18  A Laughable Empire

he labels “American Pacificism,” a kind of “American Pacific Orientalism.”48 In analyzing nineteenth-century American and Pacific Islander humor, this book seeks to unmask how the stereotypes of “American Pacificism” were reified and disseminated (and sometimes resisted) through humor. In doing so, it is important that I do not unwittingly replicate these misinterpretations, a common danger in anthropology, history, and cultural studies. Matsuda bemoans the overprevalent, “concurrent major narratives” about the Pacific, “those of ‘fatal impact’ and ‘paradisical exoticism.’ ”49 Scholars should take care not to oversimplify contact into pat binaries of domination and helplessness. Nicholas Thomas explains how critiques of imperialism tend to reinscribe “precisely the distancing and silencing of the Other that is identified in colonialist texts.”50 David Wrobel, in his book on travel writing and US exceptionalism, laments the “glut of postcolonial studies” that figure travel writers as “the architects of imperial visions, commodifiers, and objectifiers of colonized ‘others,’ the agents of empire.” Travelers and travel writers certainly did play these roles, but, Wrobel argues, postcolonial critiques too often have “the effect of flattening the discourse about empire in travel writing” by ignoring these writers’ ambivalence about or resistance to empire, sometimes in the very texts that served empire’s purposes.51 In what follows, I continually seek such tensions, ambiguities, and vexed relationships to the project of empire. That said, of course, I must analyze in good faith what the archive presents, and, as chapters 1–4 demonstrate, that archive overwhelmingly relies on and reifies stereotypes of Pacific Islander otherness to excuse or extoll imperial interventions in the Pacific world. I do not condone the epithets (such as “savages”) and other racist language (such as the n-word) that are all too commonly employed by many of the archival sources I examine throughout this book. Travel writing was an important source for American readers’ information about the Pacific world. Between 1830 and 1900, about two thousand travel books were published in the United States; accounts of travel also regularly appeared in newspapers and magazines. Much of this output, according to Jeffrey Melton, narrated travel to the United States’ West Coast and to Pacific islands. Reading about these destinations was a popular pastime for Americans in part because, according to Melton, these islands “embodied the Edenic possibilities of the New World in much the same manner as the eastern coast beckoned to the early explorers, and the West itself offered evidence of America’s Introduction  19

supposed manifest destiny.”52 Some studies of nineteenth-century travel narratives have examined the comic techniques of Pacific travelers and canonical authors such as Twain and Melville. Melton and James Caron, building on the work of previous scholars such as Alexander Grove Day, Walter Frear, and Don Florence, have conducted persuasive readings of Twain’s 1866 travel letters from Hawai‘i to the Sacramento Union and his adaptation of that material to his travelogue Roughing It (1872).53 Meanwhile, the Melville scholar John Bryant has developed a comprehensive theory of amiability in Melville’s humor, including in his early novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), fictionalized travel accounts of Melville’s roving through the Marquesas, Hawai‘i, and Tahiti.54 Kim Leilani Evans has also written compellingly about the cultural relativism and “skepticism” of “Melville’s South Seas laugh.”55 Because this ground has been ably covered by scholars of humor and travel writing, this book focuses more on equally popular but largely unrecovered humor as it appeared in mid-nineteenth-century joke books, almanacs, newspapers and magazines, and exhibits. Some scholars of travel writing miss or misread the ambiguities of its humor and thereby risk oversimplifying humor’s relationship to the imperial project. For example, Christopher McBride, in his book The Colonizer Abroad: American Writers on Foreign Soil, 1846–1912 labels Herman Melville’s Typee and Mark Twain’s 1866 letters from Hawai‘i as patently imperialist narratives, and he suits his close readings of those texts to that conclusion. Of course, it is not necessarily wrong to identify imperialist elements in both texts; they are there. But McBride reaches his conclusions largely by eliding, ignoring, or misinterpreting humorous or ironic passages (and there are many of them) in those texts. To give just one example, McBride mistrusts Twain’s description of Bill Ragsdale, a happa haole (of mixed Hawaiian and European ancestry) translator for the Hawaiian legislature whom Samuel Clemens befriended during his time on O‘ahu. In McBride’s reading, “Twain consciously foregrounds Ragsdale’s dual racial status—a biological trait that would equate him with Southern mulattoes for his readers.” McBride arrives at this conclusion through his interpretation of Twain’s account of Ragsdale’s impish translating style. Twain playfully calls Ragsdale a “rascal” because, in offering his translations, Ragsdale would, Twain notes with relish, “drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous.” McBride uses this passage as evidence that Twain “seems intent on 20  A Laughable Empire

disparaging this man who possesses more foreign language skill than he does, by calling him a ‘rascal’ for this unfounded accusation.” For McBride, the motives for this alleged derogation are plain: “As a man of mixed race, Ragsdale must be denounced, for he represents one of America’s greatest postbellum concerns: racial mixing. Ragsdale is not of pure Hawaiian or Western blood, so Twain must actively asperse his character.” Ultimately, in McBride’s thinking, Twain disparages Ragsdale for imperialist ends: Twain’s depictions of both Ragsdale and the Hawaiian legislature are meant to make clear that, in McBride’s words, “if the natives cannot govern themselves, then some ‘civilized’ Western power, preferably America, will have to take over.”56 The problem with this interpretation is that it misconstrues Twain’s comic praise of Ragsdale as straightforward attack. Yes, Twain calls Ragsdale a “rascal,” but the context of this epithet is how impressed Twain is at Ragsdale’s ability as a translator to hoodwink both his Hawaiian and Euro-American auditors. Biographical evidence also shows Twain’s joshing of Ragsdale to be all in good fun. Clemens had so much respect and affection for Ragsdale that in the 1880s, he began (but did not finish) a novel about him; he later mourned Ragsdale in his 1897 travel narrative Following the Equator. There Twain writes that, when he returned to the coast of O‘ahu during an around-the-world tour, “I asked after ‘Billy’ Ragsdale, interpreter to the Parliament in my time—a half-white. He was a brilliant young fellow, and very popular. As an interpreter he would have been hard to match anywhere. He used to stand up on the Parliament and turn the English speeches into Hawaiian and the Hawaiian speeches into English with a readiness and volubility that were astonishing. I asked after him, and was told that his prosperous career was cut short in a sudden and unexpected way.” Twain then tells a tragic story of Ragsdale’s “loathsome and lingering death” by leprosy.57 Twain’s assessment of Ragsdale’s mischievous translations might actually hew closer to what Yunte Huang has called “counterpoetics” than to McBride’s application of postcolonialism. Huang, in his reading of Ragsdale’s mischievous translations, emphasizes that “translation that is slightly off-key changes the nature of a speech” in ways that lay bare “the uneven exchange of material objects and cultural beliefs between the natives and the whites” as well as the continual negotiations and misunderstandings inherent in such exchanges.58 Samuel Clemens and Herman Melville are certainly guilty of cultural tourism and some amount of ethnocentrism, akin to the “seeing man” Introduction  21

who embodies what Pratt has called an “anti-conquest” stance, her label for representational strategies through which Euro-Americans “seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.”59 But Twain’s and Melville’s Pacific writings also both express through the playful double meanings of their comic irony a critical awareness of their own fraught subject positions. In this way, they mock their narrators’ touristic ethnocentrism and foreground their sense of complicity in the missionary and commercial takeovers they are leery of, while denying a laugh of superiority to either themselves or their readers. (McBride also conflates author and narrator in his readings of both authors.) But too many scholars, in missing the joke, also miss the thought-provoking ambiguities, anxieties, and cultural contradictions that these jokes reveal. McBride is not alone in reifying notions of Pacific otherness in his attempt to identify colonialist impulses in nineteenth-century depictions of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders. Lyons notes that, even when the goal is to critique imperialism, well-meaning scholars and artists have sometimes “misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own.”60 Alternatively, focusing on the ambiguities of humor in Americans’ writings about travel, empire, and foreign lands can unearth not just how imperial domination works but also “processes of negotiation, transculturation and even exploitation by ‘native’ peoples.” Attention to the comedy of contact allows scholars to see contact and continuing encounter “as involving exchange and contestation rather than compliance, submission and imposition,” as Tim Youngs urges in The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing.61 A Laughable Empire examines how both representations and misrepresentations of the Pacific world were spread through popular nineteenth-century humor. I have tried to do so without revivifying those perceptions, instead seeking to foreground ways that humor “bound together” Pacific Islander and Euro-American histories through mutual possession, as Lyons and the historian Greg Dening have emphasized in their scholarship.62 This book, I hope, performs a decolonial gesture that avoids the oversimplifications of colonizer/colonized dichotomies and recognizes the sometimes “manifold incompatabilities that exist between Euro-American and Native Pacific Islander epistemologies.”63 Another way to avoid reproducing US domination of Pacific islands and Islanders in my study 22  A Laughable Empire

of American humor about it is to answer J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s call for scholars working in American studies to “engage Native Pacific studies” as a “productive lens” through which to view imperialism, colonialism, Indigenous concerns, cultural studies, and more.64 This is something I have sought to do throughout this book, particularly in chapter 5. Finally, though Pacific histories have tended to portray contact as “inherently violent or destructive,” the study of humor may serve to emphasize what the historian I. C. Campbell suggests is more common in “culture contact”: interactions that are “nonviolent” or “mutually advantageous,” that occur “in a context of situational equality rather than of asymmetry of power.”65 As Campbell’s formulation implies, contact involves not just domination and violence but also commerce and comedy. In what follows, I draw on humor theory, the tools of literary criticism, and lessons from Native Pacific studies to highlight the power of humor and laughter to other as well as to unite peoples during the historical era of the United States’ early imperial ambitions in the Pacific. Overview

Chapter 1, “The Backwoodsman Abroad: The Pacific Imperialism of Nineteenth-Century American Humor,” considers how and why American humor—most notably almanac humor, sea yarns, jest books, and literary comedy—appropriated Pacific geography and culture into its comic mythology. The chapter shows how comic exaggeration supported or questioned westward expansion not just to the shores of California but beyond, into the Pacific. In tall tales and sea yarns, I argue, the Pacific functions as a setting wherein rustic, sometimes superhuman, comic Americans engage in playful exploits that serve as a stand-in for imperialist urges. Chapter 2, “Comic Currents: Polynesians in Periodicals,” limns the circulation of several popular jokes, bon mots, and humorous anecdotes about sailors, missionaries, and Pacific Islanders that were widely reprinted in nineteenth-century US newspapers, periodicals, and jest books. Midcentury periodicals mixed comedy and serious content in their treatments of the Pacific, offering to their readers visions of Pacific islands and Islanders as both curiosities to explain and raw material for American humor. I trace how such items evolved with shifting print and sociopolitical contexts as they were reprinted in different newspapers and journals. Through a unique methodology that performs Introduction  23

comparative, contextualized readings of reprints of jokes in their shifting contexts, I consider the cultural stakes of such items’ popularity and circulation in terms of what McGill has called the nineteenth-century United States’ “culture of reprinting.”66 Chapter  3, “ ‘Cheering for Ye, Cannibal’: The Politics of Boiled Missionaries,” features cultural close readings of “cannibal-and-boiled-​ missionary” jokes that were ubiquitous throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. My analysis demonstrates how cannibal jokes are encoded with anxieties about Pacific Islanders’ otherness in ways that disseminate Western stereotypes of Pacific savagery. But these jokes also allow their tellers and auditors to question imperialism by laughing at the death of missionaries. As I demonstrate, there are two butts to every cannibal-and-missionary joke: the ferocious cannibal and the meddling missionary. In chapter 4, “Collecting the Pacific: A Cabinet of Comic Curios,” I analyze burlesque exhibits of Pacific objects and objectified people, as well as comic responses to those exhibits in the popular press. I focus extensively on P. T. Barnum, a larger-than-life figure in mid- and late-nineteenth-century popular entertainment whose exhibits mocked his audiences’ fascination with authenticity regarding the Pacific and its relics, playing on the spectacle of the other and the potential for exotic conquest. Chapter 5, “ ‘Didn’t Our People Laugh?’ Humor as Resistance,” analyzes humorous moments in missionary and travel writing to detail the subversive power of Pacific Islanders’ comic resistance to imperialism. I attempt to responsibly identify, recover, and situate accounts of Pacific Islanders’ humor in response to contact and continued connections with Euro-American sailors, adventurers, and imperialists, mostly by rereading comic moments in Euro-American-authored travel narratives against the grain. In the conclusion, I outline several other methodologies that scholars might use in attempting to perform responsible scholarship—as free as possible from the unconscious ethnocentrism implicit in interpreting other cultures through one’s own epistemological assumptions—on the humor of Pacific Islanders and other subjects of humor and empire.

24  A Laughable Empire

The Backwoodsman Abroad

The Pacific Imperialism of Nineteenth-Century American Humor

1.

The 1865 jest book The American Joe Miller: A Collection of Yankee Wit and Humour includes a joke titled “Tall Talk”: “A Kentuckian was once asked what he considered the boundaries of the United States. ‘The boundaries of our country, sir?’ he replied. ‘Why, sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgment.’ ”1 This piece of tall-tale exaggeration on Americans’ imaginations of the United States’ expansiveness embodies how southwestern humor’s trademark braggadocio works in the service of imperialism through a hyperbolic claiming of Manifest Destiny, whose westward expansion to and through the Pacific and elsewhere is limitless. Sometimes US comic imperialism imagined Pacific conquests in particular, as in “A Spread Eagle Toast,” a jingoistic piece of expansionist exaggeration in The Book of 1000 Comical Stories: An Endless Repast of Fun (1859). The toast personifies “Our Nation” as it grows up, from “its infantile movements . . . on board the May Flower, on the rock of Plymouth, at Jamestown,” through “the ‘capricious squalls’ of its infancy” during the Revolutionary War, during which he was seen “whipping his mother and turning her out of doors.” The toast continues:

In his youth, he strode over the prairies of the boundless West, and called them his own, paid tribute to the despots of Barbary in powder and ball, spit in his father’s face from behind cotton bales at New Orleans, whipped the mistress of the ocean, revelled in the halls of Montezuma, straddled the Rocky Mountains, and with one foot upon golden sand and the other upon codfish and lumber, defied the world; in his manhood, clothed in purple and fine linen, he rides over a continent in cushioned cars, rides over the ocean in palace steamers, sends his thoughts on wings of lightning to the world around, thunders at the door of the Celestial Empire and at the portals of distant Japan, slaps his poor decrepit father in the face, and tells him to be careful how he peeks into any of his pickaroons, and threatens to make a sheep pasture of all the land that joins him. What he will do in old age, God only knows. May he live ten thousand years, “and his shadow never be less.”2 This toast offers a single-sentence history of the United States by piling up geographical locations and military triumphs as it personifies the nation as a growing, ever-more-powerful man. In this way, it echoes proliferating tall-tale descriptions of Davy Crockett–like superhumans as manifestations of Young America. This is especially true in the middle of the toast, in which the United States “straddled the Rocky Mountains” with feet touching each coastline. From there, it implies a techno-​determinism that associates US innovations with threats of impending imperial conquests in Asia. Midcentury Yankee humor often worked similarly. For example, Seba Smith ironically performed land-hungry expansionism through his Yankee character Jack Downing’s 1847 advice to President James Polk that, after conquering Mexico, the United States ought to “keep on annexin’ . . . clear down to t’other end of South America, clear to Cape Horn,” before moving on to annex Europe, Africa, and Asia.3 As all of these examples’ giddy enactments of the accretive logic of Manifest Destiny hint, comic exaggeration celebrated westward expansion not just to the shores of California but beyond, into the Pacific. But sometimes, as in the Jack Downing example, humorists used exaggeration to critique imperialism by rendering its logic and ambitions patently ridiculous. Such critiques tend to operate through what Kenneth Burke has labeled the “entelechial principle,” through which a satirist imagines “the implications of a position, going to the end of the line,” often pushing the logic 26  A Laughable Empire

of an erroneous or dangerous idea “to the point where the result is a kind of Utopia-in-reverse.”4 No matter the intent of such humorous engagements with the ambiguities of frontiers, borders, and expansion, they narrate Americans’ interest in and anxiety about annexation and imperialism long before 1898, when the United States is commonly assumed to have become an imperial power via the Spanish-​American War. This chapter explores how several key strands of mid-nineteenth-​ century humor—specifically Yankee humor with its practical acquisitiveness, southwestern humor with its swaggering braggadocio, sea yarns with their exotic cosmopolitanism, and jokes with their stereotyping shorthand—served to satisfy Americans’ curiosity about Pacific islands and Islanders while stoking their national pride and imperial ambitions, often through crass racializing caricatures. As Jennifer Hughes has noted, during the print boom from the 1830s through the 1880s, when Americans had ready access to cheap comic print materials such as “joke books, magazines, gift books, and newspapers, as well as tickets to laughing gas exhibitions, minstrel shows, and comic lectures,” humor functioned as a “forum” that expressed “anxieties” and enacted debates about “citizenship and human rights through overt examination of who had the right to laugh.”5 Indeed, what Michael H. Epp has labeled the “humor industry” because of its relationship to mass culture and the US print boom “actively pursued” questions of “national identity” and the “formation of empire” in the second half of the nineteenth century.6 The humor industry’s genres of cheap print constituted what has been characterized as a “circus atmosphere that filled the print culture” of the antebellum United States. Isabelle Lehuu describes how the replacement of pricey books with inexpensive newsprint and paperbacks “exploded” the “once well-ordered and controlled world of print.” Because, for the first time, print was being created for and mass-marketed to American men and women, a broad, heterogeneous audience gained new exposure to popular humor’s comic myth-making, some of which appropriated (imagined) Pacific geography.7 Such globalism might seem at odds with nineteenth-century American humor’s provincial fascination with backwoods brawlers like Davy Crockett and up-country rubes like Jack Downing or Sam Slick. But, as Judith Yaross Lee posits, considering the relationships between humor and empire can “help scholars reframe the invidious elite/little-guy contrast in a transnational context.”8 Identifying and reading moments when nineteenth-century American regional humor and comic characters export their shenanigans into a larger The Backwoodsman Abroad  27

“transnational context” reveals previously undertheorized connections between regional humor and the US imperial imagination. Constance Rourke notes off-handedly in her seminal 1931 work American Humor that “a marked drift of interest was shown in the South Seas, as in the later Crockett legends, which during the same period were reaching farther and farther toward the western horizon.”9 This passage, with its lack of specifics and passive voice—Who showed a “marked drift of interest”?—drove me to distraction for the first two years that I worked on this book. It was not until two weeks into a residency at the American Antiquarian Society, where I flipped through literally every comic and Crockett almanac in its vast collection, that I found evidence of Crockett in the Pacific, when I came across the 1854 Crockett almanac sketch “Crockett among the Cannibals.” In this brief sketch, Crockett escapes from Hawaiians who have taken him and his buddy Ben Hardin captive and, with typical Crockett-almanac violence, murders and feeds the Natives to the sharks (for more detailed analysis of this sketch, see later this this chapter).10 Much of the nineteenth-​ century “marked drift of interest” in humor of and about the Pacific in the United States served the ends of empire, at times with similar sadism. The viciousness of some comic treatments of the Pacific world and Pacific Islanders constituted part of a larger trend in nineteenth-​ century American humor. William Keough argues, “Whatever may be said about the parentage of American humor, something happened— and it happened in the nineteenth century,” when some American humor became “nasty” and was characterized by its “rawness, cruelty, and lack of restraint.” This comic cruelty can be traced to the United States’ aggressive expansionism; Keough notes, “The violent exaggeration of much nineteenth-​century American humor was often the whole point.”11 As Jesse Bier puts it, “In the predatory, fugitive, combative lies and wiles of most frontier characters . . . comic gusto becomes exuberant sadism and cruel punishment, picturesque but excessive.”12 As many of the examples analyzed in this chapter show, much of the “nasty” humor commonly found across all popular print genres in the mid-nineteenth century functioned through racism. Terence Whalen, in considering Edgar Allan Poe’s treatment of race in his magazine writings, sees such racism as constitutive of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and has coined the term “average racism” to describe the “strategic construction” of racist tropes “designed to overcome political dissension in the emerging mass audience.” For Whalen, Poe and 28  A Laughable Empire

other writers working in popular print media sought to connect with their readers in all parts of the nation by articulating “a form of racism acceptable to white readers who were otherwise divided over the more precise issue of slavery.”13 Whalen’s insight on racism’s role in coalescing a national readership for cheap print helps explain—though not ameliorate—the appalling prejudice prevalent in comic works appearing in the Crockett almanacs, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and other outlets published in the North. Indeed, Crockett’s fictional almanac exploits are merely the most egregious example of an always fraught and often brutal strain of nineteenth-​ century humor through which Americans laughed at and laughed off their fears of Pacific “otherness” while creating stereotypes that justified expansion into and across the Pacific world. Mid-​nineteenth-​century US tall tales, sea yarns, and jokes represent the Pacific as an arena in which larger-than-life American figures comically encounter the other and assert their nationalist feats of strength in life and even after death, as we will see in the cases of Crockett and the Yankee leaper Sam Patch. Such tales made the vast geographical spaces of the oceans feel understandable and conquerable by exaggerating both human capabilities and the natural world. In this way, the Pacific became both subject of and location for particularly US strands of humorous exaggeration. As the examples analyzed in this chapter demonstrate, however, the humorous ambiguity of such exaggeration often cuts in multiple directions, mocking not just the Pacific peoples and places acted on by heroes exporting their homegrown US attitudes and adventures but also the ridiculous and often naïve hubris of those heroes and the expansionist ideology they represent. “Crockett Among the Cannibals”: Comic Almanacs and Jest Books

Jest books and comic almanacs were the preeminent print outlets for the humor consumed by the US masses in the mid-nineteenth century. P. M. Zall writes that, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jest books, jokes competed for space with such miscellaneous content as “serious and comic anecdotes, aphorisms, epigrams, rebuses, riddles, and songs. To call a jestbook a jokebook is like calling Poor Richard’s Almanac a calendar.”14 Comic almanacs descended from jest books, and, beginning with the publication of Charles Ellms’s American Comic Almanac in 1830, comic almanacs took over as the most popular US genre of humor. As The Backwoodsman Abroad  29

Michael Winship puts it, Ellms’s innovation transformed “a traditional genre for a new purpose, turning the almanac into a joke book.”15 Due to the popularity of Ellms’s American Comic Almanac, a plethora of imitators quickly followed, and comic almanacs—with names like Sam Slick’s Comic Almanac, Rip Snorter Comic Almanac, Devil’s Comical Oldmanick, Laugh and Grow Fat Almanac, and Elton’s Comic All-my-Neck—proliferated until the outbreak of the Civil War. Robert Secor sees almanacs, comic and otherwise, as “the best record of the development of America’s popular taste.”16 Comic almanacs featured calendars and astrological projections similar to regular almanacs but replaced accompanying matter such as statistics, lists of government officials, pedantic moralizing, and the like with humorous anecdotes, ribald jokes, riddles, poems, and illustrations.17 In spite of or because of these almanacs’ “crude and uncouth” humor, they appealed to a wide audience.18 The humor in both jest books and comic almanacs relies heavily on wordplay, puns, and exaggeration, all of which appear in both the illustrations and in the text. Southwestern humor, sailor yarns, and Yankee jokes are also common. In general, most jokes and anecdotes in comic almanacs and jest books limn domestic scenes (“domestic” here meaning both home and US), drawing their humor from local drunks, amours gone wrong, agricultural mishaps, Yankee rubes, and racial stereotypes of Black and Irish Americans. But some comic almanacs and jest books, especially in the 1840s and 1850s, also became interested in issues of expansion and annexation, including into the imagined geography of the Pacific. Sometimes the otherness of the Pacific is presented noncomically, as in the sketch on “Van Dieman’s Land” in The American Comic Almanac 1835, which gives a brief, straightforward account of the island that is now called Tasmania, describing landscape, climate, weather, soil, and so on. It is accompanied, though, by a comic illustration, titled “Van Demon’s Land” as a pun on Van Dieman, depicting Natives as smiling devils holding spears and a landscape that appears to be supernaturally alive (fig. 2). This mixture shows a desire to fulfill readers’ curiosity for information, whether comic or not, about faraway and exotic locales. Almanac makers were not always particularly fastidious about how they portrayed that interest, as a comparison of the 1850 and 1876 incarnations of Fisher’s Comic Almanac demonstrates. The 1850 issue features a picture of a mustachioed, foreign-looking personage, identified by the caption as “The new Russian Ambassador at Washington.” 30  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 2  “Van Demon’s Land,” from The American Comic Almanac 1835 (New York: Charles Ellms, 1834), 45. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

This image was recycled for the 1876 almanac but with a far different identifying caption: “King of the Cannibal Islands” (fig. 3).19 Such recycling is particularly odd considering that both images feature the same figure in a Russian ushanka-hat, presumably as an indicator of nationality. Nevertheless, this reuse probably arose from economy: that is, the publisher probably had the plate lying around and decided to repurpose it to fit new readerly interests. Donald Dewey notes in his history of political cartoons that it was common in the early to mid-nineteenth century to reprint old cartoons to illustrate different topics and themes, “with variations being confined to the captions.”20 This particular woodcut’s reuse also reveals the almanac makers’ (and readers’) lack of concern over racial specificity in their comic othering. In addition, it exemplifies almanac makers’ interest in connecting timeless almanac humor and other material on hand to shifting current events. Indeed, it is likely that the image appearing in the 1876 almanac is meant to refer to Hawaiian king David Kalākaua’s 1874–75 visit to the United States, during which both comic and serious write-ups and images of him abounded in the popular press. The Backwoodsman Abroad  31

FIG. 3  “King of the Cannibal Islands,” from Fisher’s Comic Almanac 1876 (Philadelphia: Fisher and Brother, 1875), n.p. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

When the Pacific is treated humorously in comic almanacs, it is most often a location in which to stage the incredulous, either in what travelers find waiting for them in the ocean or what they themselves will do in acting on the vast empty spaces and tiny islands of the Pacific. Often, almanacs tend to deal with the dangers of life at sea by exaggerating the size, power, and intelligence of its wildlife. As Marryat’s Comic Naval Almanac (1837) puts it in a caption to an image in which a man loses his hat to a gale, “Friend, does thee call this the Pacific?”21 Fisher’s Comic Almanac, especially, often illustrated life at sea on the front 32  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 4  Fisher’s Comic Almanac 1841 (Boston: James Fisher, 1840), back cover. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

and back covers in order to achieve puns on the name “fisher.” In each illustration, the sea is rendered comically menacing, as in an oft-reused woodcut of a small boat swamped in heavy seas, with a man and woman overboard and sharks (or other nondescript sea creatures) lurking. In the 1876 Fisher’s Comic Almanac, it is accompanied by the pithy couplet, “Wife and Daughter, on the water, / Said they’d like to sail a bit.”22 The 1846 editions of Fisher’s Comic Almanac (both the Boston and Philadelphia versions) take readers farther out to sea with a “fishing” expedition gone wrong in the back-cover image captioned “A Novice Taking on the Whale,” which drags him helplessly across the waves. The 1846 almanac’s back cover features a grinning Neptune and an ocean absolutely teeming with frightening, toothy sea creatures.23 The 1841 edition’s back cover (in both the New York and Boston versions) depicts an enormous, angry sea creature with a long tail and an open mouth revealing sharp teeth dwarfing a small steamer. The creature’s body reads, “fisher’s comic almanac. 1841.” (fig. 4), an advertisement that somewhat mitigates the terror, though a sailor on a nearby shore strewn with palm trees certainly looks frightened. None of these images is obviously set in a particular ocean; here the precise location is immaterial, as it is the ocean itself that the cartoonist fills with unknowable terrors, which are both depicted and mitigated through caricatured exaggeration. The Backwoodsman Abroad  33

Other almanacs were more whimsical in foregrounding and diffusing such terrors. The Comic Almanac for the Year 1876, for instance, includes an illustration of a marooned marine and an alligator, with accompanying poem imagining their dialogue: “shipwrecked sailor.—Oh! that some friendly bark would near this savage shore I’d leave for home and never wander more. seductive alligator.—Behold me stranger in this friendly tide, walk right in here—I’ve room for one inside. shipwrecked sailor.—Not much! I thank you—for I greatly fear ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ should decorate those jaws—from ear to ear.”24 This sketch, though set on a “savage shore,” is not specifically described as taking place in the Pacific, and alligators do not live in saltwater. But crocodiles do live on many Pacific islands and can swim long distances in the ocean. Here the island and the ocean are sites for the fantastic, in this case a cunning, talking alligator, whose poetry is “seductive” in a vastly different way than a stereotypically sensual Polynesian woman. As in the Fisher’s Almanac images, the ocean in this sketch is malicious, terrifying, and comically unfathomable. Jokes and drawings like these, as well as ubiquitous anecdotes about and depictions of mermaids and sea serpents, all express, while attempting to contain, anxieties about the natural world and the dangers of oceanic travel. Many almanac narratives use humor to render oceanic voyages ridiculous. For instance, Fisher’s Comic Almanac 1853 includes an image and anecdote: “A half water-coloured sketch of that remarkable individual who crossed the Atlantic in a wash-tub, with his body for a steam-boiler and his old clay stem pipe for the smoke-pipe.” Using the bragging exaggeration of southwestern humor, the story goes on to narrate further implausible adventures and eventually the man’s death from “slewicide by cutting his throat with a mackerel,” after which he is memorialized by “having sixteen rounds of tobacco squids fired over him from the mouths of a well-drilled corps of alligators.” Though the sketch begins by mentioning the Atlantic, it ends with an encomium to readers considering travel to the Pacific: “If any body wants to make a voyage around the Horn [Cape Horn, at the bottom tip of South America and the most common entryway from the Atlantic to the Pacific] on an economical scale, let him cut all the steamers, and jump into a wash-tub, hoist a table-cloth for a sail, and if he don’t land in safety to where he goes to, he’s sure not to suffer by starvation and extortion by steam.”25 Here, the incredible feat of boating in a tub is dismissed as accomplishable by all and a way to get to the Pacific cheaply. 34  A Laughable Empire

The most famous of the antebellum almanacs were the various Crockett almanacs—published between 1835 and 1856 in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—which mythologized the life of the backwoodsman-​turned-​congressman-​turned-​Alamo-​martyr David Crockett, reshaping Crockett into the United States’ “first comic superman.”26 Ellms may have been the initial creator of the Crockett almanacs, the first seven of which were published under a false Nashville imprint so as “to capitalize on the then-current craze for all things Western,” though they were actually produced in Boston.27 The Crockett almanacs were among the United States’ most popular print productions of the time.28 James E. Caron highlights the breadth of the Crockett almanacs’ readership, writing that “the almanacs commanded an audience that knew no boundaries, encompassing adults and juveniles, middleclass city and rustic dwellers, yeoman farmers and mechanics, eastern seaboard as well as western frontier folk.”29 Like other comic almanacs, the Crockett almanacs combined astronomical calculations, calendars, and weather predictions with humorous anecdotes and droll wisdom, but their focus on Crockett and his fictional or mythologized friends— especially his sailor pal Ben Hardin (sometimes spelled “Harding”), the Mississippi boatman Mike Fink, and a host of “riproarious shemales”—moved the traditional almanac setting to the savage backwoods of the old Southwest, where these frontier vanguards of US expansionism staged herculean feats of comic violence against the natural world and, often, against racialized others.30 This hero-making only accelerated after Crockett’s death at the Alamo in 1836. In the 1840s, the Crockett almanacs increasingly deployed their exuberant hijinks to expansionist ends through “a wildly jingoistic nationalism,” and the publishing house Turner and Fisher’s 1843 takeover of the Crockett almanacs exacerbated this shift. US politics and expansion appeared throughout the pages of the Turner and Fisher almanacs.31 Antiexpansionists are, in the virulent racism of these almanacs, labeled as “all the Mixy Mexican Spanish brown an’ red ns, an’ the Malgamation party in Uncle Sam’s lands, who go in for Annexation with the blackies.”32 In describing racial miscegenation as “Annexation with the blackies,” Crockett verbally equates annexation with amalgamation while seemingly ignoring the racial mixing that inevitably would occur from taking over western lands and Pacific islands. Like much of the Crockett almanacs’ racism, this simultaneous confusion and condemnation of racial categories enacts what Len Cassuto has described as a key The Backwoodsman Abroad  35

feature of the racial grotesque: a “desire for order” that is deeply rooted in a fear of disorder. As Jean Lee Cole puts it in How the Other Half Laughs, a study of Progressive-era comics, “If the categories and classifications by which one builds societies are shown to be permeable and fluid, then society itself is shown to be nothing more than a willful act of the imagination.”33 Such realizations terrify almanac-​Crockett, whose fears of racial mixing spur him to lash out defensively and, because nonsensically, comically. He chides as mixed race anyone who would dare question his expansionist tactics, which, by the very nature of his conquest and absorption of once-foreign lands and peoples, ironically leads to the very ethnic mixing that he rails against. Built largely on the conceit of the boast, the comic sketches in the Crockett almanacs narrate Crockett and friends’ incredible and often incredibly violent deeds in a way that “showcased him as the epitome of the boisterous backwoods hero.”34 Several critics have considered the odd relationship between Crockett’s uninhibited, chaotic violence and its use to pacify and extend the US frontier. Catherine Albanese writes, “Nature was conquered and controlled when heroic humans such as Davy Crockett lost all semblance of self-control in an ecstasy of violence.” His acts of “prodigious savagery,” even more savage than the landscapes he conquers, clear the wilderness for oncoming civilization. Because “political expansion through the annexation of territory repeated in geographical space the intimate physical conquest of the hunter,” Crockett’s hunting stories mirror and anticipate his more overt acts of colonization and expansion.35 Caron builds on Albanese’s work in highlighting the Crockett almanacs’ paradox of savagery in the name of civilization. He writes, “By becoming more savage than the savages he encounters in the wilderness, Davy Crockett ironically ensures the triumph of civilized values and behavior. He is thus a figure both of cultural degeneracy—the ultimate backwards man from the backwoods—and a figure of cultural progress—the pioneer who trailblazes for the civilization that follows.”36 Such a combination of “cultural degeneracy” and “cultural progress” was attractive to antebellum American readers; Crockett’s crude language and violent expansionism allowed his audience to imagine the US frontier and beyond as tamable, if only through the uncouth savagery of its mythical frontiersman. The narrative links between Crockett’s backwoods and other parts of the globe were forged in part through Crockett’s bosom buddy Ben Hardin(g) (in my analyses, I follow the spelling given in the particular 36  A Laughable Empire

almanac under consideration). Crockett’s partner in crime and the ostensible editor of some Crockett almanacs connects Crockett’s stomping grounds of Tennessee, Washington, DC, and the Texas frontier to the larger, watery world. According to Paul Andrew Hutton, the Hardin(g) sea yarns allowed the Crockett almanacs’ publishers to meld the northeastern sailors’ yarns with tall tales from the old Southwest, thus uniting popular culture traditions from the Northeast and the West.37 As a former sailor, Hardin(g) tells Crockett and the almanacs’ readers yarns from his own and his compatriots’ ocean exploits. “A Sailor’s Yarn,” from the Nashville Crockett Almanac 1841, uses a double frame narrative: Crockett retells a story that Ben Harding had told him about a shipmate named Bill Bunker from an expedition on a ship hunting for seals and whales. While anchored on an unnamed island, Bunker begs the captain to let him go ashore. There he spies and awkwardly courts a “hansum” “Ingin gal” who turns out to be the “king’s dawter.” In flirting with her, he accidentally sticks “the end of his queu [pony tail] into her eye,” which frightens the girl. When she tells her father, Bunker is captured, tied up, and threatened with an axe, at which point he expects to be beheaded. But when the axe comes down, it hits “not Bill’s neck but the queu, which it took off smack smooth close to his hed [sic].”38 The humor here derives from the physical comedy of a wooing gone wrong that leads to a dangerous but ultimately nonlethal cultural misunderstanding. It thus internationalizes the domestic courtship humor common to nineteenth-century comic almanacs. In later Crockett almanacs, Crockett himself takes his act abroad, spreading the backwoods American way to such far-flung places as Haiti, Hawai‘i, and Japan. In most cases, as in his exploits on the North American continent, racial others are singled out for displacement or slaughter. In short, he is just as happy to murder Hawaiians as Native Americans. Crockett thus smooths the way for annexation through characteristic violence, which he justifies through antiauthoritarian rhetoric. For example, the previously mentioned 1854 Crockett Almanac features a sketch titled “Crockett among the Cannibals,” in which a young Crockett and Ben Hardin are shipwrecked off Hawai‘i, where, after “swimmen, diven, sharken, fighten, and killen about in the open sea for three days,” they are captured by Hawaiian cannibals, who “war maken up a plot to eat [Crockett] right off for a tit bit.” The accompanying image is tamer than the vicious prose, depicting a subdued, resting Crockett held captive in a thatched hut by three Hawaiians who The Backwoodsman Abroad  37

FIG. 5  “Crockett Among the Cannibals,” from Crockett Almanac 1854 (Philadelphia: Fisher and Brother, 1853), n.p. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

seemingly consult over his fate in the background (fig. 5). In the narrative, Crockett, with typical violence, fights back and feeds the Natives to the sharks in “a cannibal supper,” which is “a terrification to the hull creation o’ cannibals.”39 Crockett’s suspenseful self-description of his own ferocity echoes his high-body-count accounts of Indian killing on the frontier in previous almanacs. “Crockett among the Cannibals,” then, merely moves Crockett and his racially motivated, homicidal tendencies to a new, more exotic locale. As Dennis Howitt and Kwame Owusu-Bempah point out 38  A Laughable Empire

in their analysis of racist jokes, a commonality among all racist humor is violence committed against another ethnic group and/or its culture. Such violence is intended to “reinforce the presumed superiority of one racial or ethnic group over another.”40 In this sketch, the superiority that Crockett asserts over the Hawaiians whom he slaughters is not cultural or moral; it is simply superior brute strength staged for imperial ends. After all, Crockett and Hardin, as exemplars of Western settlers, make landfall on Hawai‘i, kill the Natives, and take possession. In this way, “Crockett among the Cannibals” offered a grisly contribution to debates about the annexation of Hawai‘i in the 1850s, when US President Franklin Pierce hoped to add Hawai‘i to new territories acquired after the US-Mexico War. At the time, rumors abounded of impending filibustering attempts by adventurers seeking to overthrow the monarchy, and annexation was much discussed in US as well as Hawaiian newspapers.41 Similar tall-tale imperialism is at work in the Crockett Almanac 1856 in “Crockett Out-Diving the Pearl Divers,” in which Crockett tells a story of how he and Hardin observe the lucrative business of pearl diving off the coast of Japan. Crockett decides to try his luck, enters an underwater cave, and finds “thousands of pearl-oysters, fast asleep in their beds.” Even in a foreign land doing unfamiliar labor, Crockett relies on his backwoods US tactics: “I went to work an’ danced the Kentucky reel on top of ’em, so all kicking strong, that they all opened their jaws with the force of the heat like geese pecking up corn.” Finally, after eleven hours and forty-five minutes “under the pickle” (thus smashing the previous record of two minutes), Crockett emerges with “pearls enough to buy a hull ship; paid a diver’s fee to the natives, who fell down and gave three rounds of grunts for Davy Crockett, the pearl of all pearl divers.”42 This sketch is much less violent than is “Crockett among the Cannibals”; Crockett cooperates with and is celebrated (in demeaning “grunts”) by the Japanese divers even as he outperforms them at their own profession. Still, through puns, bravado, and American colloquialisms and place-names, Crockett puts his stamp on Japan. “Crockett Out-Diving the Pearl Divers” was written in 1855, just two years after Matthew Perry brought four ships into the harbor at Tokyo Bay, opening up trade and contact between Japan and the Western world for the first time in two hundred years. For the comic almanac makers, then, Crockett’s international exploits became a way to understand, and Americanize, exotic foreign lands about which Americans were so curious. Crockett acts as a sort of comic emissary or, more to The Backwoodsman Abroad  39

the point, a comic shock troop, deployed to Japan, Hawai‘i, and elsewhere, but because Crockett tends to treat Pacific islands just like the US frontier, as a space to conquer by killing Natives and through extraordinary feats, these almanac sketches extend Crockett-style Manifest Destiny abroad, blurring the lines between continental US expansion and intercontinental US imperialism. “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids”: Sailors’ Yarns

A mid-nineteenth-century comic form ubiquitous in jest books, comic almanacs, and other collections of witticisms was the sailor’s yarn, a loose genre whose name is derived from the onboard activity of “picking oakum”—cutting old hemp rope into short strands and picking it apart, then rolling the fibers back together. According to Marcus Rediker in Outlaws of the Atlantic, sailors would “spin a yarn for a bored, unhappy, unwilling, ready-made audience” as they worked together on their ropes. In this way, the sailor’s yarn was “a spoken-word equivalent of the work song” that allowed sailors to entertain each other and pass the time while completing monotonous labor. The stories sailors told—the yarns they spun—were usually told by, to, and about sailors and their adventures at sea, in port, or on remote islands. These yarns tended to be lengthy and complicated, combining humor, fantasy, and realism while drawing on sailors’ “communal lore, practical knowledge of class and work, and death-defying experience[s].” Sailors’ yarns served several important social functions on a nineteenth-century ship: as bonding exercises, expressions and confirmation of sailors’ values and unwritten rules on a ship, or as didactic lessons (and warnings) to young or inexperienced sailors. But, just as important, these stories were good fun, offering sailors an escape from the boredom, drudgery, and danger of their jobs by mixing the mundane and the marvelous as they narrated their real and imagined adventures across the globe, usually while in transit. Nineteenth-​century sailors’ yarns—“full of lies, humor, exaggeration, embellishment, and literally outlandish claims, as well as deep and necessary truths”—share many commonalities with the wild braggadocio and tall tales of southwestern and almanac humor.43 Of course, because these yarns were, like jokes, told and retold, the sailors who told them were performers who revised them in each new telling to each new audience.44 But, in the 1830s, some sailors’ yarns achieved a more fixed status as they began to appear in print. Sailors’ 40  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 6  “John Tabor’s Ride,” from J. Ross Brown, Etchings of a Whale Cruise (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), 174. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

yarns like those analyzed in the previous section of this chapter appeared fairly often in almanacs, but they were also common in other media, including humor anthologies and books dedicated to collecting sensational sailors’ stories. All these interrelated genres seem to have appealed to the same readers. For example, J. Ross Browne’s eclectic book Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846)—which is “part logbook, part journal, part travelogue, part adventure tale, and part a spun yarn that happened to contain other spun yarns”—includes an oft-told sailor’s yarn titled “John Tabor’s Ride,” complete with a woodcut depicting two sailors riding a sperm whale with reins, like a horse, steering it through an ominous ocean nightscape complete with lightning (fig. 6).45 The image itself is recycled, having earlier appeared in an 1841 almanac. The blurry line between almanac sketch and sea yarn is also apparent in the fact that the 1842 Old American Comic Almanac includes an advertisement for an anthology of writings about the sea: Tales of the Ocean: Essays for the Forecastle, by Hawser Martingale, the pseudonym of John Sherburne Sleeper, a prolific writer of sailor’s yarns.46 That book contains a short story called “Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda,” about a sailor with a “rascally appetite” that gets him into trouble. Bill Deadeye is described as a Boston sailor and great “gourmandizer” who stands five foot three inches tall and three feet across at the shoulders, The Backwoodsman Abroad  41

“almost as broad as he was long.” In the Bay of Bengal (so technically in the Indian Ocean but very near Oceania), Bill gets permission from the captain to go ashore and hunt because the crew is on short rations, and he is, as always, hungry. Onshore, he shoots and kills two monkeys, not knowing that the Natives of “Juggernahadad” are vegetarians with strict laws protecting most species, with a penalty of death for killing a monkey.47 When Bill strolls through the Native village with two dead monkeys strewn across his shoulders, he is captured, despite putting up a fight in which he cracks the heads of several villagers. Bill is caged and sentenced to public death, ordered to “be swallowed in sight of all the people and the sailors belonging to the vessels in port, by an Anaconda!” The narrator reports that he “felt much aggrieved that a fellow like Bill Deadeye, who was so good at swallowing, should himself be swallowed at last by a huge serpent.” But when the anaconda, after sizing up Bill “to see whether such a hairy-looking mass of mortality was eatable or not,” wraps around him and bites into his shoulder, Bill says, “ ‘two can play at that my hearty.’ Saying which, he grasped the Anaconda by the neck, and began to exert that prodigious strength for which he was so remarkable.” The accompanying drawing narrates the beginning of this struggle, with Bill biting the anaconda (fig. 7). Like the Crockett almanac image, it foregrounds captivity, potentially as a narrative justification of the violence to follow. When the dust settles from the fight, the shocked audiences—both the inhabitants of Juggernahadad and the story’s readers—see that Bill has in fact “swallowed the Anaconda.”48 In this story, the Bay of Bengal is merely the backdrop for a character’s superhuman feats of strength and appetite. Despite Bill’s ethnocentric refusal to abide by the cultural values and norms of “Juggernahadad” and despite his violent attacks on monkeys and villagers alike, the story celebrates him as a hero whose comic superpower—eating—saves him from facing serious repercussions for his culturally insensitive actions. Bill Deadeye glimpses the danger associated with otherness but reverses that danger by eating it. In the mid-nineteenth century, such physical prowess was often associated with American sailors. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of sailors in the Pacific that their “hardihood and daring . . . had almost become a proverb”: “In this class we meet the largest aggregate of that cool self-​ possession, courage, and enduring fortitude, which have won for us our enviable position among the great maritime conquests.”49 That Poe wrote these lines as part of a plea for the United States to fund a South 42  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 7  “Battle Between Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda,” from Hawser Martingale, Tales of the Ocean, and Essays for the Forecastle (Boston: William J. Reynolds, 1848), 256. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Seas exploring expedition reveals the relation of larger-than-life, seafaring heroes to imperialism. In “Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda,” the Natives are mostly in the background: they have odd customs that the hero misunderstands or ignores yet nevertheless ultimately overcomes. The story uses a contact zone to stage a tall tale in exotic environs. Another Hawser Martingale collection, Salt Water Bubbles; or, Life on the Wave (1854)—later reprinted in 1876 as Wonderful Adventures on the Ocean—features a yarn, titled “Rufus Armstrong: or, Practical Jokes,” that similarly celebrates the exploits of a Yankee sailor who bulldozes through a foreign culture in the Pacific. As the story’s title implies, Rufus Armstrong is described first and foremost as a lover of practical jokes. The narrator assures the reader that his pranks are innocent and well intentioned: “His practical jokes did not originate in a spirit of mischief, but in a love of fun, for Rufus cherished no malice in his bosom, towards any human being. His propensity to joke was irresistible, and when a good opportunity occurred to perpetrate a practical joke, he would not spare the best friend he had in the world.” But the story that ensues—about how Armstrong “once played a serious joke on a poor Chinaman in Batavia” (present-day Jakarta)—seems to belie this assessment of the innocence of his antics. While on shore there, The Backwoodsman Abroad  43

Armstrong and his shipmates run across “a numerous and exceedingly noisy mob, occasioned by a quarrel between some Malays and a party of Chinese sailors,” with British, Dutch, and American sailors scattered among the throng as well. Armstrong quickly incites the on-edge crowd into an all-out melee, during which he spots “a tall, good-​looking and well-dressed Chinaman, with a splendid queue, reaching to the ground.” Armstrong sneaks up behind him, cuts off the man’s queue with his knife, and runs off, “carrying the queue with him as a trophy”; he barely escapes, arriving back at his boat “with the gaudily-ribboned queue tastefully arranged around his neck, after the manner of the boas of our fashionable belles.” During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), queues were a required hairstyle for Chinese men as a symbol of the dynasty. Removing a man’s queue was a highly offensive act that could ultimately put that man’s life in danger from Qing authorities. Whether Armstrong is aware of this context or not, he has committed an act of violence for a joke and to get a souvenir. Once he returns home to Boston, Armstrong buys a wig and attaches the queue to it, “and he took great delight in walking about with his dandy locks and his queue, decked with ribbons, reaching to his heels, an object of curiosity, admiration or envy, to all he met.” Though the yarn plays up Armstrong’s love of practical jokes as good-natured, in indulging his penchant for mischief, he acts as the ultimate “ugly American” in an Asian port. His fondness for the “distraction of a frolic” is tied to, and exemplified by, the violent means through which he turns another’s culture into a visual joke.50 Another comic sailor’s yarn, William Burton’s “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids,” even more clearly demonstrates how this brand of humor’s racial othering functions in service of imperial conquest. It is similar to “Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda” and “Rufus Armstrong” in that it features a Yankee sailor who finds himself in an exotic clime ethnocentrically violating local customs and defeating the natural world while subjugating Natives. Whereas the story “Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda” connects Natives to nature through their profound respect for it, the narrative in “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids” represents Natives and nature together through the hybrid construct of the mermaid. “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids” was originally published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine—then coedited by Poe— in 1839, but it was reprinted widely in other periodicals and eventually in Thomas Haliburton’s 1852 three-volume comic anthology Traits of

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American Humour. Its framed narrative recounts several sea yarns, held together by a plot about a ship anchored near “a small green island as was’nt down in the chart, and hadn’t got no name nyther.”51 There the crew accidentally drops a full cask of the captain’s brandy into the ocean, and the incensed captain orders the narrator and several others to paddle around on a small boat looking for it. During their lazy search, a chaplain shares his liquor, and they all get drunk and tell mermaid stories. One sailor describes meeting a “marman” (male mermaid) in the South Seas who came up to a boat to complain that the ship had disturbed the mermaid Sabbath by dropping a “tarnal big anchor right in front of our meetin’ house door”: “and I’m d——d if eeny of my folks can go to prayers.”52 In all these stories, each voiced through the Yankee slang of the narrator, sailors and mermaids alike speak in the same dialect. This leads to what one scholar of southwestern humor describes in another context as linguistic “contamination,” whereby one group’s dialect overlaps with another’s, creating contact zones of language.53 Indeed, the Sabbath-keeping marman at first seems very much like the New England salts he converses with. But the storyteller, through his physical description of the marman, goes to great lengths to deny that connection. He describes the marman as “half kinder n and ’tother half kinder fish, but altogether more kinder fish than kinder n.”54 This confused, racist description goes to great lengths to dismiss mermaids as nonwhite and nonhuman but in doing so offers no real physical description. This racial othering continues in the narrator’s ensuing description of his own underwater tête-à-tête with a marman, who has appeared near the ship and beckoned the narrator to swim down to the bottom of the ocean to fetch the brandy cask: His face was reglar human, only it looked rayther tawney and flabby like a biled n, with fishy eyes, and a mouth like a huge tom cod. His hair hung stret down his shoulders, and was coarse and thick like untwisted rattlin’; his hands were somethin’ like a goose’s paw, only the fingers was longer and thicker—and his body was not exactly like an Injin’s, nor a n’s, nor a white man’s—nor was it yaller, nor blue, nor green—but a sorter altogether mixed up color, lookin’ as if it were warranted to stand the weather. Jest about midships, his body was tucked into a fish’s belly, with huge green scales right down to the tail.55

The Backwoodsman Abroad  45

Aside from the telltale midriff shift from man to fish, this description works largely through the negative: specifically, what, physically, the marman is not. It also demonstrates an uncanny desire to describe the being racially when those descriptors obviously do not fit: “not exactly an Injin’s, nor a n’s, nor a white man’s.” By referencing known racial stereotypes, Burton’s comic description simultaneously plays up the exoticness of Pacific Island inhabitants and neatly dismisses them as nonwhite others. Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson have described how ethnic humor operates in part by seeking to differentiate the have-nots, “unfortunates typically of red, yellow, and brown complexions,” from “the white, mostly Protestant ‘haves.’ ” Burton’s “Cape Codder” lumps together multiple “unfortunates” for ridicule, in part to demonstrate and secure his own status as a Yankee. Though Boskin and Dorinson claim that ethnic humor “is one of the most effective and vicious weapons in the repertory of the human mind,” some humor scholars downplay its social consequences.56 Christie Davies, for instance, in Ethnic Humor around the World, argues for ethnic humor’s relative innocence, claiming that ethnic jokes are told for their own sake, “not as a means to some other end.”57 Elsewhere, Davies writes that, while ethnic jokes “play with superiority and disparagement,” they do not necessarily enact disparagement, even if the joke tellers do see themselves as superior to the butts of their jokes.58 Michael Billig, in Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, has countered Davies’s suggestion that “real racists have better things to do than tell jokes” by arguing that there is “little reason for supposing that the bigoted, or even the socially powerful, are devoid of humour.”59 I would add that, even if Davies is right and most tellers of ethnic humor do not intend it as ritual violence, when their jokes are repeated and reprinted in popular media (as in the case of the oft-reprinted “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids”), their circulation serves to disseminate and reinforce existing stereotypes that fix images and preconceptions of otherwise unfamiliar, sometimes faraway peoples in readers’ minds. Boskin would probably agree, as he has written elsewhere that the humor of stereotype works through repetition that creates uncritical thought.60 The connection between racial slurs and comic imperialism is also clear in Burton’s description of the underwater drinking spree that takes place after the narrator taps a brandy cask and shares it with the mermaid community, which is also described in highly racialized terms:

46  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 8  William Burton, “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids,” from Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1839, cover. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

a child is characterized as “half papoose, half porpus,” an elder as “looking jest like Black Hawk when he was bilious.” When the mermaids get drunk, chaos ensues: “They growed so darned savagerous that I kinder feared for my own safety amongst them drunking moffradite sea aborgoines,” and the narrator eventually flees.61 The accompanying image depicts a drunken, orgiastic revelry with the merry narrator as the focal point in its center (fig. 8). As opposed to the narrator’s version of events in the sketch, in the image, the narrator does not seem to fear for his “own safety” at all. His arm is raised in collegial encouragement of the drunken chaos around him.

The Backwoodsman Abroad  47

Back onboard the boat, the chaplain predicts, “As I’d larnt the marmen the vally o’ licker, they’d get huntin’ up all the tubs and barrels out of the different wrecks in all the various seas; and that intemperance would spile the race, and thin ’em off till they became one the things that was—jest like the Injins what’s wastin’ away by the power o’ rum and whiskey gin them by the white men.” The story ends with a joke that “the love o’ licker has had its effect upon the marmen and the marmaids”: “they must have thinned off surprisingly, for I aint seed none since, nor I don’t know nobody as has, nyther.”62 The narrator, whom the reader suspects has passed out on the deck and dreamt this whole tale, is obviously one of the butts of his own story’s humor. For this reason, the story does not necessarily imply that his racist descriptions of mermaids are to be celebrated or even trusted. But those descriptions are jolting and memorable to readers for the way that they turn Pacific Islanders into Native Americans, in part by attaching to sea-dwelling mermaids prevailing myths of drunken, vanishing Indians that rhetorically and physically evacuate them from their geographical space, leaving it empty for white Americans to exploit. As Izumi Ishii points out, during the Indian removal era in the United States, “ ‘firewater myths’ that Indians inordinately crave alcohol, and when drunk, exhibit various behaviors that are racially explicable” were used to create stereotype of a people doomed by their addictive passions.63 This tall tale similarly uses mermaids to tie Pacific Islanders to Native Americans and simultaneously other them as nonwhite, or nonhuman, and to situate them into an understandable, repeatable colonial context of domination and doom. Some Pacific Islanders in the nineteenth century, specifically Hawaiians, did see connections between themselves and Native Americans. David A. Chang has traced references to Native Americans in nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers and determined that “it appears that some Kanaka began to imagine their own struggles against colonialism as akin to those of Indians.”64 Similarly, Brandy Nālani McDougall stresses the importance of recognizing and engaging with “trans-Indigenous aesthetic systems.”65 Recognizing such cross-​racialization in cultural works might offer Pacific Islanders and Native Americans impetus for solidarity and resistance to colonialism. But Burton’s story, by transferring Native American stereotypes to Pacific Islanders, enables its readers’ imperial gaze, satisfying their curiosity about the exotic other without making them think too much about it. 48  A Laughable Empire

Examples also abound of midcentury US comic writing racializing Pacific Islanders, especially Hawaiians, as Black, especially in the midst of rumors about US annexation of Hawai‘i. Maile Arvin, in Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, explains how the concept of racial Blackness, as applied to African Americans in the United States, came to play “a significant role in racial discourses in Oceania, particularly in Hawai‘i.”66 Physical descriptions of Hawaiians in midcentury US periodicals support Arvin’s claim. For example, in 1851, the New York Picayune ran a comic story about an adventurer’s world travels in a flying machine on which, “leaving California,” he “directed his course to Honolulu,” where he stopped simply because he had never “seen a black king.”67 Similarly, an 1856 issue of the magazine Young America includes a cartoon titled “The Courtly Flatterer,” which mocks the skin tone of the Hawaiian king. The accompanying text reads, “Sullivan (Secretary of War to the King of the Sandwich Islands).—indeed your majesty has been favored by providence. while we poor whites can’t get into the most trifling of mugs without being smoked, your majesty might have any number of black eyes, and no one would ever see the difference.”68 Even though the joke here is racist, mocking darker skin pigmentation, the accompanying image depicts King Kamehameha V as fairly dignified and the white Secretary of War Sullivan as Neanderthalic, which is a visual strategy often used to attempt racial othering. That and the fact that the title of the joke is not about the king but about Sullivan as a sycophantic “courtly flatterer” complicate this otherwise straightforward bit of crass racism. Additionally, the cartoon and caption frame insult as flattery, though elsewhere in the same issue, “Yankee Sullivan” is ironically praised as “initiating the King into the Christian-like mysteries of dram-drinking, cursing, and the noble art of self-defence.”69 Here both the Hawaiian king and his American aide are abused. Anglo publications in Hawai‘i also used racialized language to characterize Native Hawaiians as similar to African Americans. In 1845, for example, the Hawaiian Cascade & Miscellany included a racist joke that described one Hawaiian as a “buck with a cigar in his mouth,” who, upon entering a menagerie, was “politely requested” by the proprietor “to take the weed from his mouth, lest he should teach the other monkies bad habits.”70 The historian Gavan Daws writes that Americans brought US-style racism to bear in Honolulu, regularly complaining about “damned black Kanakas.”71 By the end of the century, some The Backwoodsman Abroad  49

Americans seemed to fully conflate Native Hawaiians and African Americans, as evidenced by the fact that early Hawaiian music was marketed as “coon songs” in the 1890s. The historian Gary Okihiro points out that the 1898 song “My Honolulu Lady” was advertised as “ ‘The Latest Coon Conquest,’ in which an Alabama narrator returns with ‘Honolulu Lou’ to ‘show dem coons and wenches style and grace that is divine, when we pass down the line. . . . We cut de pigeon wing, de coons dis shout and sing.’ ”72 Such racial conflations in comic writings about the Pacific and Pacific Islanders encouraged readers to connect mysterious, unknown people from the other side of the globe to destructive stereotypes about African Americans and Native Americans that they recognized and, in many cases, had internalized into belief. This uncritical recognition, in turn, led to attitudes of superiority that, in some Americans’ minds, excused or even necessitated colonialism. “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands”: Pacific Humor in Comic Periodicals

The mid-nineteenth century saw a rise in another important venue for humor: periodicals dedicated solely to the comic. Early humor magazines of particular importance were Spirit of the Times (1831–61), which published many famous sketches by southwestern humorists, and Knickerbocker Magazine (1833–65), which published more genteel sketches. By the 1850s and through the Civil War, humor magazines began to abound, with titles like Carpet Bag (1851–53), Yankee Notions (1852–75), Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun (1858–96), Comic Monthly (1859–81), Phunny Phellow (1859–76), and Vanity Fair (1859–). After the Civil War ended, more enduring magazines such as Life, Puck, and Judge, according to David E. Sloane, appealed to “a wide segment of the American reading population.”73 In these and other venues, southwestern humorists and literary comedians—prominent northern humorists of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, such as Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain), George Horatio Derby (as John Phoenix), and Charles Farrar Browne (as Artemus Ward)—published their work, often under the guise of their pseudonymous, cracker-box-philosopher creations. Because the golden age of American humor periodicals coincided with the midcentury peak in Americans’ fascination with the Pacific world, humor about the Pacific recurred regularly in their pages, shadowing the news by reducing Pacific Islanders to stereotypes or reimagining 50  A Laughable Empire

imperial and colonial interactions through pat comic characters. For example, on February 1, 1854, Yankee Notions ran the cartoon “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands; or, Young American Diplomacy” (fig. 9), which sends Yankee humor’s most famous comic Yankee character, Brother Jonathan, abroad for expansionist negotiations on behalf of the Young America movement. Yankee Notions, a New York humor magazine that ran from 1852 to 1875 was, according to Cameron C. Nickels, “a representative anthology of the best as well as the worst of Native wit, humor, and satire of nineteenth-century American in word and picture.” Though most of its jokes and puns were borrowed, its illustrations were original: editor T. W. Strong drew many of the unsigned cartoons himself. According to Nickels, the satire appearing during Strong’s fifteen years as editor voiced the ideology of the Young America wing of the Democratic Party.74 Sarah Sillin has argued in a different context—the periodical’s treatments of Cuba amid filibustering attempts by Americans to conquer the island—that “Yankee Notions mined US ignorance, which so many periodicals paper over, for pleasure throughout decades-long annexation debates.”75 Sillin’s insight can be applied to the jingoistic expansionism of “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands,” printed in the same era. In the wake of the California gold rush, US Manifest Destiny set its sights on Hawai‘i and “became so aggressive as to seriously frighten the Hawaiian authorities.”76 In August 1852, California representative Joseph Walker McCorkle gave a speech in the House of Representatives demanding that the United States annex Hawai‘i, and Senator William H. Seward proposed that President Millard Fillmore appoint a commissioner to look into the practicality of negotiating annexation.77 Extralegal pressures mounted as well. By the end of 1853, with rumors of US filibusters against Hawai‘i to foment rebellion, petitions appeared for Kamehameha III to consider annexation to the United States. Even on the islands at this time, annexation fever was brewing among American émigrés, some of whom were new to Hawaii as part of “an overflow population” from the United States’ westward frontier.78 In early 1854, David Lawrence Gregg, the US commissioner assigned to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, reported to the State Department that Kamehameha III had instructed Robert Wyllie, his minister of foreign affairs, to begin annexation negotiations, but US hopes for annexation would die along with Kamehameha III at the end of 1854.79 The Yankee Notions cartoon appeared in the midst of this intrigue. The Backwoodsman Abroad  51

FIG. 9  “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands; or, Young American Diplomacy,” from Yankee Notions, February 1854, 360. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

The cartoon pictures Brother Jonathan whittling a stick and negotiating with a crudely racialized image of the Hawaiian king Kamehameha III, who ruled the Kingdom of Hawai‘i from 1829 to December 1854. Despite the insulting caricature, this Hawaiian king was actually quite well respected; one historian of Hawai‘i praises Kamehameha III for being beloved by the Hawaiian people while instituting progress and transforming the government into a “modern constitutional monarchy worthy of respect from the outside world.”80 Despite these accomplishments, the caption gives only Jonathan’s side of the conversation, thus highlighting his own stereotypical character traits through dialect: “Yer 52  A Laughable Empire

see, Gineral—yer Majesty, I meant to say—I’m sent as a depitation, I am from Young America. We want to buy you eout, we do, stock, lock, and barril. Say, now, what’ll yer take, old feller, for them ere melon patches of Islands, with all the improvements? Yer know yer can’t hold ’em long— must give up. Now, we’ll give yer a nice annuity, and send yer the Notions free, and take the hull consarn off yer hands. Come now, what will yer take?”81 The caption ties these personality traits to the magazine itself, as Jonathan promises to “send yer the Notions free.” Of course, though Kamehameha III is cruelly caricatured in the image, Jonathan is the other butt of the joke: the misspelled dialect speech and his homespun negotiation tactics show him to be overconfident and out of his element as a negotiator. In this sense, this cartoon again parallels Yankee Notions’ treatments of Cuba during this time, as interpreted by Sillin, who argues that the humor periodical “presents silly American fantasies of expansion that initially seem to ask whether the nation is too foolish to manage global authority.” But, Sillin claims, because humor in Yankee Notions assumes that both its joke writers and the periodical’s intended readers are “worldly subjects who can enjoy their parochial countrymen’s blunders,” it ultimately dismisses the anxieties about expansion that it commonly expresses. As a result, jokes that were “ostensibly regional but that mocked US ignorance” actually performed an assertion of “US global authority.”82 In “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands,” the Yankee sharper’s comically acquisitive nature works in the service of Young America and empire building. In referring to “them ere melon patches of Islands,” Jonathan conflates the local (New England) and the foreign (Hawai‘i), humorously domesticating the latter. In this way, the cartoon follows the stereotypical outlines of the comic Yankee character, which is typically a mix of rural naïveté; uncouth, “belligerent charm”; and the sharp, acquisitive nature of a peddler.83 One scholar describes Brother Jonathan as a comic character who “ranked honesty pretty far down on his list of best policies”; in this cartoon, his amiable dissembling and sharp trading are used for imperial ends.84 Jonathan’s upcountry geniality in this cartoon masks, or at least minimizes, his gesture of imperial domination. Lee writes in her essay on humor and empire that, “whereas the bumbling American eiron who outwits the corrupt other belongs to the postcolonial comic tradition, the bumbler’s reverse invasion joins the hegemonic comic tradition of American empire if it successfully remakes someplace else in the American image, The Backwoodsman Abroad  53

representing dominance as good will.”85 Such a rewriting of the American bumbler is precisely what is in play in “Jonathan’s Talk.” Jonathan’s paradoxically homespun imperial urge reflects that of another famous comic Yankee, Seba Smith’s Jack Downing. Like Downing in his imagination of never-ending “annexin’ ” during the US-Mexico War, Jonathan in this cartoon leverages his friendliness and his New England accent to Americanize Hawai‘i by attempting to buy it while representing the purchase as a kind favor, akin to the work of the New England missionaries who preceded him. Of course, unlike many New Englanders in Hawai‘i, Jonathan is not a minister but a trader. But these lines often blurred, as many missionaries and their sons became businessmen in Hawai‘i. In this way, the comic Yankee could be used in part to mock the darker side of the missionary presence in Hawai‘i. The implication that missionaries are, at heart, Yankee swappers intent on “pulling one over” on Hawaiian Natives for profit undergirds the depiction of Jonathan in this cartoon. The Hawaiian king in the picture silently smiles and quaffs a drink while sitting on a barrel, probably a reference to Kamehameha III’s allegedly prodigious alcohol consumption. Additionally, he is racialized as a grinning Sambo figure, a common practice in cartoons in the second half of the nineteenth century. For instance, Noene K. Silva, in Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, examines how cartoonists for the US satire magazine Judge, in caricaturing Queen Lili‘uokalani in the 1890s, borrowed “the ready-made ‘black’ stereotype . . . to signify the queen’s racial difference immediately, a shorthand way to convey that she was essentially, naturally, unfit to rule.”86 “Jonathan’s Talk” draws on the same racialized markers of difference forty years earlier in order to imply the same thing about Kamehameha III. Additionally, he is not afforded a response to Jonathan’s offer. Though the Hawaiian king’s silence denies him the agency of speech, it also gives him a kind of smiling power. That is, the cartoon and dialogue do not show a resolution, and the reader is left to assume that the proffered purchase is unsuccessful. It may be that Kamehameha III is taken aback by Jonathan’s hubris. Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio writes in his essay “All Things Depending: Renewing Interdependence in Oceania,” “I think it is safe to say that for the most part people of Oceania have been unprepared for the voracious appetites that foreigners—Haole, Pakeha, Palagi, Caldoche—have had for our lands and resources. This unwariness is not the 54  A Laughable Empire

result, as many believe, of naïveté, nor merely unfamiliarity with the consumptive power of capitalism. We have not been equipped to deal with foreign adventurism also because we have a fundamentally different way of regarding the world and all of its inhabitants. Frankly, we do not understand a people who think only of themselves.”87 Osorio’s formulation of Pacific Islanders’ epistemological disconnect with Euro-American acquisitiveness highlights another element of the interaction depicted in this cartoon: Jonathan’s “voracious appetite” for land and Kamehameha III’s “unpreparedness” for it. Osorio’s perspective defamiliarizes US acquisitiveness in an age of expansion and imperialism that might otherwise feel somewhat naturalized for contemporary readers of humor periodicals such as Yankee Notions. Two decades later, comic treatments of another Hawaiian king— David Kalākaua—abounded during Kalākaua’s 1874 visit to the United States, which I analyze in greater detail in chapter 4. The New York Arcadian, which obsessed over Kalākaua, ran several comic pieces about him during his time on the East Coast, most of them operating through ethnic jokes. For instance, a short item in “Nick’s Notes” in the December 3, 1874, issue uses a bad pun and racist language to joke about Kalākaua’s drinking habits: “king kalakua (pronounced calico), of the Sandwich Islands, is visiting San Francisco. He is the only piece of black calico that has ever been known to stand repeated washings.”88 After racializing Kalākaua as African American in this joke, the New York Arcadian proceeded to racialize him as Native American later that month. The December 12, 1874, issue includes a longer piece, titled “A Letter from Kalakaua,” a fake epistle to the periodical written in stereotyped Native American dialect, with many mentions of “squaws,” “wigwams,” and so on. In this letter, “Kalakaua” consistently refers to himself as “Kalakaua, son of Kamehameha and descendant of the great Weehawken.” Since Weehawken is the name of a town in New Jersey, this epithet is as a jab at the validity of Kalākaua’s claims to royal lineage, as he was not of the Kamehameha line of descendants. “Kalakaua” goes on to describe his meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant in a ridiculous dialect: “When the fine-carriage did bear me to the wigwam of your greatest chief, Ulysses the Silent, I was received with much beating of tom-toms, while many of the pale faces drank their fire-water and saluted me with, ‘Here’s to the King of the Cannibal Islands!’ ” He later speaks of having “smoked the pipe of peace and buried the hatchet at the foot of the image of the great chief, Washington,” before ending the letter with a plea for white The Backwoodsman Abroad  55

women and alcohol in even more offensive language: “Kalakaua, son of Kamehameha and descendant of the great Weehawken wanted to carry to his sea-fringed shores and to the home of his fathers a white squaw, as the Herald parchment said he ought to. My Chief Kapena he advertise in the Personals, no white squaw reply, only black ns. . . . Me send you black squaw when you want. You come see me when you want. Me find you squaws and everything, but you bring firewater. Kalakaua he like firewater. Me write no more, now. Me write again when in wigwam.”89 These tactlessly racist, disrespectful portrayals of the Hawaiian king, who was in the country in part to secure a trade deal with the United States, depicts him and other Hawaiians as a racialized other, somehow both Native American and African American, and a potential danger to the United States’ white women. As in the description of the “marman” in “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids” and other comic treatments of Pacific Islanders, racial othering in this piece seeks to disqualify Kalākaua from negotiating on equal footing as a capable, sovereign leader. If the inconsistency of US popular print’s racist depictions of Pacific Islanders in comic items seems confusing, it is because most Americans were confused. Arvin explores how “the Western racial construction of Polynesians” at this time reflected “self-referential concerns of the West and white anxieties over their own shifting definitions of whiteness and humanity.” Pseudoscientific racial theories in vogue from the nineteenth to the twentieth century posited that Europeans and Polynesians shared Aryan ancestry. Arvin argues that white settlers in the Pacific sought to situate Polynesians as “almost white” as a way to lodge their own clams of indigeneity, a logic that in turn “naturalizes white settler presence” and justifies those settlers’ “natural ownership of various parts of Polynesia.” But complicating this justificatory logic of whiteness was Euro-Americans’ persistent “anti-blackness,” which led them to attempt to racially differentiate Polynesians (i.e., Tahitians, Marquesans, Samoans, Māori, Hawaiians, etc.) from Micronesians (i.e., Natives of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, West Papua, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, etc.). Of course, as many of the comic examples analyzed in this book reveal, the average American reader did not, or did not know how to, differentiate these groups. Partly as a result, the “logic of possession” via Polynesian whiteness was thoroughly haunted by “Western fears about Polynesian blackness.”90 Such haunting is apparent in the often confused, self-contradictory racial depictions of various Pacific Islanders in popular comic discourse of the nineteenth century. 56  A Laughable Empire

All of these works of humor engage in a settler colonialist tactic of primitivism whose logic insinuates that Pacific Islanders somehow do not deserve to remain in control of their land and resources. Dean Itsuji Saranillio, in the essay “The Insurrection of Subjugated Futures,” explains that settler colonialism functions by seeking “to replace Indigenous peoples with settlers who are discursively constituted as superior and thus more deserving of these contested lands and resources.” Saranillio argues that primitivism “creates a settler alibi” that deems “Indigenous way[s] to organize society” to be “outmoded” and therefore “destined for dissolution and elimination.”91 As the preceding examples demonstrate, humor can create such alibis through playful hostility that denies its very hostility because of its playfulness, even as it convinces its audience to buy into the logic of its aggressive stereotypes. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Sigmund Freud claims that jokes play a role in “hostile aggressiveness” by seeking to “bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation, just as on other occasions we ourselves have often been bribed by an innocent joke into overestimating the substance of a statement expressed jokingly. This is brought out with perfect aptitude in the common phrase ‘die Lacher auf seine Seite ziehen [to bring the laughers over to our side].’ ”92 Freud here explains how humor can affect its audiences’ attitudes regarding its butts; one does not tend to investigate deeply the factual claims or associative logic of a joke or other piece of humor. Paul Lewis, in Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature, builds on Freud’s analyses of jokes to explain the psychological process of comic persuasion in literary humor. He argues that humor operates subconsciously, “as a seductive and largely fallacious appeal” that leads us to identify with some groups and disidentify with others. When we laugh at a joke’s butt, Lewis contends, we necessarily see it as “ridiculous” and worth laughing at. Some aggressive humor goes even further, assuming or implying “that certain people or groups of people are less than human.” Such humor, according to Lewis, can “advance destructive ideologies and political programs.”93 Even humor that is less outwardly hostile and dehumanizing than the New York Arcadia’s treatment of Kalākaua can support settler colonialist projects through subtexts that imply imperial domination. For instance, an 1875 piece, titled “A Bean-Eater on a Rampage,” focuses less on critiquing Pacific Islanders and more on a comic Yankee exporting The Backwoodsman Abroad  57

northeastern culture and making shrewd business deals in the Pacific arena. It appeared in Wild Oats: An Illustrated Journal of Fun, Satire, Burlesque, Hits at Persons and Events of the Day, a biweekly journal that ran from 1872 to 1876 and specialized in “country humor” and “localist items.”94 “A Bean-Eater on a Rampage” begins by claiming that Bostonians are superior to all others because of their love of baked beans: “No sir; all our literary and musical genius; all our political influence and moral power; our aesthetic culture, our excellent police force, our new license law, our horse railroad system, and, in fact, everything in which we are superior to other cities, is due wholly, solely, and entirely, to baked beans and brown bread.” The narrator, “Tristram Shandy,” then tells an anecdote heard from his cousin, a ship captain “who has just returned from a voyage to the Fiji Islands.” The ship captain told him about a Boston-based ship in port in Fiji “with a large quantity of beans, and that a Boston man showed the Islanders how to cook them.” Not only did this act remake Fiji in the New England image, much like what Jonathan attempts in Hawai‘i in “Jonathan’s Talk,” but it also led to profits for an acquisitive Yankee peddler because “the captain of the ship disposed of all his beans at a handsome figure.” As with most nineteenth-century comic treatments of Fiji, the anecdote includes a joke on cannibalism. “Tristram Shandy” explains that “the Islanders were delighted, as they considered baked beans and missionary a great improvement on the latter article eaten plain; because the beans give an improved flavor to the missionary, while at the same time the missionary imparts a delicious aroma to the beans. He says that the King won’t eat anything else now, and that he is continually howling for ‘baked beans, plenty o’ missionary with ’em. No pork!’ ”95 Part of the humor here stems from the Fijians’ continued commitment to eating missionaries, even as they adapt to and enjoy a new food brought to their shores through imperialism and cultural exchange. The details about beans giving “an improved flavor to the missionary, while at the same time the missionary imparts a delicious aroma to the beans” are common to nineteenth-century US cannibal jokes, many of which juxtapose the shocking savagery of man-eating with the banal details of food preparation, as I explore in more detail in chapter 3. But the bean-hawking Yankee sharper in “A Bean-Eater on a Rampage” also comes in for mockery in this comic story. Here, as in many of the jokes analyzed in this chapter, both Pacific Islanders and Americans are stereotyped and teased (or worse). This derives in part 58  A Laughable Empire

from the ambiguity inherent to humorous irony, which as often as not tends to rebound back on the joker as well. The result is that, even if these jokes seek to erase or demean Pacific Islanders through stereotyping and comic violence, the laughable foibles of the American characters—be they greed, incompetence, overconfidence, or some combination of these traits—push readers to question their motives as well as the validity of their depictions of Pacific Islanders. In this way, the foolishness, bloodthirstiness, or ridiculousness of the recognizably American comic types in these jokes sow the seeds of their own undoing or, at the very least, muddle their imperialist messages through the multidirectional mockery of comic ambiguity. Sam Patch in the South Sea: Sam Slick’s Pacific

Another, more famous comic Yankee in the Pacific was Thomas Haliburton’s Nova Scotian wit Sam Slick, who in the sketch collection The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slicksville, first published in 1836, tells of his whaling adventures in the Pacific and his visit to the Dutch colony of Java. Sam Slick narrates colonial violence via the story of a Dutch governor’s attempt to quell a Native rebellion in Indonesia, led by Tousand Teyvils, a Native chief described in the exaggerated terms of a Crockett-like hero of the humor of the old Southwest: “Sure enough there he was, a regular snorter by buth and edication, a tall, strappin,’ devilish, handsome feller, with a cap and plumes stuck sideways like on his head. . . . He had a most audacious eye, I tell you: it looked exactly as it was forged out of lightnin’; it warn’t easy to look into it, that’s a fact. It seemed to say, I am a pickaxe, and will dig you out of your hole like a badger, I hope I may be gouged, if I don’t.” When Tousand Teyvils shakes the governor’s hand, as Slick describes it in his Yankee dialect, “he squeezed his cornstealers till the old general began to dance like a bear on red hot iron”; when the governor “got clear of him, he blowed his fingers as if they was scalded, and howled and moaned like a wounded dog. It was pitiable to see him, and a caution to behold.” Sam Slick makes these observations at a dinner to which the Dutch governor has invited Tousand Teyvils in a veiled attempt to sabotage and capture him. Based on his descriptions of both leaders, it is clear that Slick is more impressed with Tousand Teyvils than with the Dutch governor. Eventually, the other Dutch colonists come to agree with him, turning on the governor and saying, “Tousand Teyvils wotth a hundred The Backwoodsman Abroad  59

such old fools and knaves!”96 As a Yankee and a sailor, Slick demonstrates a pointed disdain for European-style colonialism and an attendant admiration for larger-than-life figures—like Tousand Teyvils—who, even if they are Native Indonesians, shape men and nature to their wills. For Sam Slick, Tousand Teyvils fits the mold of North American heroes like Sam Patch, the “Yankee Leaper” he celebrates elsewhere in The Clockmaker. Sam Patch was a real-life stunt devil who made his living jumping off tall things, including Niagara Falls, until he died during a jump into the Genesee River in 1829. As Daniel Royot has noted, when The Clockmaker was first published in 1836, the US public remained familiar with Sam Patch and his legendary leaps.97 Slick mentions Sam Patch when suggesting that he be recruited to “dive down and stick a torpedo in the bottom of the province [Nova Scotia] and blow it up; or if that won’t do, send for some of our steam tow-boats from our great Eastern cities, and tow it out to sea.” He also tells a myth about Sam Patch remaining alive, disappearing after a dive off the Niagara Falls but reappearing in the Pacific: Captain Enoch Wentworth, of the Susy Ann whaler saw him in the South Sea. Why, says Capt. Enoch to him, why, Sam, says he, how on airth did you get here? I thought you was drowned at the Canadian lines. Why, says he, I didn’t get on airth here at all, but I came right slap through it. In that are Niagara dive, I went so everlasting deep, I thought it was just as short to come up tother side, so out I came in those parts. If I dont take the shine off the Sea Serpent, when I get back to Boston, then my name’s not Sam Patch.98 An 1838 article titled “Yankeeana” in the London and Westminster Review, reprinted in the United States in The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, cites this passage as a characteristic piece of American humor. The essay says of Haliburton’s Sam Patch anecdote, “The curiosity of the public regarding the peculiar nature of American humour, seems to have been easily satisfied with the application of the all-sufficing word exaggeration. . . . Extravagance is a characteristic of American humour; though very far from being a peculiarity of it.”99 But the Sam Slick tale is also emblematic of the connections between nineteenth-century American humor and imperialism. Royot reads this passage as a “striking example of Sam Slick’s imperialistic urges,” in which Sam Patch embodies “Manifest Destiny.”100 The Pacific here is a blank, mythical 60  A Laughable Empire

space in which a mythical character performs mythical feats, which he brags about in exaggerated Yankee dialect, thus emphasizing his Americanness even as he floats through the Pacific. Just as the fictional Sam Patch reappeared years after his death in the South Seas, this anecdote reappeared a decade later in another medium. The jest book The American Joe Miller printed a version in 1847, under the title “Antipodean Diver.”101 Other than removing the context of Sam Slick’s discussion about Nova Scotia, the American Joe Miller version is nearly identical to the original. Its decontextualized appearance in a jest book alongside other jokes is a testament to the rampant circulation of comic texts throughout different media in mid-nineteenth-century print culture. Jest books, humor periodicals, and comic almanacs all trafficked in similar (and, sometimes, exactly the same) jokes, sketches, and other comic material. The 1839 American Joe Miller, for instance, contains no less than six Davy Crockett stories. P. M. Zall explains that jest books “copied not only from one another but, in a happy symbiotic cycle, copied from and were copied by almanacs, newspapers, and periodicals.”102 Such republication reveals the endurance of certain strands of American humor as well as humor’s power to reinforce attitudes and stereotypes through repetition. But these repeated jokes also came to mean different things as they were reprinted and repurposed in different print venues, speaking to different historical circumstances and current events. I explore this phenomenon in its Pacific context in detail in chapter 2.

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Comic Currents

Polynesians in Periodicals

2.

Whereas chapter 1 demonstrates the presence of Americans’ humorous interpretations and willful misinterpretations of the Pacific world in popular media, this chapter measures the ubiquity of such humor by tracing the circulation and textual lives of jokes and anecdotes about the Pacific that made the rounds in mid-nineteenth-century US newspapers and magazines. Identifying which jokes and bon mots are reprinted in periodicals, and how they are presented to readers in those periodicals, offers a useful register of editors’ and their readers’ comic interests, which in turn reveals valuable information about how Americans understood the Pacific world through the jokes they read in and repeated from the popular press. For instance, when jokes about Pacific islands and Islanders appeared alongside more serious news or information about them, this mixture may have led readers to envision Pacific islands and Islanders as, at the same time, curiosities in need of explanation and raw material for American humor. But the comic impact and meanings of such jokes, as I demonstrate in what follows, evolve with their shifting contexts as they are reprinted in different newspapers and magazines at different times, in different places, in different sections, and adjacent to different content. Tracing the shifting publication contexts of such humor offers insights into how the press reflected and molded US attitudes toward the Pacific and its peoples through the humor that it often reprinted. To accomplish this, I trace the periodical journey of four distinct, and distinctly popular, “viral jokes,” a term I have adapted from Ryan Cordell

et al.’s Viral Texts Project, for oft-reprinted humor in nineteenth-​century newspapers, periodicals, joke books, and other popular media. The first uses a Yankee character to satirize the seeming limitlessness of westward expansion, the second uses an island setting to mock a missionary and the radically different epistemologies of Americans and Polynesians, the third is an anecdote recounting the antics of a Native Hawaiian working on a US fishing boat, and the fourth is a joke about the Hawaiian language. I close the chapter by analyzing reprints of the most popular excerpts from Mark Twain’s famous Sandwich Islands lectures. Collectively, the viral jokes studied here enact many key tropes appearing in much of the nineteenth-century humor studied throughout this book: specifically, lampoons of the more ludicrous aspects of the imperial project in the Pacific, racist mockery leveraged as a comic attempt to situate Pacific Islanders as other, and cross-cultural examples of Pacific Islanders using humor in their encounters and interactions with Euro-Americans. The circulation in print of jokes showcases nineteenth-century ideas and attitudes because each subsequent reprint holds the possibility of reshaping meaning to fit a different moment for a different audience. Meredith McGill writes in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 that “unauthorized reprinting makes publication distinctly legible as an independently signifying act. In the multiplicity of their formats and points of origin, and in the staggered temporality of their production, reprinted texts call attention to the repeated acts of articulation by which culture and its audiences are constituted.”1 Applying McGill’s insights on reprinting in general to jokes in particular allows us to pinpoint shifting meanings in humor over time and space as well as through the ever-changing perspectives of the readers of those jokes. As McGill’s and Cordell’s work on reprints demonstrates, the phenomenon of viral humor is not new: in fact, nineteenth-century viral jokes reached a mass audience in ways similar to modern-day viral texts. The very term “viral texts” offers a useful analogy to twenty-first-century digital dissemination practices in which memes, “listicles,” and sites that aggregate content from elsewhere circulate through the internet in ways that go viral. Like modern-day viral texts, many of the most oft-reprinted texts in nineteenth-century newspapers, as identified by the Viral Text Project, are usually quite brief “and offer little context about their aims or composition.”2 Jokes and humorous bon mots are prime examples of the short, digestible content that is ripe for virality because they can fill columns without additional context. Additionally, though jokes often Comic Currents  63

traffic in specific cultural referents, their identifiable structure and reliance on verbal ambiguity make them quite adaptable to different times, places, and audiences. Keyword searches in periodical databases can tell us which jokes were printed over and over, and subsequent close readings of those reprints reveal how those jokes evolved from one reprinting to another. Lara Langer Cohen explains that print in the mid-nineteenth century was not “inert” or “fixed”; rather, she explains, “print was more likely to invest antebellum texts with mobility than to fasten them in place.” When editors reprinted material from other printed sources, “writers often found their words altered, cut, rearranged, or attributed to others, or had unfamiliar words attributed to them.”3 In this way, identifying oft-reprinted jokes also reveals editorial practices and the social attitudes and public preoccupations that they influenced and that influenced them. Editors, Bob Nicholson writes, “played a critical role in determining the circulation of individual jokes and influenced the form in which they were presented to readers.”4 Tracing the transmission of jokes in the culture of reprinting thus helps to reconstruct larger circulation patterns and practices of scissors-and-paste journalism in nineteenth-​century US print culture. In a study of popular poetry that was reprinted widely in nineteenth-​ century US newspapers, Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen revivify the nineteenth-century term “fugitive verses” to describe “the textual and authorial fluidity of newspaper poetry” that circulated anonymously or with disputed authorship through print networks. For Cordell and Mullen, “fugitivity” highlights ways in which these ephemeral or occasional poetic texts are essentially remade as they “circulate through networks of editors and readers outside poets’ control.”5 Adapting this terminology to apply to widely reprinted newspaper jokes, we can identify examples of “fugitive humor” that, in reprint after reprint, adapted to different historical moments, audiences, and even rhetorical purposes. Tracing reprints of fugitive humor over multiple decades demonstrates how ideas and ideologies circulated and evolved through the culture of reprinting not only in historically privileged genres like editorials, transcribed congressional debates, or poems but also in seeming ephemera like column-filling jokes. We can approach collected reprints of a piece of fugitive humor through both distant readings (i.e., ones that quantify circulation patterns) and close readings (i.e., ones that consider how the joke is presented, how the text changes, and how its meaning shifts in different publication contexts).

64  A Laughable Empire

What I hope to add to McGill’s, Cordell and Mullen’s, and Nicholson’s innovative approaches to periodical reprints, as applied to multiple iterations of the jokes that I detail in what follows, is a new way of reading those reprints. To trace these evolutions and tease out shifting comic meanings and their import, I have developed a methodology for studying reprints that combines quantitative and qualitative methods. First, through keyword searches in several newspaper and periodical databases, I have identified (and counted) some of the most-reprinted jokes and comic tidbits about the Pacific. Then I have considered the different ways that periodical matter engages with these jokes in different versions, on the basis of both the jokes’ placement within the issues themselves and the contents of nearby news items. Why bother spinning out readings of the publication contexts of multiple reprintings? As the media historians Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone have argued, “Readers do not read bits of text and pictures. What they read is the paper, the tangible object as a whole.”6 Therefore, in order to approximate the experience of nineteenth-century readers who imbibed this literature during the “print explosion,” scholars, too, must read “the paper, the tangible object as a whole.”7 This calls for a methodology that, for lack of a snappy neologism, I call contextual close reading, that is, reading and interpreting not just the joke itself but also, like its original readers, the articles, ads, editorials, and other printed matter that appear alongside it in the pages of the newspapers in which it was published. The result is, I hope, a richly textured horizon of meaning that demonstrates the ever-changing cultural work that may be accomplished by even the dumbest jokes. “Two Hundred Miles West of the Pacific Shore”: A Yankee Boast

To demonstrate the methodology I have just outlined, in this section, I trace the periodical journey of an illustrative piece of nineteenth-century fugitive humor: a joke—sometimes titled “A Yankee Boast” and sometimes “Not to Be Outdone”—that depicts a friendly argument between the United States and Britain. (For consistency’s sake, I refer to the joke as “A Yankee Boast” unless discussing a specific reprint with a different title.) Though it probably first appeared in the Boston Transcript, the earliest version I found appeared in the December 24, 1855, Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch:

Comic Currents  65

A yankee boast: A correspondent furnishes the following report of a conversation which recently took place in a store in Boston. He says: An innocent and pure-minded Jonathan, in a warm argument with a John Bull, on our national institutions, was endeavoring to floor his antagonist who had sneeringly remarked that, “fortunately the Americans couldn’t go farther westward than the Pacific shore.” Yankee searched his pregnant brain for an instant, and triumphantly replied, “Why, good gracious, they’re already levelling the Rocky Mountains and carting the dirt out West; I had a letter last week from my cousin, who is living two hundred miles west of the Pacific shore—on made land.8 In this joke, “made land” refers to people-constructed acreage extending into water; “John Bull” is the personification of England; “Jonathan” refers to Brother Jonathan, the personification of the United States but also a regional stereotype of New Englanders, as discussed in chapter 1. In 1931, Constance Rourke described the nineteenth-century stereotype of the Yankee as including the seemingly antithetical characteristics of the sharper and the bumpkin: “Half bravado, half cockalorum, this Yankee revealed the traits considered deplorable by the British travelers; he was indefatigably rural, sharp, uncouth, witty. Here were the manners of the Americans! Peddling, swapping, practical joking, might have been national preoccupations.”9 As Rourke’s description implies, the term “Yankee” always held the possibility of signaling a regional (northeastern) or national character and sometimes both. From the eighteenth century onward, southerners used “Yankee” as a pejorative for northerners, while to Britons and others, the term was a national epithet describing any American.10 Indeed, the Yankee in “A Yankee Boast” seems to inhabit both roles simultaneously. Early incarnations of the joke are set “in a store in Boston” and introduce the Yankee as “innocent and pure-minded Jonathan,” which reminds readers of the regional stereotype of the Yankee. But because Jonathan is arguing with “John Bull,” the personification of Great Britain, about national boundaries and the American continent’s boundlessness, he is also simultaneously a national character representative of the entire United States. The joke’s humor derives from putting traits of old southwestern humor—most notably its aggressive exaggeration about frontiersmen’s 66  A Laughable Empire

superhuman abilities to conquer their natural surroundings—in the service of westward expansion and empire building. Its popularity in newspapers and magazines probably derives from its comic enactment of Manifest Destiny and its connection to Anglophobia, which stemmed in part from a territorial dispute in the 1840s between the United States and Great Britain over land in the Pacific Northwest. Other versions of the joke end with, “The Englishman gave in” or “The Englishman sloped.” Knocking down the Rocky Mountains to extend the physical space of the North American continent, specifically for further US settlement, literalizes the drive to “overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions,” as John L. O’Sullivan famously put it in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845.11 But the joke also makes clear that Americans’ imperial ambitions did not stop at the Pacific shore. The Yankee’s description of artificially extending the United States into the Pacific allegorizes Americans’ interest in the Pacific during a time when Pacific expansion in general, and the annexation of Hawai‘i in particular, were hot topics. In fact, the joke first appeared in print during the same month that a trade reciprocity agreement between Hawai‘i and the United States was submitted to the Senate. But the joke’s content was also general enough that it did not just speak to that particular historical moment. On the contrary, American editors deemed it important enough to reprint the joke over 105 times (the number that I have found through keyword searching in periodical databases and open-source newspaper repositories), mostly between 1855 and 1867. The joke made the rounds of newspapers, magazines, and jest books, including in such diverse outlets as Moore’s Rural New Yorker, Sailor’s Magazine, Irish Miscellany, Littell’s Living Age, the story paper Flag of Our Union, small-town newspapers like the Mining Register and Pottsville (PA) Emporium, and William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper the Liberator. It even appeared twenty-five hundred miles west of the Pacific shore that the joke describes, in the Honolulu paper the Pacific Commercial Advertiser (in 1856) and in the missionary paper the Honolulu Friend (in 1859). The joke, in its various incarnations, was presented to readers in a variety of different ways, on the front page or the fourth page, in sections of miscellany with names like “Fact and Fancy” or “Wit and Humor” or “News Items,” at the bottom of a page as column filler, and, eventually, as evidence of American ingenuity in a serious editorial celebrating westward expansion. Comic Currents  67

Viewing all 105 reprints as a data set unveils geographical, temporal, and rhetorical trends and evolution in “A Yankee Boast” that considering just one appearance of it would not. But applying the methodologies of distant reading opens up new avenues of analysis that then require further close reading and interpretation. As Franco Moretti notes in his theoretical treatise on the practice of distant reading, Graphs, Maps, Trees, to make sense of data from quantitative research, scholars must “abandon the quantitative universe, and turn to morphology: evoke form, in order to explain figures.”12 I undertake such explanations in what follows. Identifying temporal clusters of republications can reveal when a joke was popular and when it was not and at which historical moments it did and did not speak to editors’ and readers’ preoccupations. Pinpointing publication clusters is an example of how “computational exploration” of reprinted texts surfaces previously hidden patterns.13 In the case of “A Yankee Boast,” such dating reveals that the joke would make the rounds for a couple months, getting copied and reprinted from exchange papers, and then disappear for a year or more before reemerging. The first cluster, beginning December 24, 1855, and ending February 26, 1856, contains thirty-three reprints in less than two months. Then the joke mostly disappeared for nearly two years. Another cluster emerged at the beginning of 1858, with thirty-eight reprints between January and July of that year. Then the joke retreated to the shadows again. In 1867, however, the same year that the United States annexed Alaska, the joke returned and was reprinted nine times, several instances of which appeared in excerpts of a New York Evening Post column that references the joke to extoll westward expansion.14 From there, it mostly disappeared again, with only four reprints between 1868 and 1877, the final one an appearance in the 1877 Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom, a book that itself was reprinted in 1897.15 (See the appendix for tables detailing exact reprint counts over time.) One possible explanation for clusters of reprints just before and just after the American Civil War is that the joke’s unifying jingoism performs a convergence of North and South—at the expense of Great Britain—based on a shared national dream of empire. The joke’s talltale celebration of American prowess and ingenuity elided the fraught politics of expansion in the late 1850s, when debates about statehood inevitably became debates about the extension of slavery, and in the late 1860s, during Reconstruction, when westward emigration accelerated once again after having slowed during the war. 68  A Laughable Empire

Whatever the historical reasons for these clusters, tallies of the rise and fall of reprints show that, for short bursts of time, reprints led to reprints. Most likely, newspaper editors would see the joke in one or more of the exchange papers they received from other editors, decide that it would entertain their readers or just fill out a column, and choose to print it in their own newspapers, which would again be taken up by other editors, in a recursive process. Then, when editors stopped choosing to reprint the joke, it would no longer be readily available for others to cull, until some editor eventually revived it as seeming pertinent to news or, again, simply as column filler, and the process would repeat, though, it seems, with less intensity than the original bursts of reprints. Viewing the reprints as a data set also discloses geographical patterns of cities, states, and regions that were most likely to reprint the joke and when. Tracking publication locations offers insights into circulation patterns and editorial exchanges as well as regional preferences for humor. Cordell notes that because of the system of exchange papers, certain newspapers—some of them “in understudied cities in the South and Midwest”—served as “information brokers” through which “popular newspaper snippets were likely to have circulated” before spreading “to the publications on their exchange lists.”16 Within the reprinting clusters of “A Yankee Boast,” bunches of reprints appeared over a short period of time in the same city or region: five reprints in Louisiana papers between January 7 and January 27, 1856; five in Boston between February 20 and April 10, 1858; and six in North and South Carolina papers in one month, between March 24 and April 25, 1858. Such geographical bunching implies that editors probably read the joke in rival or neighbor papers and decided to reprint it in theirs. Tallying up which states reprinted the joke the most shows, not surprisingly, that it appeared most often in states with robust publication centers. Massachusetts leads with twelve reprints, followed by New York with ten and Pennsylvania with nine. But the joke also made the rounds in some midwestern, western, and southern states. There are eight reprints from Tennessee, six from Ohio, six from Louisiana, five from North Carolina, five from South Carolina, four from California, four from Indiana, and four from Iowa. (See the appendix for a table detailing reprints per state.) But because efforts to digitize newspapers and magazines have been uneven to say the least, it would be unwise to trust these figures blindly. Cordell, whose Viral Texts Project offers a powerful tool for studying reprint networks, admits that the Library of Comic Currents  69

Congress’s Chronicling America database of newspapers, which provides the ever-expanding corpus that the Viral Text Project uses, includes “few newspapers from . . . print centers” and that its “network model will change dramatically” when it “incorporate[s] more data from New York and similar print centers.”17 The distribution of reprints of “A Yankee Boast” per state, then, might simply signify which states have the most digitized periodicals in the repositories that I searched at the time that I searched. Looking through the reprints list also reveals that several newspapers printed the joke multiple times over the years. The Boston Herald, for instance, ran it in 1858 and 1864, once titled “Not to Be Outdone” and once with no header.18 The Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal ran it three times, in 1856, 1864, and 1867.19 The Raleigh Weekly North Carolina Standard and Raleigh Semi-Weekly Standard ran the joke twice in 1856 under the title “Going West” and once in 1858 under the title “Not to Be Outdone.”20 Gleason’s Literary Companion printed it in 1864 as “Yankee Progress” and without a title in 1866, and the related Gleason’s Monthly Companion reprinted the titleless version in 1874.21 As the changing titles show, later versions of these jokes tend to follow the wording then making the periodical rounds instead of the verbiage that these journals previously used. This variation indicates that editors were copying the joke not from their own back issues but rather from other papers, which underscores just how integral the practice of reprinting items from exchange papers was in shaping the contents of newspapers. Comparing transcriptions of the 105 print appearances of “A Yankee Boast” demonstrates how the joke changed over time or sometimes reverted back to older versions. Noting such changes can be fruitful because, according to Nicholson, tracking the circulation of jokes shows that editors “reshaped” the jokes they culled from the newspapers and periodicals on their desks, sometimes writing a header or an introduction and sometimes modifying them for their own audiences and space constraints.22 In the case of “A Yankee Boast,” early versions introduce the joke with, “A correspondent furnishes the following report of a conversation which recently took place in a store in Boston. He says: . . .” This preface is retained in the majority of the twenty-five or so reprints over the next month. But reprints beginning in February 1856 drop the introduction about the correspondent and head straight into the dispute. The joke is now sometimes titled “Not to Be Outdone” or occasionally 70  A Laughable Empire

“A Great Country,” “Going West,” or “Further West.” It peters out in the ensuing months, and when the joke resurfaces again in November 1857, it has a new addition at its end: “The Englishman gave in!” Most of the thirty-three reprints I found from 1858 include this tagline or a version of it, such as, “The Englishman caved.” But the Englishman stopped giving in eventually, since only two of the twenty-seven reprints after 1858 retain that part of the joke. Though these changes are minor, they evince a kind of print-circulation game of “telephone,” in which reprints of the joke hew closely but not always exactly to the wording of versions contemporaneously making the rounds. As a result, the joke changes— and sometimes changes back—slowly over the years. But the most stunning change in “A Yankee Boast” is not one of wording but rather how, after a decade in circulation as a joke, it was eventually co-opted and redeployed for serious ends. A July 30, 1867, New York Evening Post editorial titled “The Extent and Growth of Our Country” ends with the joke as evidence of Americans’ mastery of the continent. The article’s final paragraph reads: Our population, reinforced by an enormous immigration from Europe, is spreading over the continent with marvelous rapidity. There is no longer a “far West”; the arts and customs of civilization are already naturalized over nearly the whole of the great region through which Lewis and Clark journeyed at the hazard of their lives, little more than half a century ago, and which was then as utterly unknown as a great part of Africa. The Rocky Mountains no longer oppose their barrier to our progress; the western frontiersman ridicules them instead of fearing them: and a western wit expresses, in the peculiar manner of the men who “sleep on the prairie and drink out of rivers,” his contempt for such slight obstructions by the remark: “We are already levelling the Rocky Mountains and carting the dirt out west; I had a letter last week from my cousin, who is living two hundred miles west of the Pacific shore, on made land!”23 Here, the punch line, and only the punch line, of a joke that had been circulating on and off for ten years is transformed into the kicker of a page 1 editorial about Manifest Destiny. Similarly, the green Yankee of the original joke has morphed into a wizened “western frontiersman.” While the punch line’s structure signals to the reader its humorous intent, Comic Currents  71

the editorial sets it up with a serious assertion. Specifically, the claim that “the Rocky Mountains no longer oppose their barrier to our progress; the western frontiersman ridicules them instead of fearing them” is presented as evidence in support of the editorial’s claim about the US population “spreading over the continent with marvelous rapidity.” This evolution implies that the joke had come both to express and to influence newspaper writers’ and readers’ views of westward expansion. Several papers reprinted an excerpt of this editorial soon after its publication. The Wheeling (WV) Daily Intelligencer on August 3 and the Columbia (SC) Daily Phoenix on August 9 reprinted only the paragraph I have quoted, with the joke at its end.24 The Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, which had printed the full joke in December 1855 and April 1864, reprinted just the punch line of the joke on August 5, with the wording as it appeared in the Post.25 For these papers’ editors, then, the joke captured the essence of the entire editorial “The Extent and Growth of Our Country,” and the reprinted punch line stood in synecdochally as its thesis. As evinced in the Post editorial’s co-option of “A Yankee Boast” as well as in the excerpts that other editors chose to reprint of that editorial, tracking the circulation of viral jokes shows humor’s unique power to distill, popularize, and even drive important contemporary political conversations. “Made Land”: Contextual Close Reading

In addition to applying quantitative methods, attending to the shifting meanings produced over time in multiple publication contexts through contextual close readings of these reprints gives further clues to the joke’s resilience and continuing topicality. For example, in the Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch from Christmas Eve 1855, just below “A Yankee Boast” is a news item titled “The Celebration of the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” a piece about the “anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims.” The placement of these pieces juxtaposes the founding mythos of Plymouth Rock with the Pacific frontier and situates Jonathan as continuing the work begun by his Puritan forbears.26 Comparing this contextualized reading with those of the scores of other reprints demonstrates how a joke’s meaning shifts in disparate editorial environments on the basis of its collocation with other news items. In noting interesting juxtapositions between the joke and other editorial matter, I do not mean to conjure editors’ intentions in selecting 72  A Laughable Empire

texts and placing copy. Instead, reading the joke alongside pertinent neighbors in various periodicals helps to re-create a horizon of changing meanings for periodical readers. To put it another way, considering each reprint’s unique publication environment as subtly shading the joke’s possible interpretations itself constructs a kind of “made land” for critical analysis. By this I mean that contextual close readings create a space for sociopolitically informed interpretations that are simply not available to a reading of the joke alone, divorced from the context of the information and opinions surrounding it in newsprint. Such comparative readings reveal several persistent themes shared by different versions of “A Yankee Boast” and nearby articles or items: specifically, comic and serious comparisons between the United States and Great Britain, uses of Yankee and/or southwestern humor, observations on the vastness of the American continent and its natural features, and commentary on westward expansion and the political battles that expansion engendered. Sometimes several of these themes appeared together in the same issue, on the same page. For instance, in January 1856, the Athens (TN) Post includes on page 1 the joke alongside pieces exhibiting three of these themes, including an article on proposed US imperialism (in Nicaragua), a piece on US-Britain relations, and a bon mot about the prodigiousness of the United States’ natural features. In the reprints I analyzed, these themes do not always adhere to a particular cluster of reprints over a short period of time. Rather, and rather surprisingly, they demonstrate broader patterns of mid-nineteenth-​century editors’ and readers’ social, scientific, and geopolitical preoccupations. The joke’s relative elasticity allows it to mean something different to readers who consume it alongside one or more of these recurring themes. Barbed comparisons between the United States and Great Britain appear near “A Yankee Boast” in several reprints of the joke. In these cases, the rivalry between John Bull and Brother Jonathan in the joke serves to mirror and emphasize those comparisons. For instance, in April 1858, the Belmont (OH) Chronicle features an item, credited to the Harrisburg Telegraph, in the column next to “Not to Be Outdone” and titled “Republican Simplicity,” which describes the wedding of ex-​president Millard Fillmore, at which “only forty guests were present.” “What a contrast,” the article proceeds, “between the marriage of an American ex-President—the proudest position in the world—and that of an English Princess!—Is there an American who does not feel proud of his country and its institutions when viewing the simplicity of the one Comic Currents  73

and the tomfoolery of the other?”27 The combination of this derisive comparison with Jonathan’s simple but clear one-upsmanship of John Bull in the adjacent “Not to Be Outdone” projects an amplified sense of US pride as well as differentiation from the mother country on the first page of this small-town Ohio paper. But sometimes such patriotic pride was not quite as appreciated. In July 1867, the Brooklyn Circular printed the joke under the title “Going Ahead” right next to a section titled “News Items.” A page earlier, readers could find a column comparing the United States and Great Britain, with an admonishment to the Brother Jonathan character to learn “a little modesty,” modesty that is clearly not on display in the joke on the ensuing page.28 In some newspapers reprinting “A Yankee Boast,” adjacent material’s descriptions of US-Britain relations compare the relative sizes of the nations. For instance, just below an untitled version of the joke in the Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom (1877, 1897) is a bon mot about an Irishman describing the United States. He says, “I am told that ye might roll England thru it, an’ it wouldn’t make a dint in the ground; there’s fresh-water oceans inside that ye might dround old Ireland in; an’ as for Scotland, ye might stick it in a corner an’ ye’d niver be able to find it out, except it might be the smell o’ whiskey.”29 In this item, the Irishman, presumably an immigrant to the United States, extols the United States by expressing amazement at its size in comparison to the countries of the United Kingdom, all of which are dwarfed in scope. In doing so, it doubles down on “A Yankee Boast’s” conflation of US size with US accomplishments. Indeed, many outlets reprinting “A Yankee Boast” feature items near it expressing similar marvel about the size of the United States as well as everything in it, including its flora and fauna. In such cases, the joke’s simultaneous ironic understatement (its dry declaration that “they’re already levelling the Rocky Mountains and carting the dirt out West”) and exaggeration (its reference to “two hundred miles west of the Pacific shore”) are lent credibility by this juxtaposition. For instance, in the February 22, 1856, issue of the Mineral Point (WI) Tribune, right beneath “Not to Be Outdone” is an item titled “A Mormon Grasshopper,” which describes a grasshopper from Utah that “was exhibited in New York last week, which measured five inches in length!” The Tribune comments, “No wonder they had short crops in that territory.”30 Again, this expressed amazement at the size of bugs in the far West tracks with the nearby joke’s casual invocation of the grand scale of the western US. The Athens (TN) Post’s “Length of the Mississippi,” on the same 74  A Laughable Empire

page as the joke, utters similar awe at the grandiosity of nature in the United States when it cites the Boston Transcript’s description of “the total length of the Mississippi and all its tributaries as fifty-one thousand miles, which is more than twice the equatorial circumference of the earth.”31 This assertion of fact comports with the joke’s more ludicrous accounting of the Rocky Mountains being repurposed as ever-​ expanding seashore. Comic exaggeration and the immensity of the United States’ natural features tended to go hand in hand in nineteenth-century American humor. In 1882, H. R. Haweis characterized “the vastness of American nature and the smallness of man, especially European man,” as a major theme of American humor; Americans’ “general ability to ‘whip creation,’ ” he wrote, “turns largely upon the bigness of their rivers, mountains, and prairies, and the superior enterprise generated by these immensities.”32 This tactic is evident in a piece of southwestern humor sharing a column with “A Yankee Boast” in the Clearfield (PA) Raftsman’s Journal. “One of the Speeches” introduces Joe Kollick, a politician who was “ ‘one of ‘em’ on the stump. A double barreled throat, and lungs as large as two bushel baskets, enabled him to electrify his constituents up to a fighting point in less time than it would take for a Susquehanna raft to go over Niagara Falls.” The squib then gives “an extract” of one of his supposed speeches, “for the sake of posterity”: “Fellow-Citizens!”—You might jist as well try to dry up the Atlantic ocean with a broom straw, or draw this ’ere stump from under my feet with a harnessed gad-fly, as to convince me that I ain’t gwine to be elected this heat. My opponent don’t stand a chance—not a sniff. Why he ain’t as intellectual as a common sized shad. Fellers, I am a hull team with two bull dogs under the wagon and a tar bucket—I am. If there’s anybody this side of whar the sun begins to blister the earth that kin wallop me, let him show himself—I’m ready. Boy’s I go in for the American Eagle—claws, stars, stripes and all, and may I burst my everlastin’ button holes, ef I don’t knock down, drag out, and gouge everybody as denies it.33 In this Crockett-like address, Kollick and the piece’s frame narrator, like Jonathan in “A Yankee Boast,” detail impressive elements of the US landscape—“Niagara Falls” and the “Atlantic ocean”—only to claim, nonchalantly, Kollick’s ability to conquer them. Additionally, the speech and the Comic Currents  75

joke both couch their jingoistic pride in exaggeration. Their appearance in the same column of the Raftsman’s Journal has the effect of celebrating, even normalizing, such attitudes. In many reprints, paeans to US expansion or imperialism accompany and mirror the joke’s more comic pride in Manifest Destiny. In May 1856, the joke, here called “Going West,” shares a page in the Bloomsburg (PA) Star of the North with over three columns of a review of the well-known editor and author Maturin Murray Ballou’s travel narrative History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveler in the Tropics, including a section titled “Prospect of the Purchase of Cuba.” The review describes the book as “doubly interesting” due to “the prospect of acquisition by the United States of the Island of Cuba,” thus connecting directly to the expansionism of the joke.34 In November 1867, Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner, an illustrated story paper, ran the joke on a page titled “Pacific Railway Humors,” with other jokes and several illustrations, most of which depict western rail travel as a comic contact zone.35 Of course, “A Yankee Boast” was not originally conceived as commentary on the Pacific Railway, since it first appeared in December 1855 and the Pacific Railroad Act was not passed until 1862 and construction not begun until 1863. So, in this case, a tall tale about westward expansion in general has been retooled to speak to western rail travel specifically. Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner’s somewhat anachronistic placement of “A Yankee Boast” on a “Pacific Railway Humors” page demonstrates, in a nutshell, the malleability of the joke for different purposes at different points in the nineteenth century. The collective contexts of all the examples I have enumerated here show the vastly different types of cultural work that a single, relatively innocuous joke can perform based on its varying publication environments over time. As I have shown in my readings of “A Yankee Boast,” these meanings shift not just as the wording of the joke changes but also as it rubs shoulders with different content and as the historical circumstances it is meant to comment on evolve along with it. The foregoing examples and analyses combine the insights of distant reading with a method of contextual close reading that reveals meanings of fugitive jokes as they shift over time and across reprints. Scholars from all areas of humor studies can learn from advances in periodical studies and apply these methods to their own objects of study, and they will no doubt glean unexpected findings and new insights into how humor has been disseminated and consumed in mass media throughout 76  A Laughable Empire

US history. Having demonstrated the possibilities of this methodology through an in-depth quantitative and qualitatively comparative look at “A Yankee Boast,” I now turn to three other, widely circulating, nineteenth-century jokes about the Pacific in somewhat less granular detail. Bald Missionaries, Thatched Heads: “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders”

The British missionary John Williams’s 1837 Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands includes the following story as evidence of the “wit and humor” of Pacific Islanders: A few years ago, a venerable and esteemed brother Missionary came to England, and, being rather bald, some kind friends provided him with a wig. Upon his return to the islands, the chiefs and others went on board to welcome him; and, after the usual salutations, one of them said to the Missionary, “You were bald when you left, and now you have a beautiful head of hair; what amazing people the English are; how did they make your hair grow again?” “You simple people,” replied the Missionary, “how does everything grow? is it not by sowing seed?” They immediately shouted, “Oh, these English people! they sow seed upon a bald man’s head to make the hair grow!” One shrewd fellow inquired whether he had brought any of the seed with him? The good missionary carried on the joke for a short time, and then raised his wig. The revelation of his ‘original head’ of course drew forth a roar of laughter, which was greatly increased, when one of the natives shouted to some of his countrymen who were near “Here, see Mr. _______, he has come from England with his head thatched; he has come from England with his head thatched!”36 Williams offers this example in the midst of a compelling critique of ethnocentrism. It is basically a bald joke that finds humor in the clash of epistemologies: readers of the missionary account laugh simultaneously at the Islanders’ wonder at a wig, the English missionary’s vanity in wearing a wig to do missionary work on a remote island, and the comic redescription of the wig in terms of Native building materials. It is not, like “A Yankee Boast,” a braggartly piece of expansionist humor, though its depiction of a friendly, jocular relationship between Comic Currents  77

an English missionary and Native Pacific Islanders in a firsthand account of missionary work certainly assumes that all parties involved, including readers, approve of missionary efforts in the Pacific. Mostly the joke mines the comic possibilities of cross-cultural communication, with its constant opportunities for laughter-inducing misunderstandings of unfamiliar cultural practices. Given the anecdote’s original publication context in an English missionary’s quite serious narrative, it is somewhat surprising that Williams’s example of his ethnographical observations of Tahitians’ wit eventually became popular US newspaper fodder: I found thirty-one reprints of the joke in newspapers, magazines, and jest books spanning over forty years, between 1838 and 1879. The anecdote’s structure as a joke, with its setup and punch line, made it easily excerptible and reprintable without the book’s surrounding reflections on each culture’s ethnocentric assumptions about its superiority to others (which I examine in detail in chapter 5). In “editing with scissors,” the various editors reprinting this joke highlight the comedy of contact without all that pesky missionary moralizing, thus changing Williams’s meaning by presenting it without its broader context. When it is offered as a stand-alone joke, the comic targets are narrowed to a bald but good-​natured missionary and naïve but good-natured islanders; ethnocentrism is no longer critiqued. An examination of the publication contexts of these reprints, the subtle changes made to the joke over the years, and the shifting nationality of the “South Sea Islanders” and the missionary it describes offer further insights into the various uses to which humor about the Pacific and Pacific Islanders was put in the mid-​nineteenth century. In the various reincarnations of the joke, with its gentle ribbing of multiple targets and its emphasis on Pacific Islanders’ “wit and humor,” it offers a genial depiction of intercultural contact between Euro-​Americans and Pacific Islanders in the Pacific world. As with “A Yankee Boast,” “The Wit and Wisdom of the South Sea Islanders” and its variations appear over a long period of time but can be bunched into temporal clusters with higher volumes of reprints: particularly, the late 1830s, the late 1840s, the late 1850s to early 1860s, and the late 1860s. After the publication of Williams’s Narrative in 1837, at least three reprints appeared between November and December 1838. The joke then seemed to disappear for eight years before a flurry of seven reprints between May and September 1846. Most astonishingly, the joke became ad copy in at least ten different newspapers in 1867 in 78  A Laughable Empire

a recurring advertisement of nationwide scope. (See the appendix for a table detailing exact reprint counts over time.) Surprisingly, the final reprint that I found, “Fun with a Wig,” in the Harrisonburg (VA) Rockingham Register from June 1879, credits Williams with the anecdote forty years after it was originally published in his missionary account; the next-​latest version that I found crediting Williams before this was in the Honolulu Polynesian in 1849, thirty years prior.37 The joke also achieved wide geographical reach, as reprints appeared in periodicals published in thirteen states and in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. (See the appendix for a table detailing reprints per state.) Of the thirty-one reprints that I found (and I have not counted in this tally attributions to periodicals that I could not track down), six credit it to Williams or his book, while the rest do not. Twenty-two refer, as does Williams, generally to “South Sea Islanders,” seven specify “Tahitians,” and several vaguely mention only “the island,” with no geographical particularity. All seven reprints that refer to “Tahitians” also name the missionary as a “Mr. Nott” or “Dr. Nott,” suggesting that these cognates form a separate strand of reprints. (See the appendix for a table detailing the different titles of the joke in reprints.) Six of the reprints appear in religious newspapers or magazines, and several others cite such periodicals as their source. A scan of the contents on the same page of the joke in one such periodical, Zion’s Herald & Wesleyan Journal (Boston), reveals a host of articles on Christianity and morality, with titles like “A Great Truth,” “The Prevalence of Peace Principles Essential to the Conversion of the World,” “Glad Tidings,” “An Honest Life,” and “Taking God’s Name in Vain.”38 Juxtaposed with such content, this anecdote functions as an innocent bit of humor connected to missionary work, characterizing the missionary as genial and on friendly terms with his flock. Over the years, a couple of different versions of this joke circulated, suggesting that different editors culled the joke from different sources. The most common version, with about ten reprints, is usually titled “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders,” but sometimes “The South Sea Islanders” or “The Thatched Head,” and appears to be borrowed from Williams’s book. Another cognate, with seven reprints, is titled “Mr. Nott and His Wig,” “Dr. Nott and His Wig,” or “A Wig in Tahiti.” In giving the missionary a name and locating the joke in Tahiti, this version seeks to create a sense of verisimilitude through greater detail, while the introduction draws generalizations about Tahitians by Comic Currents  79

positioning the anecdote as culturally emblematic. The fact that some reprints refer to “South Sea Islanders” generally and some to “Tahitians” specifically also implies interchangeability among Pacific Islanders for American editors and readers. The Tahiti version is usually introduced, “The following humorous story is told in illustration of the simplicity and wit of some of the Tahitians.” In describing “the simplicity” of Tahitians in addition to their “wit,” this version sets up readers to laugh at their naïveté; it puts readers in a position of superiority, implicitly sanctioning missionary efforts and Pacific imperialism. The children’s periodical Youth’s Companion printed different versions of the joke in 1858 and 1861. The 1858 version, titled “The Thatched Head,” begins, “As an instance of the wit and humor of the South Sea Islanders, the following amusing anecdote is related.”39 The 1861 version, titled “The South Sea Islanders,” eschews this introduction and goes straight to the joke; this version (like several others in the reprints I found between 1861 and 1864) cites as its source the London Missionary Herald, whereas the 1858 version does not cite a source.40 There are minor wording differences, too. This suggests that the editor of the Youth’s Companion in 1861 culled the joke from a stack of exchange papers instead of from back issues of the Youth’s Companion. It is likely that the editor forgot that the joke had been included three years earlier. In 1867, the joke was repurposed into an ad for a hair-growth formula, “Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative.” These untitled ads (of which I have found ten) intersperse product placement throughout the joke. The version from the April 13, 1867, Sunbury (PA) American reads as follows: A Missionary to the South Sea Islands was so unfortunate as to lose a fine head of hair by sickness, and being unprovided with proper restoratives, returned to England to recruit his health. “Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative” had not then been discovered, and on regaining his health the missionary provided himself with a wig, and returned to the scene of his labors. The Natives with natural simplicity supposed he had obtained some hair seed which he had planted on his poll and produced a luxuriant crop of the capillary substance. The missionary humored this idea for a while and promised to get them some hair seed, but finally astonished them by lifting his wig. They all shouted with one accord, “He has come from England with his head thatched!” 80  A Laughable Empire

There are too many grey and thatched heads at the present day, and these would be fewer were the use of Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative more universal in the country. While it is not exactly a “hair seed” it will prevent premature baldness and greyness, and is a delightful article for the toilet.41 The joke is quite similar to Williams’s version and that of other newspaper reprints, with the notable exceptions of the second paragraph of commentary (which one printing of the ad does not include), an early mention that the incident occurred mostly because “Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative” had not then been discovered, and some overwritten prose describing “a luxuriant crop of the capillary substance.” The second paragraph acts as an application of the joke to the advertisement’s attempt to describe a problem—“too many grey and thatched heads at present day”—that the product is situated to solve. The appropriation of a missionary’s comic, ethnographical anecdote about Pacific Islanders for a newspaper ad to sell hair tonic demonstrates the extreme malleability of such humor as it is de- and recontextualized for different purposes at different times. It also shows the relationships between humor and advertising in the second half of the nineteenth century. Michael H. Epp has explored how, in magazines such as Harper’s and Scribner’s that featured humor sections, those sections either abutted advertisements or were intermingled, demonstrating the spatial and topical proximity of the usually anonymous popular humor “that sold magazines and the advertising space upon which magazines came to rely for profit.”42 Another noteworthy change to the joke appeared in 1868 in Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, in which the joke “Sowing Seed” sees the missionary return “to the United States” in the first line and emphasizes his Americanness in the punch line: “Here, see, Mr. ______ has come from America with his head thatched!”43 Two years later, the Hillsdale (MI) Standard reprinted this version of the joke.44 Americanizing the missionary has nationalist, or at least patriotic, undertones, even as he stands as one of the butts of the joke. Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, which advertised itself as “the cheapest magazine in the world,” was one of several magazines published by Maturin Murray Ballou. Others included Flag of Our Union (1846), Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (1851, changed to Ballou’s in 1855), Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine (1855), the Weekly Novelette (1857), and later, the Boston Globe (1872). In fact, the Weekly Comic Currents  81

Novelette had run a different version of this joke in 1861.45 According to Gretchen Woertendyke, Ballou’s work as an editor and writer enacted an expansionist, mid-nineteenth-century “literary nationalism,” and Ballou was particularly interested in US annexation of Cuba.46 Ballou’s simple substitution of the missionary’s nationality can be read as an enactment of that nationalism, framing the missionary as an American emissary preparing foreign ground for imperialism. This change thus pushes this joke, which in earlier versions seemed pro-missionary work but entirely agnostic on state-sponsored imperialism, into expansionist territory. All told, this versatile anecdote served many editorial purposes in very different periodicals over the course of forty years—that is, as an innocent, good-natured joke about a missionary for Christian readers, as a seemingly accurate ethnographical insight about the nature of Pacific Islanders, as an advertisement for hair tonic, and, finally, as a nationalist paeon to US intervention overseas. A Strange but True Reprint

A third viral joke from the mid-nineteenth century that deals with the Pacific and Pacific Islanders—often titled “Fishing for Bass—A Strange but True Story”—had a much different trajectory as it made the rounds of US newspapers and magazines. Unlike “A Yankee Boast” and “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders,” “Fishing for Bass” does not have a long circulation history; instead, it seems to have featured in US periodicals in a single, short burst of reprints. Though the anecdote probably originated in the Hartford (CT) Times, to which multiple sources attribute it, the earliest version I found appears in the August 9, 1871, Daily Albany (NY) Argus. The story there, in its entirety, goes as follows: A strange story is told on board of the steamer City of Hartford, which runs up the Connecticut River from her landing at Peck Slip in New York. While she was lying at Pratt’s Ferry, a few days ago, waiting for a messenger from Hartford (says the Hartford Times) the second mate thought he would improve the time by fishing for bass. So he got out his lines and hook and bait, and made everything ready—lighted a cigar, and casting his line into the water, sat down patiently to wait the result. On board the boat is a young colored boy, one of those amphibious Kanakas who came to San Francisco from the Sandwich Islands, and eventually turned up as 82  A Laughable Empire

a boat hand in the city of Hartford. Like all of his amphibious race, he can remain a long time under water. He took it into his head to play a joke upon the mate; and, divesting himself of his clothes, he jumped into the water on the opposite side of the boat from where the mate sat, hopefully but dreamily awaiting “a bite.” Presently that official was startled by “a strong pull and a long pull” at his line. His slumbering eyes opened wide, his breath came fast and thick, for he thought he had captured one of the biggest of the “big” bass which abound in the river. He attempted to pull in his hook, but it resisted all his efforts! Then he thought he would “play” the fish for a little while; and so he would let out a few fathoms of line, and then draw it in again. This was repeated several times, until finally the boy, thinking he had carried the joke far enough, held on to the line and came to the surface with it, just at the time the mate with bigger eyes than he ever exhibited in all his life before, expected to land a fish, and so shouted to the men on deck. The astonishment of that of-fish-al can be better imagined than expressed when he saw the woolly cocoanut head and rolling eyes of the Kanaka emerge from the waves! At first he thought he had caught the “d——’ fish” that Victor Hugo wrote about; then he didn’t know what it was; but finally, as the boy, blubbering and blowing like a porpoise, struck out for the boat, and the laughter of some of the hands who were in on the joke rang in his ears, he acknowledged himself “sold” and treated all round. This good story is in every particular a true one.47 The power dynamics at play in this detailed description of a practical joke on a merchant ship are complex and somewhat ambiguous. The young Hawaiian who plays the joke on the second mate is racialized as “colored,” with a “woolly cocoanut head and rolling eyes,” and further stereotyped as “one of those amphibious Kanakas” who is “like all of his amphibious race.” But, in spite of these essentializing descriptions, the Hawaiian boy wields power as the instigator of the elaborate prank, along with “some of the hands” who are “in on the joke” and who join him in laughing at the second mate’s incredulity. Maybe most important here is the general air of good nature of all participants throughout the anecdote. Even the pranked second mate responds kindly, as he “acknowledged himself ‘sold’ and treated all round.” The comic anecdote demonstrates to its readers how, in the multiethnic, cosmopolitan realm of a nineteenth-century ship, racial difference was acknowledged and Comic Currents  83

noted but ultimately mattered relatively little to the sailors, who worked and joked together regardless of race or nationality. A Hawaiian sailor on a ship in New England in the nineteenth century was certainly not a rarity. As David A. Chang has noted, since the end of the eighteenth century, many Hawaiians had been working on US and European ships as sailors, whalers, and fur-trade workers, jobs that sent them all over the world, including New England.48 Print media, in narrating seafaring episodes like this, highlighted and modeled sailors’ multicultural experiences for their landlubber readers. In the joke, the Hawaiian boy, removed from the milieu of the Pacific, uses his physical and cultural prowess to undertake a complex prank that deepens the lighthearted camaraderie among his fellow shipmates. I have found twenty versions of the anecdote (and three attributions to other newspapers that I could not track down) between August and November 1871, eighteen of them between August and early October. Specifically, “Fishing for Bass” was reprinted twelve times in August, four times in September, twice in October, and once each in November and December. These twenty versions were spread over fourteen states, from Rhode Island to California, plus the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.49 It appeared most often (four times) in New York, plus twice in Ohio and Hawai‘i. The temporal density but geographical spread of these reprints shows that it was briefly a very popular story but forgotten by the end of the year. Its minimal life span as a viral joke in comparison to other fugitive humor might derive in part from its length. Shorter jokes like “A Yankee Boast” and even “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders” were probably handier over a long period of time for editors looking to fill out a column or page. Unlike other viral comic items studied in this chapter, the wording of “Fishing for Bass” does not change significantly from one version to another. The most substantial change that I identified was in the Boston children’s magazine Youth’s Companion, which renames the anecdote “A Surprised Fisherman” and removes the detail from the end in which the second mate treats his compatriots to drinks.50 Because of the short-lived nature of the anecdote’s virality, it did not evolve over time to speak to other news cycles and historical circumstances. A few reprints of “Fishing for Bass” appear on the front page of the paper, but most are printed in the back pages, usually along with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous items, many of them also reprinted from other newspapers. To give the flavor of such juxtapositions, in the June 84  A Laughable Empire

10 San Francisco Bulletin, “Fishing for Bass” shares the page with pieces such as “Railroad Rumors,” “A Woman Shot by Her Paramour,” “All Sorts of Items,” and “Literary Gossip.”51 In the August 31 Brownstown (TX) Banner, it abuts “News in Brief ” but also such oddities as “The Human Ear,” “How They Telegraph in Chinese,” and “The New Religious Movement in Germany.”52 The September 7 Austin Mower County (MN) Transcript pairs it with miscellanies like “How to Give Children an Appetite,” “Rotation of Crops,” and “Sagacity of the Elephant.”53 In both the August 24 Greensburg (IN) Standard and the August 25 Paw Paw (MI) True Northerner, the anecdote shares a page with the same eleven other reprinted pieces on each paper’s page 3: “The Pope,” “Public Parks of New York,” “The Metropolis of the West,” “Statement of the Doctor Who Witnessed the Death of the Double Children,” “An Amateur Editor,” “Best Time to Cut Oats,” “Amsterdam Ship Canal,” “The Horrors of Famine,” “New Source of Albumen,” “An Eagle Story,” and “Fiendishness.”54 It is very likely that both these papers borrowed “Fishing for Bass” and these other pieces (or an entire plate) from the same paper in their pile of newspaper exchanges. In the nineteenth-century press, readers consumed some of the same material in their local newspapers as other readers spread out across the nation, in part because of the rampant culture of reprinting that made newspapers mostly compilations of material culled from other newspapers. This material included news but also, as these article titles indicate, general-interest pieces, how-tos, and curiosities. Viral jokes like “Fishing for Bass,” as circulating miscellany, reached many Americans and influenced their knowledge of and opinions about the larger world outside their towns. The significance of “Fishing for Bass,” then, inheres not in its longevity, its changes over time, or its juxtaposition with different news items in different years but in its widespread but ephemeral influence on its readers’ ideas of Hawaiians and of sailors’ lives at a particular moment in the nineteenth century. “Consider the Above Strictly Confidential”: Reprint Humor on Hawaiian Language

A shorter, more bizarre joke on Hawaiians underwent two brief rounds of circulation, with at least five reprints in 1856 and another eight in 1873, both years that featured a surge in Americans’ interest in the possibility of US annexation of Hawai‘i. The earliest version I found appears Comic Currents  85

in the March 8, 1856, Plattsburgh (NY) Republican: “From the Sandwich Islands.—‘Ua hookahora e ke Kiaaina o Oahu, J. kaona, i Lunakanawai no ka Apana o Kona ma kahi o J. kaauai, ka mea I make iho nei.’ We hope the reader will consider the above strictly confidential.” The joke here is simply on the otherness of the Hawaiian language. The sentence in Hawaiian translates roughly as, “The Governor of Oahu, J. Koana, has appointed a Judge for the District of Kona in the place of J. Kaaukai, who has died.”55 For the purposes of the joke, this information is of no importance. Instead, the ironic injunction to the reader to “consider the above strictly confidential” attempts a joke about its apparent incomprehensibility. Other versions of the punch line function in the same way. For instance, in George Manville Fenn’s 1873 jest book World of Wit and Humor and in the January 25, 1873, Harper’s Bazaar, the punch line reads, “We hope the reader will deeply ponder the important fact stated in the above. It is to be considered strictly confidential,” adding verbosity and a second layer of ironic treatment of the news item’s foreignness.56 The April 4, 1873, Magnolia (MS) Gazette follows the Hawaiian-​language news with, “The above is very satisfactory indeed, and we presume our readers will understand it at once.”57 Several reprints attribute the news item to “Our valuable contemporary, the Honolulu Polynesian,” and respond, “We agree in substance with this view of the case.”58 The joke here lies in the editors’ pretending to understand the sentence while pretending to assume that the readers do, too, and so do not need a translation. Each of these interchangeable punch lines seeks to represent linguistic difference as cultural difference through the juxtaposition of Hawaiian-language and English-language print. The irony is that this print presentation of otherness is made possible by a distinct lack of it. After all, when American missionaries created the Hawaiian written language in the 1820s, they did so based on the English alphabet. It was therefore typographically reproducible by English-language presses in ways that other languages might not be. Like the other viral jokes studied in this chapter, “From the Sandwich Islands” had a broad geographical reach, appearing in newspapers and magazines in seven different states. It appeared most often in New York (four times) and twice each in Ohio and Louisiana. Like “Fishing for Bass,” “From the Sandwich Islands” mostly ran on pages featuring a hodgepodge of miscellaneous items, sometimes in columns with names like “Facts and Fancies” or “Wit and Humor.” More often than not, it 86  A Laughable Empire

was set on the bottom of the page, which hints that it served a practical purpose as a short piece of column filler. And, as with “Fishing for Bass,” tracing reprints of “From the Sandwich Islands” reveals just how homogeneous the culture of reprinting made newspapers from different parts of the country. For instance, both the March 28, 1873, Columbia (TN) Herald and the April 2, 1873, Louisiana Cotton-Boll (Attakapas) feature the joke on the first page in identical “Facts and Fancies” columns. But their front pages also share many other identical items, including articles titled “What Came of It,” “Flower-Garden and Lawn,” “The Original ‘Arkansas Traveler,’ ” “Only a Woman’s Hair,” “Are Men and Women Fond of Each Other?,” “An Indoor Tragedy,” “John Smith,” “Sunday Readings,” and “The Essentials of Worship,” as well as two poems, “The Childless Mother” and “Annals of the Poor.”59 Though these newspapers were printed two days apart in different states, their readers consumed much of the same news and information. In this way the culture of reprinting shaped the perceptions of American readers from every part of the nation on a myriad of topics, including the Pacific and Pacific Islanders. Mark Twain made a similar joke—twice—on the incomprehensibility of the Hawaiian language. First, in his 1866 letters to the Sacramento Union, he complained that the popular American song “While We Were Marching through Georgia” had followed him to Hawai‘i, where he was chagrined to hear Natives “singing it in their own barbarous tongue!” Twain continues, “They have got the tune to perfection— otherwise I never would have suspected that ‘Waikiki lantani oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo’ means, ‘While We Were Marching Through Georgia.’ If it would have been all the same to General Sherman, I wish he had gone around by the way of the Gulf of Mexico, instead of marching through Georgia.”60 Here Twain highlights the Hawaiians’ appropriation of an American tune to their own circumstances, as the place name Waikiki evinces. Clemens adapted this joke in his 1872 book Roughing It, in which Twain claimed to hear, as he was falling asleep in Honolulu, “a rich voice” rising up “out of the still night”: “And as far as this ocean rock is toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar air. But the words seem somewhat out of joint: ‘Waikiki lantani oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo.’ Translated, that means, ‘When we were marching through Georgia.’ ”61 This condensed version of the joke still relies on the juxtaposition of familiarity and foreignness by overlaying Hawaiian words onto an American song. As I demonstrate in this chapter’s next section, Twain’s oft-reprinted comic descriptions of Hawai‘i in the 1860s and Comic Currents  87

1870s were extremely influential in shaping American readers’ opinions about the kingdom. “A Few More Seminaries Would Finish Them Completely”: Mark Twain, the Sandwich Islands, and the Politics of Reprinting

In October 1873, Mark Twain penned a letter to the editor of the London Weekly Standard: sir,—In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich Islands, & the inflamed desire of the public to acquire information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet another week in England & deliver a lecture upon this absorbing subject. . . . I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can. . . . I feel & know that I am equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of excitement by lecturing upon it. . . . I have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic that I chose to take hold of & elucidate with all my strength.62 Of course, instead of “paralyzing the public interest” in Hawai‘i, this notice, as Samuel Clemens had hoped, stoked it, advertising his upcoming lectures in England. At least six US newspapers, too, reprinted the squib. The ensuing thirteen performances between October and December 1873 were the last presentations of a lecture that Twain had been giving on and off since 1866: often titled “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” but sometimes “The Sandwich Islands,” “The Sandwich Islands! A Serio-Comic Lecture,” “A Serio-Humorous Lecture Concerning Kanakadom,” or “The Experiences of a Late Journey Through the Sandwich Islands.”63 This lecture made Twain a household name across the United States. Tracy Wuster notes that these lectures, delivered across the United States before he traveled to Great Britain, “helped propel his reputation across the nation,” in part because his onstage embodiment of “the character of ‘Mark Twain’ ” made that character “real to audiences who paid to see the living, breathing, joking American humorist.”64 Between 1866 and 1911, US newspapers printed over 187 reviews, mentions, and excerpts from this lecture that I have been able to track down. These squibs fueled Twain’s literary celebrity and kept some of his jokes in continuous circulation. 88  A Laughable Empire

The excerpts of Twain’s lectures that editors reprinted—often out of context—reveal the divergent ideological uses to which his “seriocomic” ruminations on Hawaii were put during a time of annexation agitation. Twain’s early Sandwich Islands lectures, given soon after his return to the United States from Hawai‘i, were timely and topical, coinciding with Hawaiian Queen Emma’s 1866 visit to San Francisco. In fact, the San Francisco newspaper the Daily Alta California mentioned her visit and Twain’s lecture in the same paragraph.65 In his first lecture, Twain exhibited support for US annexation of Hawai‘i, noting its possibilities as a producer of sugar, cotton, and rice; he justified this stance by saying, “The property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the United States.” But he culled the passage and, by the end of 1867, “was publicly ranked with the anti-expansionists.”66 In fact, James Caron has noted that the lecture “contains anti-annexation sentiment”; though Twain’s lecture certainly makes Hawai‘i and Hawaiians butts of many jokes, it regularly “inverts the assumed inferiority of the island culture in order to score points against American culture.”67 In spite of this, the jokes from the lectures most often excerpted and reprinted by American editors seek laughs by highlighting Hawaiian otherness and implying US superiority. In this way, the fugitive jokes derived from Twain’s lecture, often circulating without the context of his ironic, self-mocking stance or his lecture’s anti-imperialist critiques, tell a different story about Hawai‘i and Twain’s attitude toward it than does his lecture as a whole. These circulating squibs reached a wide swath of the US reading public. Of the 187 different excerpts from, reviews of, or mentions of the lecture between 1866 and 1911 that I found through keyword searches in various newspapers and periodical databases, the vast majority appeared before 1885. (See the appendix for a table detailing exact reprint counts over time.) They were reprinted in thirty-one states, Montana Territory, and the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. (See the appendix for a table detailing reprints per state.) Of these excerpts, 16 are merely announcements of upcoming lectures, and 53 are reviews, summaries, or references to Twain’s lectures or compilations of multiple jokes from it; 102 are reprints of a specific joke or section of the lecture. A close look at a few of the most often reprinted of these latter excerpts shows how the circulation patterns and practices of scissors-and-paste journalism simultaneously shaped American readers’ images of Twain and of Hawai‘i. (See the appendix for a table detailing exact reprint counts over for the most popular excerpts.) Comic Currents  89

One common reprint differs from the others that I examine here in that it offers a pointed critique of the deleterious effects of US imperialism and missionaries. The version in the February 16, 1873, Columbia (SC) Daily Phoenix appears as a squib in a column of miscellaneous items and reads in its entirety, “Mark Twain says that eighteen or nineteen years ago, the population of the Sandwich Islands was 400,000. Then the people were happy and alarmingly prosperous. Civilization reached them, and in two years the Natives numbered only 100,000. He thinks a few more seminaries would finish them completely.”68 At the end of March 1873, this joke appeared in “Current Items” columns of three more newspapers. The joke also featured in six reviews or collections of multiple jokes from Twain’s lecture. Like many other parts of Twain’s Sandwich Islands lectures, it combines factual information with a punch line. As Caron describes the joke, “The association of learning with genocide strikes satirically at the foundation of the missionaries’ work with the destructive energy of a lightning bolt.”69 It is therefore somewhat surprising that this joke was excerpted and reprinted even a few times, but it did coincide with the clearly antiannexation attitude that Twain had expressed in his widely excerpted and reprinted January 1873 letters about Hawai‘i to the New York Tribune. The excerpt echoes the ironic support for annexation that Twain articulated in those letters and thus served as a counterpart to it throughout 1873. But other commonly reprinted jokes from Twain’s lecture tend to denigrate Hawaiians and tacitly excuse US imperialism, often in ways that ignore the self-effacing irony of his lecture performances. For instance, another popular joke from the lecture that circulated in multiple versions between March and May 1873 has the effect of othering Hawaiians by mocking their dress, or rather undress. I found seven reprints of the following joke alone—in newspapers from Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Maine, Tennessee, and even Hawai‘i—as well as six versions in reviews or collections of multiple jokes. The most common version is worded as follows: “Lecturing on the Sandwich Islands, in New York, the other evening, Twain graphically described the costumes of the islanders. In the towns they wear something like civilized garments, but ‘in the up-country they wear—well, a smile or a pair of spectacles, or something of that sort.’ ”70 Other versions replace “or something of that sort” with “rarely anything else” or add in editorial commentary such as, “We should say that to wear only a smile or a frown would be reducing one’s garments to the last degree of thinness.”71 In each case, Twain’s genial humor and 90  A Laughable Empire

the newspaper’s presentation and commentary on it pretend to perform Victorian restraint while titillating readers by stoking sensual fantasies about Pacific Islanders. Circulating at the same time as Twain’s dark, antimissionary joke about Hawaiian population decline, this joke uses print to allow its readers an imagined gaze at Hawaiian bodies. Two years later, a similarly demeaning Twain joke about Hawaiians was reprinted at least eighteen times in newspapers in ten different states and territories, from Maryland to Montana, between January 30 and April 7, 1875. The joke—“Mark Twain says the Sandwich Islanders are generally as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone”—is a dig at Hawaiian literacy that Samuel Clemens himself knew was inaccurate.72 According to Paul Fatout’s composite transcript of Twain’s 1869– 70 lectures in Mark Twain Speaking, Twain had praised Hawai‘i’s high literacy rates, saying, “The missionaries taught the whole nation to read and write with facility, in the Native tongue. I don’t suppose there is today a single uneducated person above eight years of age in the Sandwich Islands. It is the best educated country in the world, I believe, not excepting portions of the United States. That has all been done by the American missionaries.”73 According to the February 8, 1873, Brooklyn Eagle transcript of his lecture, three years later, Twain was still doing this bit about Hawai‘i being “the best educated country in the world.” According to that transcript, the “unlettered as the backside of a tombstone” joke is actually a dig on the US-born Charles Coffin Harris, who served as Hawai‘i’s minister of finance from 1865 to 1869 and minister of foreign affairs from 1869 to 1872. Harris was a routine target for Twain’s mockery throughout his Hawai‘i writings. In his 1873 lecture, he sets up Harris as the archetype of an American charlatan working for the Hawaiian government. He says of Harris: These white people get to be “ministers”—political ministers, I mean. There’s a perfect raft of them there. Harris is one of them. Harris is minister of—well, he’s minister of pretty much everything. He is a long legged, light weight, average lawyer from New Hampshire. Now, if Harris had brains in proportion to his legs, he would make Solomon seem a failure. (Laughter.) If his modesty equalled his ignorance he would make a violet seem stuck up. And if his learning equalled his vanity, he would make [the Prussian polymath Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von] Humboldt seem as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone.74 Comic Currents  91

In full transcripts of the lecture, then, Twain clearly praises common Hawaiians’ learning while denigrating the intelligence of a white, American official serving in the Hawaiian government, but newspaper editors excerpting the joke shifted its butt from Harris to “Sandwich Islanders . . . generally.” In doing so, or in eagerly catching at the chance to reprint another newspaper making this switch, these editors reimagined Twain’s account to align more closely with their own stereotypical notions of Native Hawaiian inferiority. Another oft-reprinted Twain joke from his Sandwich Islands lectures maintains its dual targets in reprints: “Mark Twain says that the Sandwich Islands dish of plain dog ‘is only our cherished American sausage, with the mystery removed.’ ”75 Appearing at least sixteen times (plus at least six more times in reviews, transcripts, or articles collecting Twain jokes) between 1869 and 1874 (the vast majority from November 1869 through 1870), across eleven states, reprints of this joke vary little in their wording. In Twain’s lecture, this serves as the punch line to a disquisition on how much Hawaiians love their dogs but eventually “kill and eat them.” According to the Brooklyn Eagle transcript, he then explains, “These dogs are raised entirely for the table and fed exclusively on a cleanly vegetable diet all their lives. Many a white citizen learns to throw aside his prejudices and eat of the dish. After all, it’s only our own American sausage with the mystery removed.”76 Even without this fuller context, the joke itself laughs both at Hawaiians for a seemingly barbaric practice of eating their pets and at Americans for eating mystery meat. Readers’ momentary feeling of Hobbesian superiority as they laugh at Hawaiians for eating dogs evaporates when Twain implies that they, too, eat dogs, only in sausage form. As part of Twain’s discussion on Hawaiians eating dogs, he avers in his lectures, “I couldn’t do that. (Laughter.) I’d rather go hungry two days than eat an old friend that way. (Laughter.)”77 A bastardization or misinterpretation of this joke circulates in reprints, applying these remarks not to eating a dog but to eating humans. It appears in February 1873 in a Washington, DC, newspaper as follows: “Mark Twain, in speaking of cannibalism grows serious for once, and solemnly declares that, for his own part, he ‘would rather go hungry for two days than eat an old personal friend.’ ”78 I found five reprints of this joke in the context of cannibalism—in newspapers in South Carolina, Delaware, Montana, and Michigan—and three other instances in reviews of collected jokes from Twain’s lectures. Another version, printed in the New York Tribune and 92  A Laughable Empire

copied by Honolulu’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser, admits the appropriate context for these remarks but still connects them to cannibalism by association: “The charge of cannibalism was discussed at length, and the lecturer assured his hearers that for his own part he would rather go hungry for two days than eat an own personal friend. This was apropos to pet dogs, but led the way through the mixed diet of the islanders, including ‘sausage with the mystery removed.’ ”79 Both versions have the effect of twisting and conflating multiple topics from the lecture to raise the specter of cannibalism. As I demonstrate in chapter 3, cannibalism loomed large in the imaginations of nineteenth-century American readers and joke tellers of Pacific Islanders. Of course, this misinterpretation was plausible, given Clemens’s own comic concentration on cannibalism and his willingness in his lectures and other writings about Hawai‘i to portray his persona Mark Twain as a rogue. In fact, the most-reprinted joke from the Sandwich Island lectures— by far—is another cannibalism joke in which Twain situates himself, not Native Hawaiians, as the savage cannibal. In his lectures, he sometimes proposed to explain the practice of cannibalism by demonstrating on a baby in the audience, if only a mother would volunteer her child. In reversing the stereotype by portraying himself, not Native Hawaiians, as a cannibal, Twain brought the act of cannibalism to the United States, to the very stage he stood on. The first periodical appearance of this joke that I found is in the December 26, 1866, Boston Evening Transcript: “Mark Twain, a California humorist about to visit the Atlantic States, in the printed programme of a lecture he was lately to give in San Jose, proposed to illustrate the cannibal propensities of the ancient islanders, by devouring a child in the presence of the audience, if some lady would furnish him one for the occasion. That part of the programme was necessarily omitted, no maternal relative coming forward with a spare infant to enable him to carry out the illustration.”80 Caron notes in his analysis of the lectures, “To complete this outrageous joke, Mark Twain would pause and wait in silence for a few moments, as though expecting a child to be produced. Western audiences apparently found this very dark humor hilarious.” Importantly, Twain had said at various times in various ways that Hawaiian cannibals are “almost played out” or that they never existed. As Caron has also rightly pointed out, in defending Hawaiians from charges of cannibalism while offering to enact cannibalism himself, Twain does not just put himself on the same moral level as Hawaiians but figures himself, and his laughing audience Comic Currents  93

by connection, as much worse than Hawaiians.81 In addition to reversing the normal stereotypes of who engages in civilized and who in savage behavior, this joke revolves in part around genre expectations for lectures, at which audience members expect to hear about exotic otherness rather than see it “illustrated” by a fellow American on an audience member. Additionally, in the fuller context of the lecture, Twain’s excuses for not performing cannibalism—(a) “I am a stranger here and don’t feel like taking liberties,” (b) “I will leave out that part of my program, though it is very neat and pleasant,” and (c) “I am not hungry”—are all the more barbarous for their invidious observances of polite society.82 The joke was excerpted at least forty-nine times—in multiple incarnations—between December 1866 and 1895, amounting to almost 42 percent of the reprints of individual jokes that my searches uncovered. It appeared in reviews of the lectures or collections of jokes from them at least another nine times. The short, shocking joke obviously made great comic column filler. Indeed, it was in near constant circulation from January 1866 through January 1870, appearing at least thirty-eight times, sometimes in the same periodical. For instance, the Philadelphia periodical Saturday Night reprinted the exact same wording of the joke twice within two months, in September and November 1867.83 The joke seemed to disappear, in favor of the other popular excerpts from Twain’s lectures, from 1870 until 1876, when it reappeared at least another three times, then twice in 1880, five times in 1884, and once in 1895, almost thirty years after the joke began circulating in newspapers. As might be expected from such a widely circulating piece of fugitive humor, the joke went through multiple iterations over the years. I will mention just two brief examples of important changes in the circulating joke. First, in December 1867, a version briefly circulated that replaces Hawai‘i with Fiji, probably because Fiji was more commonly associated with cannibalism in contemporary media accounts: “Mark Twain, lecturing on the Feejee Islands, offered to show how the cannibals eat their food, if some lady would hand him a baby. The lecture was not illustrated.”84 Two other reprints in December 1867 use the same text, thus substituting the entire subject of Twain’s lecture (i.e., exchanging Hawai‘i for Fiji). As other examples in this chapter have also demonstrated, such editorial changes conflate all Pacific islands and Pacific Islanders as culturally monolithic or interchangeable. This replacement also underscores the inextricability of Pacific cultures and cannibalism in Americans’ minds, egged on by editors’ seeming fear of 94  A Laughable Empire

and fascination with cannibalism as the ultimate signifier of otherness, a phenomenon I explore in more depth in chapter 3. Second, in November 1869, reprints began to include Twain’s commentary on the US women’s rights movement at the end of the excerpt. As several newspapers quote or paraphrase Twain, “I am aware, though, that children have become scarce and high of late, having been thinned out by neglect and ill-treatment since the woman movement began.”85 This context helps to further explain Twain’s humor in the lecture: in blaming the women’s rights movement for what he pretends is a paucity of children (for him to eat), he leverages stereotypes of alleged Hawaiian savagery to mock US social politics. I found eight reprints of this version between November 1869 and January 1870. When the joke resurfaced in 1876 and 1884, this part was not included. Twain’s popular joke about cannibalism seemed to become intertwined with Americans’ conception of the humorist himself in the 1860s and 1870s. “An American Cannibal at Home” was, according to an item making the rounds of the newspapers in the second half of 1870 (with at least six mentions of this between August and December of that year), the rumored title of a book that Clemens was writing.86 That book would eventually appear in 1872 as Roughing It. The fact that the press, and maybe Samuel Clemens himself, would persist in calling him “An American Cannibal” even when he was writing about the United States, shows just how important to Twain’s literary character and celebrity was his 1866 trip to and subsequent writing and lectures about Hawai‘i. Reprints of jokes from his Sandwich Islands lectures kept Twain’s name constantly in the newspapers and allowed him to reach a much larger audience than through his lectures alone, thus helping to cement his place as the United States’ top humorist. Clemens helped to stoke the “frenzy concerning the Sandwich Islands” and in turn was aided professionally by his association with a place and subject that excited Americans’ imaginations throughout the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, periodical editors, in reprinting jokes from Twain’s Sandwich Islands lectures, often took them out of context (at best) or altered them (at worst) in ways that reinforced editors’ and readers’ preconceived notions of Hawaiian savagery. Modern scholars have also conducted cherry-picked readings of the lectures that reproduce such out-of-context stereotypes. For instance, Houston Wood has railed against Twain as a “writer who represented himself as an expert on what he persisted in calling ‘The Sandwich Isles.’ As this writer’s fame Comic Currents  95

grew, so, too, did the size of his speaking fees and of his appreciative audiences. Though he had spent but a few months in the islands, he was sometimes introduced as a Native. This writer turned speechmaker induced masses of auditors in both North America and England to laugh at the inferior race he sometimes called ‘ns’ but, more often, ‘kanakas.’ ” Wood then offers a paragraph-long list of out-of-context quotations of Twain’s most disparaging lines from the lecture, thus replicating what newspaper editors had done over a century before.87 Of course, Twain’s “serio-comic” lectures certainly traffic in stereotypes to get laughs, but they do so with more nuance than many periodical excerpts or Wood’s selective summary display. In addition, most of the popular reprints do not capture ways in which Twain’s lectures use Hawai‘i and Hawaiians as a foil to critique the United States and Americans. Such subtleties are necessarily lost in contextless excerpts in newspaper columns of humor and miscellany even when Twain’s words are not overtly twisted or changed.

96  A Laughable Empire

“Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”

The Politics of Boiled Missionaries

3.

One cannibal says to another, “These missionaries give me a pain.” The other responds, “I think you eat too fast.”1 This joke, which made the rounds of newspapers in 1895, is just one variation on the missionary-​ and-cannibal jokes in constant circulation in nineteenth-century periodicals, jest books, and comic almanacs. In fact, these jokes were so ubiquitous that there were jokes about their ubiquity. For example, the following joke was printed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1897: “Two strange shapes met face to face. ‘Who are you?’ demanded one of the two. ‘I am the cannibal-and-boiled-missionary joke,’ replied the other. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am Primordial Chaos.’ With desperate fury they fell upon each other. The cannibal-and-boiled-missionary joke was knocked out in the first round. It was too old.”2 Ever since contact between Euro-Americans and Pacific Islanders, there had been serious, often sensational discussions—in travel narratives, missionary accounts, and periodical stories—of cannibalism. But there was also an attendant flood of anxious humor about humans eating humans, often in these same outlets. In a 1908 article responding to Agnes Repplier’s claim in a lecture that there were eleven prototypical, “original” jokes in the world, the author writes, “There is the cannibal-missionary joke that has done yeoman’s service, but it cannot be older than the appearance of the first missionary.”3 Though a truism, this observation highlights the fact that cannibal jokes and missionary enterprises shared a long, mutually informing history. Both serious and absurd accounts of cannibalism trade on sensational fantasies of consuming or being consumed by the other. Neither

type of treatment exhibits much curiosity about whether stories about practices of cannibalism in Pacific cultures were actually true from a scientific or ethnographic perspective. In Cannibal Talk: The Man-​ Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, Gananath Obeyesekere seeks to debunk travelers’ and missionaries’ accounts of cannibalism in the Pacific through a contention that Pacific Islanders’ ritual human sacrifices were mistaken for ritual cannibalism and that Europeans created a discourse about Native savagery and cannibalism to dehumanize Natives and justify conquest and conversion. Building off the work of William Arens, Obeyesekere characterizes cannibalism as “a colonial projection providing a justification for colonialism, proselytism, conquest, and sometimes for the very extermination of native peoples.” But even if the facts of Pacific cannibalism have come into question, nineteenth-century American travelers viewed Pacific Islanders’ actions in part through the lens of previous Eurocentric narratives about it, which by the nineteenth century had already long been tied to notions of savagism and extant discourses about the “wild man” and “wondrous and hybrid beings of exotic worlds.” Obeyesekere urges a useful distinction between cannibalism—a cultural “fantasy that the Other is going to eat us”—and “anthropophagy,” the proper term used to describe “the actual consumption of human flesh.”4 Following Obeyesekere’s lead, I use the term “cannibalism” in this chapter to describe the “fantasy” narrated by boiled-missionary jokes. As Peter Hulme has pointed out, this fantasy of cannibalism means that, “even for sceptics, cannibalism does exist,” if largely as an animating term in the discourse of colonialism; it is, Hulme asserts, “no less historical whether or not the term cannibalism describes an attested or extant social custom.”5 For Hulme and other modern scholars of cannibalism, the “really interesting questions” have more to do with why Euro-Americans were so heavily invested in “finding confirmation of their suspicions of cannibalism” and in deploying cannibalism “so insistently as a contemporary trope in different forms of writing,” including humor.6 In fact, serious and comic accounts of cannibalism appear to have much in common. For instance, Obeyesekere categorizes multiple testimonies on cannibalism appearing in travel narratives as sailors’ yarns, a largely comic genre I discuss in detail in chapter 1. “In the South Seas,” Obeyesekere notes, “these yarns deal with the purported first hand experiences of the protagonist, generally with his adventures among the natives and witnessing that quintessential attribute of savagery, the cannibal feast.”7 In highlighting 98  A Laughable Empire

the sensational and fictive rhetorical strategies used by supposedly eyewitness accounts of cannibalism that have been taken as fact by generations of anthropologists, Obeyesekere also reveals the overlap between serious and humorous treatments of cannibalism in colonial discourse. Both sensationalist accounts and jokes about cannibalism express, and attempt to laugh away, anxieties about Pacific otherness, thus reinforcing stereotypes while reproducing the unease of contact. Geoffrey Sanborn argues in his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century discourse about cannibalism that anxiety is “the crucial element in these accounts.”8 In making comic accusations of cannibalism, cannibal jokes juxtapose for comic effect Pacific and Western epistemologies, as represented through alleged cannibalism and Western travelers’ genteel or, occasionally, similarly savage reactions to it. But they also allow the jokes’ tellers to pithily, and without much risk, question cultural imperialism by smilingly celebrating the demise of missionaries. So there are two butts to every cannibal-and-missionary joke: the cannibal, whom we laugh at in disgust and terror at an inhumane act, and the missionary, who gets his comeuppance for his ill-advised cultural and religious imposition on Pacific Islanders. Sanborn has argued that rhetoric about cannibalism aided missionaries’ projects because it allowed them to cite “Satanic practices” in need of abolition and to “measure their progress in terms of what had been eradicated” instead of by counting “genuine conversion[s]” to Christianity.9 But jokes in which missionaries not only fail in their efforts but are devoured for them call into question the objectives and usefulness of missionary endeavors in the first place. The dually aimed cruelty of cannibal-and-boiled-missionary jokes may be, in part, a nervous reaction to the otherness of Pacific cultures that Americans read about with interest and awe throughout the nineteenth century. Such jokes attempt to situate otherness within the inhumane act of cannibalism while dismissing it through laughter. Snickering at cannibals devouring missionaries fits into Peter George Marteinson’s description of laughter’s purpose “as an individual and collective defence mechanism” in response to threats to our worldview. The complete cultural otherness as embodied in cannibalism creates what Marteinson refers to as the destruction of “social identities or cultural institutions,” leading to “a tragic angst, an existential emptiness.” For Marteinson, laughter limits such angst by temporarily suspending “cultural perception” in “a disorienting free-for-all . . . accompanied by euphoria and a physiological expression” that sends the message, “let us overlook “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  99

and forget this event.” When joke tellers, listeners, and hearers confront the “cultural impasse” of the contradiction of concepts rendered by the blurring of civilized and savage, human and animal, the impasse “is promptly dispelled and ‘cleared’ by laughter, whose euphoria serves to anaesthetize the socio-cultural mind.”10 In this way, cannibal jokes raise the possibility of a cultural relativism that makes Americans and Pacific Islanders substitutable for each other; but, ultimately, these jokes dissipate and deny that possibility through mocking laughter. “He Don’t Agree with Me Yet”: Boiled-Missionary Jokes and Imperial Anxiety in American Periodical Humor

Nineteenth-century comic periodicals consistently used the occasion of missionary news to make cannibal jokes attacking both alleged cannibals and missionaries. In 1847, for instance, Yankee Doodle reprinted a French paper’s list of articles requested by missionaries to the Society Islands, opining, in a way that anticipates Mark Twain’s lecture, discussed in chapter 2, “In a few years these spirituous missionaries will have so civilized Tahiti and the neighboring isles, that there will be left no native heads to wear the hats, no aboriginal bodies to be covered with the calicoes.”11 This acknowledgment of the steep population declines accompanying European contact is grim stuff for a comic periodical and amounts to darkly satiric commentary on news. An 1861 issue of Vanity Fair works similarly, dryly noting a news item about the departure of a missionary ship from Boston but offering its commentary in the framing headline: “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal.”12 A comic poem titled “A Sad Story,” originally published in 1871 in the British comic periodical London Fun but widely reprinted in the United States, also seems to take the side of cannibals over missionaries, ending with the quatrain: And when they [cannibals] filled each maw, They said, while they deplored him [the missionary], “They loved him—live and raw— But, roasted, they adored him!”13 This poem circulated widely in US periodicals in the 1870s, appearing in at least twenty-two different newspapers and magazines between 1871 and 1875. It resurfaced again in 1887 as “A South Sea Tragedy” in the 100  A Laughable Empire

Omaha Herald and New York Sun, both of which attribute authorship to the leading writer, critic, and editor William Dean Howells. On the basis of this attribution, the literary scholar Gary Scharnhorst has argued that the poem should be added to Howells’s oeuvre.14 Of course, the existence of an 1871 version, with its attribution to London Fun, shows Scharnhorst’s claim of authorship for Howells to be a mistake. I point this out not to cast aspersions on Howells or Scharnhorst but rather to highlight the ramifications of textual circulation and the “culture of reprinting” in the nineteenth century.15 That a tossed-off poem from a British comic periodical could circulate in US newspapers and then be credited to a canonical American writer demonstrates just how easily fugitive jokes, poems, and other bon mots can separate from their original context and attach themselves to new cultural referents, sociopolitical contexts, and even authors. Contemporary readers certainly recognized the reuse of such jokes. For instance, in an 1896 New York Tribune article titled “He Wants Something New: The Protest of a Man Who Reads the Comic Papers,” the author complains about the ubiquity of recycled cannibal jokes in humor periodicals: “I was not surprised to see the stereotyped cannibal and missionary with an attendant joke. . . . But the joke—and the picture also—had an air of antiquity, inasmuch as I first noticed the identical joke—even unto the rhetorical question—and almost identical picture . . . back in the ’eighties.”16 If this complaint is accurate and emblematic, the cannibal-and-boiled missionary joke seems to have been the (overused) joke of the second half of the nineteenth century. “A Sad Story,” for instance, circulated and then resurfaced at two historical moments—the early 1870s and the late 1880s—when the fates of Pacific islands’ and Pacific Islanders’ sovereignty, and specifically that of Hawai‘i and Hawaiians, hung in the balance. The poem, then, offers readers a shorthand to the political arguments over annexation through the hackneyed stereotypical markers of missionary and cannibal and, relatedly, of colonizer and colonized. But, like many boiled-​ missionary jokes, there is more here than originally meets the eye. As the poem puts it: And yet they were not lost, That missionary’s labors, He taught them to his cost The way to love their neighbors, “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  101

which they did when they “met him” for “prayers,” at which “They killed him and they ate him.” The poem operates on a pun about loving people, as a Christian or as a dish. Scharnhorst points out that the missionary, though ultimately unsuccessful in converting the Natives, does good work: “ ‘they understood / The goodness he had brought them’ . . . only after he has become their main course in a meal, the unwitting host literally consumed in an ironic eucharist.”17 This poem, like other jokes about cannibalism, allows readers to laugh at Pacific Islanders’ ostensible otherness, but it also slyly critiques the ethnocentric self-righteousness of missionaries. Readers, through the safety of a joke, can revel in the sufferings of missionaries (who almost always die in these jokes) without being overtly, seriously, publicly against the evangelical outreach that was so central to nineteenth-century US Protestantism. Cannibalism jokes in newspapers and magazines crystallize the cultural anxieties about travel and otherness into a pithy, (pardon the pun) digestible, repeatable form while attempting to diffuse those anxieties by cordoning them off into a miscellany or “wit and humor” section of a newspaper column. For instance, the following joke made the rounds of newspapers and magazines in late 1856 and early 1857 (with at least twelve reprints between November 1856 and February 1857): progress of civilization. A London paper gives a very gratifying account of the progress Christianity has made in New Zealand. A chief of that cannibal country was questioned by one of the missionaries as to how far the study of the Scriptures had broken him of his unnatural passion for human flesh. The Chief answered proudly, “You missionary men have done me much good. I never eat my enemies on Sundays now.” On week days, however, he dined on cold boiled missionary, or baked young women, or civilian cutlet, as usual. This is not more absurd than the men of the world who cheat on every day of the week, and go to church on Sunday.18 Like many cannibal-and-boiled-missionary jokes, “Progress of Civilization” has multiple butts: one is the cannibal, who makes a category mistake in deciding not to eat humans on Sundays, but another is the “boiled missionary, or baked young women, or civilian cutlet” who get consumed the other six days of the week. A third butt is articulated after the punch line, in a sort of moral that offers the joke as an allegory for religious hypocrites who think that weekly church attendance neutralizes their 102  A Laughable Empire

persistent sinning. The title, “Progress of Civilization,” that precedes most versions of it and the laudatory language like “gratifying” and “proudly” set up the joke’s ironic relationship to the so-called progress achievable through “the study of the Scripture” in places like New Zealand. Some subsequent reprints of the joke—in publications such as the Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, Dollar Newspaper (Philadelphia), and Saint Paul (MN) Daily Times in late 1856 and Nick-Nax for All Creation and Ballou’s Pictorial and in January 1857—cut the ending analogy to “men of the world who cheat on every day of the week, and go to church on Sunday” and end instead with the italicized punch line, “I never eat my enemies on Sundays now.”19 The humor of these versions is safer because readers are less likely to feel implicated in the charge that they are no better than cannibals. Another reprint, from the November 29, 1856, Portland (ME) Transcript, actually adds material to the joke. “A Christian Cannibal” begins, “Sydney Smith once told the Bishop of New Zealand, on his departure for his diocese, that in order to meet the tastes of his native guests he must never be without a smoked little boy in the bacon-rack, and a cold clergyman on the sideboard! ‘And as for myself, my Lord,’ he concluded, ‘all I can say is, that when your parishioners do eat you, I sincerely hope you may disagree with them.’ ” This common newspaper anecdote, which attributes a piece of black humor to the English cleric Sydney Smith, also appears verbatim in the 1870 book Wit and Wisdom of Sydney Smith.20 In the Portland Transcript, this joke then transitions to the “Progress of Civilization” joke with the line, “It is pleasant to learn that the New Zealanders have much improved in their habits since that day.”21 Preceding the “Progress of Civilization” joke with this macabre context allows the Transcript to highlight the ironic “progress” narrated in the subsequent joke. The addition of the Sydney Smith material overlays one well-trafficked newspaper joke onto another in a comic palimpsest. Other versions of the “disagree with him” joke—usually attributed to Smith—abounded. For example, in 1860, Ormsby’s New York Mailbag ran the following joke, titled “One for Sidney [sic]”: “Sidney [sic] Smith’s wit was so exuberant, that it broke out even on the most solemn occasions. When bidding farewell to a missionary who was just starting for the Cannibal Islands, the clerical joker squeezing his hand affectionately remarked, ‘My friend, I hope you will agree with the man who eats you.’ ”22 In 1872, in an otherwise serious article, the Honolulu newspaper the Friend referenced “facetious Rev. Sydney Smith to Bishop Selwyn, “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  103

when about to sail for the South Seas: ‘I hope, my Lord, you will keep a good supply of cooked infant in your sideboard for all visitors; and if any of the natives should fancy to eat you, I can only heartily hope you will disagree with them.’ Such playful remarks may pass, when uttered at a dinner table, for what they are worth.”23 Such attributions of witticisms to Smith were quite common in the British and US periodical press throughout the nineteenth century. W. H. Auden, in an introduction to Smith’s collected writings, dubs him “the most famous wit of his generation”; a biographer of Smith agrees, claiming that he was “the best known wit of his own generation and the most widely quoted of the next.” His career as a cleric honed his famous wit by giving him access to the thoughts and tastes of all classes of parishioners as well missionaries and other clergy. Smith’s penchant for amusing “successive generations” inheres in the way his humor forces its readers and auditors to identify and laugh at cant and hypocrisy, all of which are readily apparent in boiled-missionary jokes.24 An 1873 essay titled “American Humor” labels the British clergyman as an honorary American humorist. According to the essay’s author, Smith’s ability to make “the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous in the most amusing and successful manner” as well as his “American facility for grotesque exaggeration” meant that he, “perhaps, approached nearer the American standard than any of his countrymen.”25 These descriptions of Smith’s characteristically American humor, which highlight moving “from sublime to ridiculous” as well as “grotesque exaggeration,” could just as easily be used to describe cannibal-and-boiled-​missionary jokes as a subgenre. Another interesting twist in the textual life of “Progress of Civilization” occurs in the pages of the humor magazine Nick-Nax for All Creation. The January 1857 issue ran the shortened version of the joke ending with the punch line. Only one month later, the February issue of Nick-Nax printed the joke again, this time with the Sydney Smith addition.26 As demonstrated in chapter 2, this practice of self-reprinting was fairly common. It is unclear whether Nick-Nax’s editors remembered that they had included a shorter version of the joke in the previous issue and wanted to offer an updated version or whether, more likely, they simply clipped a popular joke that, in making the rounds of newspapers and magazines, had evolved significantly in just thirty days. The following groaner, which also appeared in multiple versions in the same periodical, blurs the categories of civilized and savage through

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the fulcrum of a pun. Indeed, if serious discourse about cannibalism attempts to enact “constitutive oppositions between savagery and humanity,” cannibal jokes reveal the constructedness and fragility of such oppositions.27 A version in July 1865 in Harper’s Weekly connects to current events by asking, “Why is a cannibal exulting after dining off a missionary’s wife like the finest race-horse of the present year?— Because he’s Glad-he-ate-her!”28 Thirteen years later, the August 1878 Harper’s Weekly printed a different version (which also appeared in September 1878 in the Kalamazoo [MI] Gazette): “There isn’t much difference between an old Roman soldier and a cannibal who has just dined on a nice young female missionary, for the former was a gladiator, and the latter is a glad-he-ate-her, too.”29 Though the joke writer probably did not intend it, this version of the joke’s contention that “there isn’t much difference between an old Roman soldier and a cannibal” equates supposedly “savage” Pacific Islanders with Romans, often imagined as paragons and progenitors of modern Western civilization. In both versions, the digested butt of the joke shifts from a male to a female missionary to make the pun work. The “nice young female missionary” and the “missionary’s wife” are editorial additions: the pun requires only that the victim of cannibalism be female, not that she be connected to missionary work. Nineteenth-century cannibal jokes often use the doubleness of puns to illustrate the potential for miscommunication and the fuzzy delineations between civilized and savage in Pacific contact zones. For instance, “Very Tender,” an 1851 joke in the New York Picayune, narrates a conversation between a “certain New Zealand chief ” and “a young missionary” who had “landed at his island, to succeed a sacred teacher deceased some time before.” The missionary asks the chief if he knew the missionary’s “departed brother,” to which the chief replies, “Ah, yes! I was deacon in his church.” The missionary then says, “Ah, then, you knew him well; and was he not a good and tender hearted man?” to which the chief answers, “with much gusto, ‘he very good and tender. I eat a piece of him!’ ”30 Punning on “tender” connects the supposed selfless kindness of missionary work to the cannibal’s gustatory delight. As in most puns, the chief makes a category mistake by misunderstanding the new missionary’s use of the term. But the fact that a man who ate the missionary was also “a deacon in his church” does even more to confuse classifications of civilized and savage.

“Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  105

A similar pun plays out in “Flattering Presence,” from a different 1851 issue of the New York Picayune. In this joke, after “two natives of the Marquesas Islands” were “carried to France,” a Frenchman asked “which they liked best, the French or the English?” Again misunderstanding the question, one Marquesan responds, “The English,” because “they are the fattest.” His female companion jumps in to add, “And a great deal more tender,” which she says “with a grin that exhibited two rows of pointed teeth as sharp as a crocodile’s.”31 This joke uses similar culinary puns—with “liked” and “tender”—but connects specifically to global geopolitics: though France had annexed the Marquesas in 1842, tensions continued with Britain over the islands, from which French troops had just withdrawn in 1850. In addition to remarking on world affairs, nineteenth-century jokes about cannibalism also sometimes comment on current domestic politics in the United States. This is readily apparent in Mark Twain’s barb— discussed in chapter 2—about there being a scarcity of children for him to eat in his demonstration of cannibalism because their numbers had “been thinned out by neglect and ill-treatment since the woman movement began.”32 Some comic newspaper accounts of cannibalism similarly use anthropological observations about foreign lands to engage in debates about gender roles in the United States. For example, an 1874 article in the comic periodical Wild Oats discusses a conflict over gender roles in Fiji through American terminology about “the woman question.” In “Equality of the Sexes in Fiji,” the killing and eating of missionaries is comically assumed as a matter of course, unimportant to the disagreement described. As the article explains the “very painful controversy . . . raging at present in Fiji over a point of etiquette,” one side “contends that only the men should be permitted to dance around the fire when a missionary is being cooked, while the other party hold that the women should be allowed to enter the circle and participate in the dance.” The narrator ironically expresses “much regret” about “the tendency of the Fijians to exclude women from a share in their merry-makings, and to reduce her to a level with inferior beings.” “Simple politeness,” the narrator continues, tongue-in-cheek, would prompt these men to permit women to take part in these festivities, especially when it is reflected that women have precisely the same interest in seeing that the missionary is well done as the men have, and, moreover, that they may probably be able to offer 106  A Laughable Empire

some valuable suggestions respecting the best methods of preparing the gravy. We had hoped that these controversies upon the woman question were ended, but it seems that it is hard to induce men to concede justice to their weaker fellow-beings. We trust that we may soon be able to record the fact that these ungenerous differences are healed, and that the bounteous provisions of nature and of the theological seminaries may be enjoyed, by both sexes alike.33 This description includes common elements of cannibal-and-boiled-​ missionary jokes, such as culinary commentary on meal preparation and presentation that humorously normalizes the unthinkable: for example, “Seeing that the missionary is well done,” “the best methods for preparing the gravy,” and “bounteous provisions of nature and of the theological seminaries.” But in framing these jokes in relation to controversies over women’s rights, the article allegorizes debates over “the woman question” in the United States by displacing it into that most foreign of locales, a Fijian cannibal feast. Another, shorter, periodical treatment of the same news, published nine months later, is even more overt in connecting this supposed Fijian controversy to US discussions of gender roles. The item reads, in full, “A dispute is going on in Fiji about the etiquette to be followed at missionary cookings. One party claims that men only should be allowed to dance round the tempting morsel, which the Fiji Woman’s Rights Society urge that the women should be permitted to join us. We should think a good way to settle the dispute would be to roast a missionary for each party. The supply is unlimited.”34 Like the previous, longer version, this bon mot revels in its depiction of “missionary cookings,” describing them as “tempting morsel[s]” and urging the cannibals to kill and cook more. The punch line, “The supply is unlimited,” is a dig at the perceived ubiquity of missionaries in the Pacific. Imagining a “Fiji Woman’s Rights Society” conflates Fijian and US culture for a laugh at the seeming impossibility of such a connection. Not all cannibal jokes use stereotypes about man-eating Pacific Islanders to dismiss them as savage others and therefore unfit for civilized society. Some blur lines between civilized and savage by depicting the cannibal propensities of Euro-Americans. Often in these jokes, comic charges of cannibalism against Pacific Islanders rebound back on Euro-American characters, thus exhibiting something akin to a cultural relativism that shows all humans to be more or less susceptible “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  107

to savagery. For instance, the 1852 G. M. Wharton (Stahl) short story “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal,” which was later reprinted in William Burton’s Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (1857), tells the story of a cannibal-turned-missionary. The storyteller’s very act of relating his tale turns him, his auditors, and, by extension, the story’s readers into potential cannibals. The sketch operates through a double-framed narrative in which a narrator recounts hearing a sea captain just returned from Tahiti spin a yarn over drinks in New Orleans. Captain Thorn introduces the story by connecting his protagonist, a Māori named Pee-wi Ho-ki, to the well-known wit of Sydney Smith. He asks his drinking buddies if they remembered “when a clerical friend of Rev. Sydney Smith departed on a missionary visitation to New Zealand,—the parson fervently prayed that his brother might not be made a pickle of by the savages?” He continues, “The jest of the petition neutralized the fervor of it; and Pee-wi Ho-ki, after patiently listening to the missionary’s sermon as far as ‘forty seventhly,’ grew hungry and ate him!”35 The details of Captain Thorn’s telling—particularly Pee-wi Ho-ki’s patience until the forty-seventh part of the sermon—hint to readers that the missionary had it coming. The joke attacks the tedium of sermons more than it does the savagery of cannibalism. The accompanying image shows a minister standing up while delivering an oration to two seemingly uninterested Māori (fig. 10). It is reminiscent of another joke, titled “Missionary Perils,” from Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag of Fun (1854): “There are some natives that won’t believe a word of the sermon, but will swallow the preacher.”36 In both cases, cannibalism is comical mostly because it is an outlandish, if merited, response to witheringly boring preaching. It is, the joke implies, what we all wish we could do in similar circumstances. In “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal,” Captain Thorn recounts a curious physiological process via which Pee-wi Ho-ki’s dyspepsia after eating the missionary ultimately converts him. Pee-wi Ho-ki reasons that the “pains of his indigestion” are connected “to the spiritual functions once appertaining to the viands. . . . He began to reflect upon what the good tongue, now in his stomach, had told him of the white face’s religion.”37 Pee-wi Ho-ki’s thought process here demeans the efficacy of missionary preaching by physicalizing it. That is, Pee-wi Ho-ki spiritually internalizes the missionary’s sermon by literally internalizing the missionary, which calls to mind stock missionary jokes about cannibal chiefs explaining to a missionary that his predecessor had “gone into the interior.”38 The joke also mirrors a jest about Hawaiian King 108  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 10  G. M. Wharton, “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal,” Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor of America, Ireland, Scotland, and England, Division II, edited by William Burton, 333–35 (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 334. Image source: Hathi Trust.

David Kalākaua from 1882, printed in the National Police Gazette: “king kalakaua, of the Sandwich Islands, cannot help being a good man. His ancestors ate so much missionary in their time that it worked into their system and was transmitted to their descendants. Missionaries who are eaten are, after all, not wasted, it would appear.”39 In these jokes, cannibals become “good” people by devouring and digesting “good” people. In a sense, these jokes anticipate twentieth- and twenty-​first-century theorizing of cannibalism. For example, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, in Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, echoes the earlier work of Maggie Kilgour in From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation when she characterizes the cannibalistic act as annihilating the “difference between the self and the eaten other, making one body of the two” and thereby recognizing and enacting “sameness.”40 Captain Thorn elevates his language when describing the conversion process of the so-called savage. He relates that Pee-wi Ho-ki “declared that the tongue of the preacher continued to harangue his soul, so near a neighbor now, and with such effect. . . . You might have thought him mad, had you seen the nude penitent sitting in his warm island sunshine, contemplating his umbilicus, and hearkening unto the vermicular borborygm, as to the whispering of an oracle, or the blowing of a divine afflatus!” Wharton probably overwrites this section to wring “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  109

humor from the ironic juxtaposition of a “nude penitent sitting in the warm island sunshine” with medical and religious jargon. Wharton shifts back into the vernacular immediately after this, however: “Suffice it to say, that Pee-wi Ho-ki was converted, by whatsoever process, and human bacon was taboo’d to his palate ever after.”41 “Human bacon” becomes important in part because the Thorn and his auditors are sitting at a restaurant; the phrase inches cannibalism closer to American gourmandizing. In Captain Thorn’s story, Pee-wi Ho-ki does not just convert; he becomes a missionary, thus replacing the man he has ingested. But, as he finds that missionary labors are not appreciated among his own people in New Zealand, he paddles to Tahiti, where he becomes much revered as a preacher. Pee-wi Ho-ki’s migration and easy transition from New Zealand to Tahiti demonstrate once again that, in the imaginations of American comic writers and their readers, anyway, Pacific islands and their inhabitants were virtually interchangeable, despite the fact that New Zealand and Tahiti are over twenty-six hundred miles apart. Tahiti is where Captain Thorn, who is anchored there, meets Pee-wi Ho-ki. Hearing a call to worship on conchs, which was “the signal for church-going, and that a distinguished native missionary was to preach,” Thorn, curious, attends the service, which he describes to his compatriots in relation to churchgoing in the United States, particularly in the “foppishness” of the attendees.42 Describing the foreign through the familiar is a common trope in travel writing; what is notable here, however, is the cultural mélange on display: a Christian sermon delivered by a Native New Zealander to Native Tahitians, who behave in a manner similar to New England churchgoers. Captain Thorn and Pee-wi Ho-ki become fast friends and even go so far as to exchange names, about which the narrator and his friend rib Thorn: “ ‘captain Pee-wi Ho-ki!’ we interrupted, congratulatorily. ‘Thank you,’ Thorn said, politely.” They are joking, but the invocation of a name-trading ritual is yet another example of an equal exchange between the New Zealander and the American. Such exchanges, in the rest of the story, quickly become ludicrous. As Thorn and Pee-wi Ho-ki get to know each other, Thorn admits his curiosity “on the subject of cannibalism, having witnessed its fascinations upon the uncivilized indulgers in it, eaten remarkable sausages in civilized Paris, and expecting, some day, to be driven to the long boat, with half a dozen others, and without the cupboard aboard.” As Thorn equates cannibalism with Parisian dining 110  A Laughable Empire

and then admits, with no apparent qualms, that he fully expects one day to be driven to cannibalism at sea, the barriers between “civilized” and “savage” begin to break down. Then they are erased entirely: “Candidly, I asked him to favor me with his recipes. He did. I wrote them down. I invariably carry them in my pocket.” Thus ends the frame narrative and Pee-wi Ho-ki’s story. Then, at the restaurant, Captain Thorn pulls out the cannibal recipes and says, “Here they are. I will read a few.” The recipes are not represented in the story; they are elided with a series of dots. But the effect of Thorn’s reading of them is remarkable, turning the auditors into hungry cannibals as well. The narrator comments, “Whether owing to the wine, our long sitting, or Thorn’s spices—certainly not his meats!—we both confessed to a recurring sense of appetite, and selected a veal cutlet and coffee.”43 Their hunger pangs, operating as a mirror image to Pee-wi Ho-ki’s earlier conversion-inciting indigestion, complete the reversal between Pee-wi Ho-ki and Thorn and his friends: that is, Pee-wi Ho-ki becomes a Christian missionary, and they become, nearly, cannibals. Such satiric leveling makes the New Zealander civilized and the Americans savages at the slightest provocation. In a rhetorical reversal that Mark Twain would perfect in his Sandwich Island lectures, wherein he infamously offered to demonstrate cannibalism by eating a baby onstage (as described in chapter 2), this leveling targets Euro-​ Americans with ethnocentric pretensions to superior civilization much more than it does Pacific Islanders. But, in “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal,” the near-​transformation of civilized to cannibal savage that takes place in the diners is neither permanent nor applicable beyond their table. In fact, their very discussion stirs chaos with serious consequences. An Irish cook has been listening to their conversation from the kitchen door and goes into spasms of fear, which the narrator describes in a slapstick scene wherein the waiters attempt to revive her by shoving food into her mouth. A description of ensuing events reveals the real reason for this story: it is written testimony as part of a legal defense. The last paragraph reads, “Thus, in a few words, have we explained—first, the seeming row in Murphy’s always quiet, genteel, well-administered restaurant, on Friday evening last; secondly, the evident falsity of the affidavit made by Bridget Mahoney, before his honor, Recorder Genois, yesterday forenoon, charging the captain of a schooner and a grave newspaper reporter, with desiring her to truss and roast human flesh, to appease their cannibal hunger; and, thirdly, the mysterious disappearance, early this morning, of James “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  111

Thorn and the ship Bagatelle, from their moorings at the wharf of the New Orleans levee. Diximus!”44 Summarizing the events through a “he said, she said” legal statement lends them a comic doubleness; we are not precisely sure whom to believe. If the narrator is telling the truth and Bridget Mahoney lying (or acting on a misunderstanding), it is proof that fear of cannibal savages remains rampant back home even as travelers (and their auditors) come to understand Pacific Islanders through equal exchanges and even cultural relativism. Americans are not ready for Captain Thorn and his friends’ open-minded curiosity about cannibalism; the fear that it engendered has forced Captain Thorn to take a French leave of New Orleans. On the other hand, the last paragraph also leaves open the possibility that Bridget Mahoney’s affidavit is accurate and the narrator is lying to save face after being motivated to rapturous hunger by Thorn’s story and requesting that the cook “roast human flesh, to appease their cannibal hunger.” If so, the story uses comedy to demonstrate the very fine, mutable line between civilized and savage. That a mere description of cannibal recipes—divorced from any ritual or other cultural referent—could almost immediately turn the narrator and others into eager cannibals shows there is really no difference between them and Pee-wi Ho-ki or even the New Zealand cannibals he had left behind. Such anxieties about the cross-cultural similarities of peoples across the world are quite common to nineteenth-century humor about cannibalism, some of which takes pains to distinguish nations and cultures on the basis of food preferences. As Christie Davies has noted, food jokes are a common element of ethnic humor because “food is one of the means by which an ethnic group asserts that it is different from its neighbors.”45 For example, a joke titled “How Folks Differ” from the jest book Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag of Fun attempts such differentiation through comic listing: “We chew tobacco, the Hindoo takes to lime, while the Patagonian finds contentment in a bite of guano. The children of this country delight in candy, those of Africa in rock salt. A Frenchman goes his length for dried frogs, while an Esquimaux Indian thinks a stewed candle the climax of dainties. The South Sea Islanders differ from all these, their favorite dish being boiled clergymen, or a roasted missionary.”46 This joke begins with a comic celebration of cultural difference in relation to culinary culture, laughing equally at Hindus, Patagonians, Africans, the French, and Eskimos for their dietary choices but treating them all with respect, more or less. Beginning the list with Americans 112  A Laughable Empire

“chew[ing] tobacco,” and thus labeling American readers’ own cultural norm as odd, denies any urge in readers to engage in ethnocentrism. But the tone of the joke shifts at the last sentence, which delivers a punch line that makes “South Sea Islanders differ from all these.” This exclusion from the previous list of countries—all of whose supposedly odd eating habits are chuckled at but framed as not so divergent as to disqualify them from a comic league of nations—derives from the Pacific Islanders’ supposed savagery. After all, they are the only peoples on the list whose supposed culinary preferences are for human beings. Oddly, the joke separates them out for this alleged savagery but, at the same time, treats cannibalism with dry understatements, especially in their blasé (and, even by the 1850s, clichéd) attention to modes of preparation— that is, “boiled” and “roasted.” This stand-alone joke is structured similarly to a jest that S. S. Cox makes in an 1875 Harper’s essay in which he attempts to lay out characteristics of American humor. Cox writes, “But as the people of one country may be alike even in their differences of body and mind, so there are peculiarities in the humor of different nations as marked as the geographical peculiarities of their country, or as their food. An Englishman loves roast beef; a German, krout; a Patagonian, red mud; a Kamtchatkan, blubber; a South Sea Islander, cold clergyman; a Peruvian Indian, the abominable chica; and the American, the weed! Their humorous taste is not less diverse.”47 Davies argues that divergent food preferences can function as a symbol or microcosm of cultural difference. In this way, according to Davies, “jokes about ethnic groups and food” reflect attempts by one ethnic group to “maintain and reinforce social boundaries and identity.”48 Indeed, both versions of this joke reproduce the stereotype of the Pacific Islander as a cannibal devouring an innocent, well-meaning missionary. But in both, as in most of the jokes I discuss in this chapter, there is also a cross-cultural association that undercuts that othering stereotype. The doubleness of humor allows its practitioners to signify on stereotypes in ways that force audiences to view them in a new context that forges connections across cultures, making the familiar seem foreign and the foreign familiar. Some cannibal jokes in newspapers and jest books do this by jamming together cannibalism as the paragon of foreignness with the bland familiarity of family life in the United States. By far the most-​ reprinted cannibal jokes of the 1860s and 1870s were multiple variations of the following, here quoted from the Hawaiian Gazette in 1868: “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  113

“Do you see that fellow lounging there doing nothing?” said Owens to Jenkins. “How does he live, by his wits?” “Oh no, he’s a cannibal.” “A cannibal?” “Yes, a cannibal—he lives on other people.”49 Other versions make accusations of cannibalism specific to family members. “Civilized Cannibals,” from Demorest’s Young America in 1873, makes “sons-in-law” the butts of the joke: “ ‘Why do they call the people that live in some of the South Sea Islands cannibals?’ asked an old man of a sailor. ‘Because they live on other people,’ answered the sailor. ‘Then,’ said the old man, pensively, ‘my sons-in-law must be cannibals, for they live on me!’ ”50 Another version, from Harper’s Weekly in 1867, specifies a lazy uncle: “Pa, are cannibals people that live on other folks?” “Yes, my dear.” “Then, pa, Uncle George must be a cannibal, for ma says he’s always living on somebody.”51 Each version of this wildly popular joke domesticizes Pacific cannibalism by equating it with freeloading in the United States. In this way, it attempts to defang the practice by treating it as a nuisance instead of a life-threatening danger. In doing so, the leveling logic of the joke also degrades white Americans like “the fellow lounging over there doing nothing” to savage status while commensurately affording alleged Pacific Islander cannibals civilized (if lazy and sponging) status. A similar joke, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1867 and in the humor periodical the Jolly Joker in 1876 before circulating widely in newspapers in 1877, highlights cultural difference by juxtaposing cannibalism with Christianity: “What is the difference between a Christian and a cannibal?—One enjoys himself, and the other enjoys other people.”52 This version again puns off a verb—here “enjoy” instead of “live off ”—that can apply to eating as well to other aspects of life. But in framing that pun in terms of “the difference between” instead of similarity, it reifies a contrast between “a Christian and a cannibal.” The fact that Harper’s printed several different versions of this same joke is a testament to its popularity and persistence. Another iteration of the “live off me” joke leverages the notoriety of the famed showman P. T. Barnum as an exhibitor of supposed “Feejee Cannibals” and turns it into an in-law joke. Giving Barnum a role in the dialogue of the joke, as a kind of setup man, leverages both his association with his exhibits and his reputation as fun-loving. It also allows for the repurposing of an old joke for current events, in this case Barnum’s traveling exhibition of alleged Fiji cannibals (discussed in more detail in chapter 4). The following version appeared in April 1872 in the Daily Albany (NY) Argus and was reprinted in Harper’s Weekly a month later: 114  A Laughable Empire

“A kind old father-in-law wanted to know why the Feejeians were called cannibals, to which Barnum replied: ‘Because they live off other people.’ ‘Then,’ replied he, unhappily, ‘my four sons-in-law must be cannibals— they live off of me!’ ”53 This adaptation uses the same pun but further co-opts a joke about Pacific Islander otherness for the articulation of clichéd sentiments about family life in the United States and its attendant financial burdens. In this and other examples, cannibalism functions as a comic foil to domestic life. The joke’s appeal to editors and readers alike may be due in part to the fact that, more than other eating puns common to cannibal-​ and-boiled-missionary jokes, it domesticates cannibalism by locating it in the home. The joke is somehow simultaneously othering and familial, which mirrors the paradoxes inherent to US imperialism. Amy Kaplan has argued that “the border between domestic and foreign” dissolves when we consider domestication as a “process” that requires “conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien.” For Kaplan, the concept of the domestic is integral to imperialism and its self-​justifications through appeals to “civilizing” Natives, since “the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery.” Because all domestication—be it in one’s home at the familial level or abroad at the national level—requires taming “wild or foreign elements,” the concept of domesticity somewhat paradoxically “monitors the borders between the civilized and savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.” Kaplan offers this insight in the context of her readings of nineteenth-century domestic manuals by Catherine Beecher and Sara Joseph Hale in order to understand “the imperial reach of domestic discourse.” But cannibal jokes that highlight familial connections or home life engage in a similar “process of domestication” that seeks to psychically tame the “wild or foreign elements” of the Pacific world as represented by fears of cannibalism.54 Tensions between universal human nature and cultural or national difference are highly characteristic of these and other nineteenth-​century jokes about cannibalism. “Amiable . . . Epicures”: Jokes on Cannibalism in Comic Travel Writing

Breathless accounts of cannibalism in popular nineteenth-century travel literature narrated for American readers the epitome of otherness and thereby became inextricable from Americans’ anxieties about cultural “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  115

contact and from their general conceptions of Pacific Islanders. Paul Lyons describes fear as the animating emotion of contact for those who engaged in it directly as well as for those who participated vicariously by reading travel narratives. Lyons writes, “Fear—its generation, its repression, its negotiation—would inform all perception, and most extravagantly that involved with early intercultural contact.”55 In serio-comic travel writings, globe-trotting humorists like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Conflagration Jones play on those fears as they enter into dialogue with (and sometimes against) previous travelers’ accounts of terror in their jokes about cannibalism. Herman Melville’s first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), builds on his audience’s assumed familiarity with earlier discourse on cannibalism to build suspense in his narrative. Melville uses rumors of the Typee tribe’s cannibalism to structure his plot and create tension, toying with readers’ fears as his narrator, Tommo, vacillates between acculturation with the kind, hospitable people he falls in with and his abject fear at being killed and eaten by those same people. But in spite of this trope of equivocation between exotic luxury and abject fear, many of Melville’s actual descriptions of the practice of cannibalism are full of good-natured, easygoing humor of the ilk that John Bryant has characterized as Melville’s “aesthetics of repose.”56 Melville’s geniality undercuts the tension built up by the cannibal-or-no, “Typee or Happar?” refrain of the book. For instance, Tommo jokes that, while the infamous Typee are indeed cannibals, “a more humane, gentlemanly, and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in the Pacific.”57 The humor in this description arises from Melville’s overcivil diction, which creates a ludicrous juxtaposition between cannibalism, that ultimate signifier of savagery, and the “gentlemanly,” club-like pursuits of gourmands. Contemporary readers and reviewers certainly noticed and commented on Melville’s good-natured style in his treatment of what at least one reviewer dubbed “a race of naked savages.” An 1846 advertisement in the New York Commercial Advertiser cites an excerpt from a review describing Typee as “one of the most agreeable, readable books of the day. The peculiarity of the book, to us, is the familiar and town life of the author among a race of naked savages. He goes down every day from his hut to a lounging shed of the chiefs, the Ti he calls it, as if he were walking from the Astor House to the Saloons of the Racket Club. The bon hommie of the book is remarkable. It appears as genial and

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natural as the spontaneous fruits of the island.”58 This review conflates Melville’s genial style with the supposed geniality of his subjects and gentleness of their land, thus reifying stereotypes of Pacific islands as Edenic while associating good-natured humor with it. Other reviews of Typee laud it in similar terms and for similar reasons. The Dollar Newspaper (Philadelphia) describes it as “an exceedingly agreeable and pleasant work”; the Alexandria (VA) Gazette quotes the Albany Argus’s praise of “Mr. Melville’s charming book”; and the Honolulu Polynesian highlights the connection between Melville’s and the Marquesans’ amiability: “His descriptions of Polynesian Life are characterised with a careless elegance of style which suits admirably with the luxurious and tropical tone of the narrative.”59 Walt Whitman, in his 1847 review of Typee and Melville’s follow-up, Omoo, praises Melville’s “richly good natured style.”60 Whitman’s contemporary description of Melville’s “good nature” aligns with Bryant’s characterization of the author’s “amiable humor.”61 As presented to readers in ads and reviews, a major element of the “true” Pacific as rendered by Melville was its genial, easygoing humor. In Melville’s satiric logic, the Typee are both more savage and more humane than Westerners such as the despotic captain whose ship his narrator, Tommo, has deserted. Such humorous description turns on its head fears of the Typee that had been fostered by previous travel writing, a fearmongering that Melville’s book responds to but also participates in. Lyons asserts, “For Melville cannibalism is a hackneyed theme, blown madly out of proportion, irresponsibly deployed as a justification for preemptive violence, and productive of blockages within perception, while itself becoming an absurd form of literary tourism.”62 For Sanborn, Melville’s novel seeks to “expose the ambivalence at the heart of discourse of colonialism, as embodied in the discourse on cannibalism.”63 Melville’s amiable treatment of alleged cannibals seems in part an admonition to sensationalist travel writers and readers ready to believe the worst about Pacific Islanders. Melville renders sensational accounts of cannibalism even more absurd in an anecdote in Typee about an “old chief ” on Maui who, “actuated by a morbid desire for notoriety, gave himself out among the foreign residents of the place as the living tomb of Captain Cook’s big toe!—affirming, that at the cannibal entertainment which ensued after the lamented Briton’s death, that particular portion of his body had fallen to his share.” Melville explains that this chief was put on trial “in

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the native courts, on a charge nearly equivalent to what we term defamation of character,” but acquitted because it could not be proven that he did not eat Captain Cook’s toe. The fame of this acquittal, as Melville tells it, “fully established” his “cannibal reputation” and resulted in the “making of his fortune; ever afterwards he was in the habit of giving very profitable audiences to all curious travellers who were desirous of beholding the man who had eaten the great navigator’s great toe.”64 In this anecdote, Melville again deploys genial irony to transform lurid tales of cannibalism into a ludicrous spectacle that denudes it of its fear factor. The chief ’s outlandish claim, rendered comic by its specificity, as well as his capitalistic urges to tell his tale to “profitable audiences” of “curious travellers,” turns cannibalism into a tourist trap, a phenomenon I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. Like Melville, Mark Twain repeatedly plays on his readers’ and lecture audiences’ fears of cannibalism, often in order to challenge their sense of cultural superiority. For instance, in Roughing It, an account of his travels to Nevada, California, and Hawai‘i, he similarly applies the humor of genial understatement to cannibalism. Telling a story about nobles proposing to eat a dying king “raw,” he offers a joking footnote: “All Sandwich Island historians, white and black, protest that cannibalism never existed in the Islands. However, since they only proposed to ‘eat him raw’ we ‘won’t count that.’ But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked him.”65 Twain here pretends to misunderstand what constitutes cannibalism and what about it is immoral. As we have seen, this humor of category mistake is common to cannibalism jokes: by making the criterion about cooked versus raw instead of considering the cruelty of the act, he destabilizes the assumed definition of cannibalism and muddies the line differentiating “them” from “us.” Humor similarly inheres in Twain’s refusal to understand or acknowledge the barbarity of cannibalism. In Twain’s lecture “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” he humorously dismisses accusations that Hawaiians were cannibals by saying, “It used to be said that the Kanakas were cannibals, but that was a slander. They didn’t eat Captain Cook—or if they did, it was only for fun.”66 As in the joke in Roughing It, here Twain purports to excuse or minimize the immorality of cannibalism; saying that it is permissible because it is “only for fun” mocks the explanations of more serious anthropologists describing anthropophagy as a specific cultural ritual or

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response to war or famine. “It was only for fun,” of course, is no excuse; that actually makes the act worse. In making such judgments, Twain purposely undermines his own moral authority, thus erasing distinctions between himself and Hawaiians in favor of a comic cultural relativism. His other jokes about cannibalism in his Sandwich Island lectures work in much the same way, undercutting his audience’s assumed cultural superiority by making himself the object of disdain, even as he endears himself to his audience through his charming performance. Another tactic that Twain uses to disassemble his readers’ sense of preeminence over Pacific Islanders is to describe, jokingly, Euro-​Americans’ complicity in cannibalism. The most famous example—discussed in detail in chapter 2—from his Sandwich Islands lecture is his offer to demonstrate cannibalism onstage, on a child from the audience. But elsewhere he makes comic complicity part of his scathing critique of missionaries and their negative impacts on Hawai‘i. In an 1871 essay for the magazine Galaxy, titled “About a Remarkable Stranger, Being a Sandwich Island Reminiscence,” and used again in Roughing It, Twain treats cannibalism with nonchalance, in this case as an excuse to get away from an annoying man. He writes, “Somehow this man’s presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds.”67 More than Twain’s other cannibalism jokes, this one accedes to prevailing stereotypes about “rude war-chiefs of the Islands.” It also signifies on the tired trope of the boiled missionary. But, in doing so, Twain once again makes himself a coparticipant in a potential cannibal act, since he is more than willing to “help him enjoy a missionary” for the totally mundane purpose of avoiding conversation with a tiresome bore. Twain here embodies in startling physical form his earlier attacks against missionaries, whose “work” in (depopulating) Hawai‘i, he points out with bitter irony, “speaks for itself.”68 Seen in this context, it appears that Twain evolves the old “boiled missionary” joke for something very near anti-imperialist ends. This is less a reversal of normal markers of civilized and savage than it is a leveling gesture that makes Hawaiians and Americans equally savages. Such satiric leveling seems part of Twain’s overall project in his writings about Hawai‘i, as the lecture title “Our Fellow Savages of the

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Sandwich Islands” and the rumored book title “An American Cannibal at Home” both imply. The phrase “Our Fellow,” especially, implies an equivalency between Hawaiians and Americans not through their shared humanity but through their shared savagery. Both Melville’s and Twain’s humor questions the assumptions behind travelers’ and travel writers’ charges of cannibalism as an excuse for conversion and conquest. Both are leery of missionary efforts and commercial takeover, even as they participate in the latter through the very act of travel writing. Indeed, through their anxious jokes, they foreground their sense of complicity while denying a laugh of superiority to either themselves or their readers. Other mid- to late-nineteenth-century American literary comedians also saw the comic possibilities in the moral ambiguity of boiled missionaries. For instance, the midcentury humorist Mortimer Thomson’s character Q. K. Philander Doesticks casually references cannibalism in several of his newspaper columns about urban life in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. In an 1856 account of Doesticks’s “visit to Coney Island,” for example, he describes the sensation of getting beaten about by waves and cut by shells while swimming as comparable to “a missionary to the Cannibal Islands . . . being pickled alive as a Christian tidbit for their Epicurean King.”69 In an 1861 essay, Doesticks uses a more extended metaphor about cannibalism to describe war fever at the outset of the Civil War. He writes, “It seems as if all the people in the country had suddenly been converted to Cannibalism, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t relish anything that doesn’t have the taste of human blood and brains.” Doesticks then forgets the tenor of the metaphor he has set up and ponders the act of cannibalism itself in lurid fashion: I’m not quite up to Cannibalism yet, on general principles—though there are some acquaintances of mine, whom I could devour with a gusto. One particular young lady who has, on several occasions, snubbed me sharply, has a soft cheek that would make a magnificent grill—and I think I could devour, with much delight, a broiled slice of her shoulder, taken out, the first cut under the collar-bone, if done rare, and well seasoned with red pepper and Worcestershire sauce. However, we have not quite come to that yet, but must live in hope. Meantime, I must content myself with hoping that this said young person may be fed on the fat of the land, and trust that she may be plump and in good condition when— 120  A Laughable Empire

Doesticks then interrupts himself, saying, “However, all this has nothing to do with all my campaigning experience,” before returning to his narrative.70 The humor here stems in part from Doesticks losing himself in his own metaphor and providing intricate culinary details of his sexual fantasy of devouring “a particular young lady.” But the familiarity of this account and Thomson’s choice of cannibalism for a metaphor also show just how common cannibalism was as a comic trope in the mid-​nineteenth century. In an 1868 essay, Doesticks makes a more pointed reference to the Pacific in an invocation of cannibalism when he describes a “restaurant keeper” who “would have cooked a state dinner for the King of the Cannibal Islands out of plump old bachelors and tender little school-girls if he had been paid for it.”71 Even with the more specific allusion, Thomson still uses cannibalism here as a comic metaphor to describe the urban US social scene, thus exoticizing the familiar. Decades later, newspaper humorists were still at it. Near the end of the century, Edgar Wilson Nye (writing as Bill Nye), in “William Nye Visits Royalty from the Home of the Ham Sandwich,” uses genial exchange, with missionaries as the butt of the joke, even as he seeks to make the Queen of Hawai‘i a cultural representative of cannibalistic savagery. Nye writes, “I did say . . . that I regretted sincerely the unfortunate time of the year at which Her Majesty had decided to visit us, it being rather between hay and grass, as it were, for as there was no r in the month it was a little too late for missionaries and a little too early for watermelons.”72 This is the humor of understatement, in which Nye, under the auspices of being a good host, equates “watermelons” and “missionaries” as crop foods. In doing so, the character highlights otherness of Hawaiians and invokes Americans’ moral scruples about cannibalism by pretending to ignore them. As in Twain’s jokes, Nye is no better than the alleged cannibals to whom he purports to want to be a good host, by any means necessary. Similar ambivalence about the labels of “civilized” and “savage” and these characteristics’ coexistence in both Pacific Islanders and Americans are on display in the humorous travel narrative Hawaii, a Snap Shot, Being the Record of a Trip to the “Paradise of the Pacific” in Which the Truth of General Impressions More than Literal and Often Misleading Fact Is Offered, written by Clarence Webster under the pseudonym Conflagration Jones. Though Webster’s 1891–92 newspaper columns for the Chicago Inter-Ocean and the 1893 book that his correspondence would eventually make up were published just after the five-decade focus “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  121

of A Laughable Empire, I mention it here in part because Webster’s character Conflagration Jones appears to be inspired by Clemens’s character of Mark Twain in Hawai‘i. Like Twain, Jones sets himself up as the naïve traveler who is the butt of jokes and comic buffoonery, and he even overtly references Twain’s Hawai‘i writings.73 Additionally, Jones’s traveling companion Burridge (a stand-in for the illustrator Art Young) is highly reminiscent of Brown from Twain’s letters from Hawai‘i to the Sacramento Union: Burridge, like Brown, acts as the somewhat genteel narrator’s wilder id. Near the end of the book version, Jones notes casually that “the percentage of illiteracy is very small, nearly every native being able to read and write in his own language.”74 This description is not funny, but the accompanying illustration by Young attempts a comic juxtaposition of this trait associated with civilization with preconceptions of cannibal savagery (fig. 11). The image pictures a shirtless Native on a beach, holding a fork after a meal, with a kettle still smoldering and what looks like human bones discarded in the sand. The Native has a satisfied smile and reads a newspaper. The caption simply says, matterof-factly, “Percentage of illiteracy small.” The humor here arises from the perceived contrast between savage cannibalism and enlightened reading. It also uses visual cues to depict, simultaneously, the Hawaiian as other (that is, nearly naked and having repasted on humans) and as similar to American readers (that is, relaxing with a newspaper after enjoying a good meal). This latter element identifies Hawaiians with Americans through a shared passion for print journalism. In this way, the cartoon pulls in two different directions at the same time. As Conflagration Jones and Art Young’s literacy joke exemplifies, the boiled-missionary joke experienced a curious revival in US newspapers in the last two decades of the 1800s and the first decade of the 1900s. This renascence coincided with the beginning of the US age of imperialism that featured, among other imperial endeavors, the annexation of Hawai‘i and the Spanish-American War in 1898. Though the jokes themselves are timeless, repeating the same puns and stereotypes that had been in circulation since the 1840s, this historical context slightly alters their meanings. First, because print technology had evolved considerably in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the jokes in the 1890s and 1900s were accompanied by illustrations. Most are single-panel cartoons, which, as Sarah Sillin explains, tend to deny readers’ identification with the caricatured subjects and instead “reinforce 122  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 11  “Percentage of Illiteracy Small,” from Clarence A. Webster, Hawaii, a Snap Shot . . . (Chicago: Smith and Colbert, 1893), 57. Image source: Internet Archive.

the physiognomic tenet that we can read racial and cultural hierarchies in the body”; the result is a flattening of “foreign peoples into types.”75 Donald Dewey has also noted turn-of-the-twentieth-century caricatures’ “decided pandering to the ticking demands of settled prejudices.” Cartooning’s “golden age,” he writes, “was also a period of virulently bigoted illustrations,” as is clearly evident in fin de siècle cartoons that accompany cannibal jokes.76 Second, the United States’ emergence as an imperial power on multiple continents led to racial conflations that sometimes removed the specifically Pacific context of cannibalism from these jokes. Indeed, when viewing turn-of-the-century cartoons, it is often difficult to determine if the savagely caricatured subjects are “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal”  123

intended to represent Pacific Islanders, Africans, or either one. But, like their predecessors in previous decades, fin de siècle cannibal jokes and cartoons in periodicals express Americans’ anxiety about the imperial project. Combining racist caricature with the scapegoating of missionaries as harbingers of US culture, they articulate, and attempt to jocularly dismiss, lingering fears about the otherness of peoples in the path of US overseas expansion while processing qualms about the morality of imperialism. By the 1890s, cannibal jokes had become so ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines that they were even co-opted by advertising. For example, in 1893, Harper’s Weekly ran an ad featuring a comic conversation between a cannibal and a missionary: “ ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t eat you.’ Missionary ‘I don’t agree with you.’ Medicine Man ‘Take a dose of Wright’s Indian Vegetable Pills after the meal, sire.’ ”77 The dialogue is reminiscent of a cartoon that would appear in 1901 in the St. Albans (VT) Messenger, which featured the following exchange: “Cannibal Chief— ‘That missionary certainly did love to argue. Just before I put him in the pot we had an argument as to the method I should employ in cooking him.’ His Private Secretary—‘But now that you’ve eaten him, you’ve got the best of the argument.’ C.C.— ‘No—he don’t agree with me yet.’ ”78 Like most turn-of-the-century cannibal cartoons, it depicts the islanders cross-racially—they could be Pacific Islanders or Africans—in a style reminiscent of caricatures of African Americans at the time. The dyspeptic chief holds a rude war club in one hand and his belly, full of a missionary who “doesn’t agree with” him, in the other hand. His secretary seems to be wearing the devoured missionary’s undershirt and nothing else, while the cannibal king wears a grass skirt. It is unclear whether an earlier version of the “don’t agree with you” joke preceded the ad for vegetable pills or whether the cartoonist and joke writer drew from this or a similar ad. In a sense, it does not matter which came first. Their coexistence points to the ubiquity of cannibal jokes at the turn of the century as well as the familiarity and flexibility of their form. In general, the cannibal-and-boiled-missionary jokes that circulated in jest books, magazines, and newspapers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century are much more interested in cruelty than in kindness, less committed to urging their readers to be open to alternative epistemologies than they are to demeaning both meddling missionaries and the “savage” objects of their labors.

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The pervasiveness of these jokes, it seems, led them to at least partially influence readers’ conceptions of Pacific islands and Islanders. As early as 1873, the Honolulu newspaper the Pacific Commercial Advertiser complained about the damage such jokes did to Hawai‘i’s international reputation. An installment of “What They Say About Us,” a regular column that collected and commented on articles about Hawai‘i in the US papers, complains that too many US newspapers’ treatments of the news of the death of Hawai‘i’s “late King” are colored by these jokes: “While some of the California journals have been very fairly informed, in the East there seems to exist a ‘plentiful lack’ of correct information upon the real state of things here, and it is amusing to read the blundering statements of the various editors. Many of these seem to think it very witty to speak of us as ‘the cannibal islanders,’ and in the same connection to allude to the stereotyped ‘baked missionary.’ ”79 For the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, such jokes were not just tired but also misleading at best and pernicious at worst. Of course, the cannibal-and-boiled-missionary joke, which spread in US popular media as US imperialism ramped up in the second half of the nineteenth century, went largely extinct in the twentieth century due in part to the very success of imperialism. That is, notwithstanding the primordial age of the joke described at the outset of this chapter, cannibalism jokes did have an expiration date connected to increasing globalization. At the outset of the twentieth century, some observers claimed that the cannibal-missionary joke was on its way out because, despite these jokes’ implication of violent resistance, the missionaries had won. A Cleveland Plain Dealer snippet, “Wants to Put It Out of Business,” speaks of a “Chicago professor” who “solemnly condemns the missionary joke,” not just because it is “designed to cast ridicule on a self-​sacrificing band of noble men and women” but also because it is obsolete. The boiled-missionary joke, the article claims, “is rapidly disappearing. As the cannibal grows scarcer the missionary joke loses its savor. With the extinction of the final savage islander the joke will entirely disappear.”80 It is unclear from the context whether “extinction” here implies death or conversion and modernization. Both possibilities are chilling, and both imply that the cannibal-and-boiled-missionary joke has met its end because there are no more cannibals to discover and attempt to convert. Or, as the Omaha Sunday World-Herald (quoting the Cleveland Plain Dealer) put it more comically in 1907 in “Abolishing

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the Cannibals,” “ ‘Uncle Sam should go slow about this island business.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘If he keeps on, there won’t be a single cannibalistic spot in which a paragrapher can locate a boiled missionary story.’ ”81 Because of increasing globalization at the beginning of the twentieth century, cannibalism jokes were neither historically accurate (according to Obeyesekere, they never were) nor any longer necessary to draw support for or, conversely, to offer laughing critique of US imperialism.

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Collecting the Pacific

A Cabinet of Comic Curios

4.

In 1842, Americans flocked to a very popular exhibit of “trinkets, implements, and natural and artificial curiosities from the Feejees and Tonga and Navigators’ and Sandwich Islands,” as one visitor described it in a letter. That visitor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, judged the exhibit to be “the best sight in Washington.”1 The items composing it had been brought to the United States upon the return of the government-sponsored 1838–42 United States Exploring Expedition led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. This voyage, which traveled eighty-seven thousand miles and surveyed 280 Pacific Islands, brought back a staggering four thousand ethnographic objects—thought to be the largest collection “ever made by a single sailing expedition”—as well as specimens of flora and fauna.2 The Collection of the Exploring Expedition, housed at the Patent Office in Washington, DC, saw over one hundred thousand visitors over ten years, and Emerson’s friend and protégé Henry David Thoreau mentioned the exhibit in Walden. Eventually the collection would move to its permanent home as the base collection of the United States’ first national museum, the Smithsonian Institution. As one scholar of the expedition puts it, the “Great National Expedition had created a great national museum.”3 The Collection of the Exploring Expedition was the culmination of a long-standing urge in the United States as well as Europe to collect and classify the Pacific world. Nolelani Arista notes in The Kingdom and the Republic that ship captains had long brought souvenirs back from

the Pacific and sometimes gifted them to burgeoning museums and curiosity cabinets back home. Arista singles out a 1790 donation to the Museum of Cambridge from Captains James Magee and Joseph Ingraham of items collected along trade routes between New England, the Far East, the Pacific Islands, and the northwest coast of the American continent. Such displayed keepsakes—in addition to periodical stories, travel narratives, and live performances—shaped Americans’ understandings as well as misunderstandings of the Pacific and its peoples and further fueled their curiosity about them. Arista writes, “Stripped of proper context and removed from their places of origin, items were rehistoricized as part of an enlightenment narrative that sought to distinguish nature from ingenuity and industry that measured progress in the crude or artful distances between items of familiar Euro-​American manufacture and those made by heathen hands.”4 Decontextualized portrayals of Pacific cultures emphasized Pacific Islanders’ otherness: after all, the collected objects were curiosities precisely because of the difference they metonymically embodied. But such collections also gave Americans a (probably misguided) sense of familiarity with Pacific Islander cultures. Arista claims that “the theaters, waxworks, and museums” cultivated “the public’s desire for authentic natives” while supplying “a comforting sense of superiority and condescension that grew out of the conviction of authentic knowledge of the savage.”5 Arista’s history reveals just how much power both serious and burlesque exhibits had in shaping Americans’ views of Native Pacific Islanders. Scholars in the field of museum studies have also considered the relationships between exhibitions and empire in the nineteenth century. John M. MacKenzie, in Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, describes nineteenth-century museums as “tools of empire” that worked to justify expansion through their function as “a machine for measuring the alleged achievements, or lack of them, of mankind.” MacKenzie frames the global and globalizing exhibitions common in Europe and the United States in the mid- to late nineteenth century as “museums of global explanation, visual encyclopedias of knowledge about empire.”6 Building on MacKenzie’s work, the editors of Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience explain the role of objects that were acquired abroad and then displayed in “radically different contexts from their original uses” as forming “part of an imperial nexus.” But, they warn, though museums

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and exhibits did serve as “tools of empire,” it would be a mistake to think that they were consciously wielded as “part of some overarching imperial project.” While they gave their visitors a sense of knowledge about and familiarity with potential colonial outposts, most museums were not organized or well funded by governments.7 Additionally, nineteenth-​century museums and exhibits tended to be overstuffed and poorly organized by modern standards, resulting in a somewhat carnivalesque and chaotic atmosphere that prohibited the definitive knowledge of the other that it promised. Many serious Pacific collections and collectibles were subject to comic burlesques, the most famous being P. T. Barnum’s Fejee Mermaid, which he also displayed in 1842. But the line between legitimate and burlesque exhibits about the Pacific world was often quite blurry. This can be seen in a letter that Barnum wrote in June 1876 to Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian: “I have some Fiji cannibals in Philadelphia, and I want to obtain & put in the main building some implements of any kind: clubs, ornaments, fishing or hunting tackle, maps or pictures of those regions, or anything else appertaining to them. I hope that you may have some such articles that you can loan me till the exhibition at Philadelphia closes 10th Nov.—and if you can give me any trinkets, bows & arrows, or anything to please these two fellows, I shall be glad.”8 Henry complied with Barnum’s request and sent the artifacts, proving that neither Barnum nor his more legitimate counterpart at the Smithsonian seemed particularly troubled about achieving cultural authenticity in displaying “trinkets” “appertaining to them.” This exchange also demonstrates how nineteenth-century exhibitors and their exhibits of all levels of respectability were more alike than different. Bluford Adams notes in his study of Barnum and popular culture that, by the 1840s, the term “museum” was applied to “a dizzying variety of cheap entertainments. A museum visitor in this period was as likely to encounter freaks and mermaids as Indian relics and animal bone.”9 Many of these entertainments reveled in the spectacle of the other and the potential for exotic conquest, which engrossed Americans in the Pacific world in the mid-nineteenth century. But humorous depictions of collectors or burlesques of collections also called into question the very notion of cultural authenticity by straining the connections between objects and the exotic locales and peoples those objects were meant to represent. As the archival

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examples explored in this chapter demonstrate, a significant strand of mid-​nineteenth-​century American humor played on Americans’ fascination with the Pacific world and Pacific Islanders in order to mock emergent notions of collecting and tourism, particularly their slippery claims of authenticity. For instance, magazines and newspapers printed (and reprinted) jokes about Pacific exhibits that sought to understand, contain, and highlight the “otherness” of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders while mocking Americans’ desires for a glimpse of the genuine article. Humorists like Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and, in his own, self-​reflexive way, P. T. Barnum also identified and pilloried the particularly American contradictions inherent in an urge to collect and classify the Pacific while taking pleasure in puzzling over those collections’ authenticity. In addition to blurring lines between authentic and contrived, comic representations of and responses to Pacific exhibits underscored and embodied slippages between exhibit and exhibitor (as seen in popular jokes about P. T. Barnum and his Pacific attractions) as well as between real Pacific Islanders and the ossified stereotypes they are seen to embody when rendered as exhibits (as seen in Barnum’s and media treatments of Hawaiian King David Kalākaua on his 1874 visit to the United States). This chapter offers a sort of curio cabinet of parodic exhibits and comic treatments of serious exhibits about Pacific objects and people. Curiosity cabinets have their origins in the Renaissance as a kind of “proto-museum,” and the term “curiosity” has long referred to “both the inherent qualities of a material object and the response of viewers to it.” Additionally, Euro-American sailors and explorers in the Pacific often used the term “curious” to describe their interest in something without offering judgment on it. “Curio,” an abbreviation for “curiosity” that an 1891 dictionary of American slang defines via more slang (“bric-a-brac”), came into usage in the United States in the mid-​nineteenth century, possibly through Herman Melville, the itinerant sailor-turned-author whose narrator Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851) uses the term to quip about embalmed heads that his soon-to-be bosom friend Queequeg is peddling about town.10 In exhuming comic rarities from various print archives for display and recontextualization, I act the part of a scholarly ringmaster or compere (hopefully not a mere “wind artist”) highlighting nineteenth-​ century American readers’ and writers’ often sophisticated relationship to notions of authenticity as presented and represented through artifacts and people from the Pacific world. Step right up. 130  A Laughable Empire

The Pacific Man and the American Cannibal as Burlesque Souvenir Hunters

In the mid-nineteenth century, the enormously popular genres of travel writing and travel-related fiction were rife with comic critiques of travelers’ urges to collect and classify. For instance, Herman Melville— known in the newspapers as “Pacific Man” because of the popularity of his first two books, Typee and Omoo, which fictionalized the author’s ramblings in the Marquesas, Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and Moorea—offers an oddball burlesque of collecting in his third book. Mardi, and a Voyage Thither contains two chapters that comically treat the concept of Pacific collecting through the figure of the obsessive antiquarian. Gananath Obeyesekere describes these chapters as “spoofs” on “curatorial obsessions, such as collecting artifacts and old manuscripts,” while also lampooning “the conventional art appreciation of objects encased in museums.” In chapter 122, “They Visit an Extraordinary Old Antiquary,” the narrator and his traveling party meet “Oh-Oh,” so named, according to Obeyesekere, “because every time he looks at an object in his collection he goes into ecstasies.”11 Melville’s prose contains a humorous list of the antiquarian Pacific Islander Oh-Oh’s relics, including “a long tangled lock of Mermaid’s Hair, much resembling the curling silky fibres of the finer sea-weed. (Preserved between fins of the dolphin.)” Chapter 123, “They Go Down into the Catacombs,” similarly lists some of Oh-Oh’s prized manuscripts, including “books of voyages.” These books have parodic titles—such as “A Sojourn Among the Anthropophagi, by One Whose Hand Was Eaten Off at Tiffin Among the Savages,” “Franko: its King, Court, and Tadpoles,” and “Three Hours in Vivenza, Containing a Full and Impartial Account of that Whole Country: by a Subject of King Bello”—that mock the cottage industry of ethnographic travel writing that had given Melville his entree into literary society with the publication of Typee in 1846. Oh-Oh might even be seen as a precursor to Melville’s “sub-sub librarian” in the extracts that begin Moby-Dick. Oh-Oh’s overzealous commitment to collecting becomes apparent when the philosopher Babbalanja asks him for a manuscript; the narrator notes that the request is “all in vain; Oh-Oh was an antiquary.” Oh-Oh, suddenly unwilling to part with any of his items, says, “Philosopher, ask me for my limbs, my life, my heart, but ask me not for these. Steeped in wax, these shall be my cerements.” Babbalanja then “spied a heap of worm-eaten parchment covers, and many Collecting the Pacific  131

clippings and parings. And whereas the rolls of manuscripts did smell like unto old cheese; so these relics did marvelously resemble the rinds of the same.”12 Melville’s overwrought language here mimics that of the musty manuscripts he describes, even as he devalues Oh-Oh’s prize texts as useless, festering, and cheese-like in appearance and odor. No matter what wisdom these manuscripts hold or what history the relics represent, Melville reminds his readers, when they are treated merely as prized objects, they are worthless, or worse. Whereas Melville’s critique of antiquarianism in Mardi is fairly universal, the mockery of collecting that Mark Twain engages in throughout his 1866 letters from Hawai‘i to the Sacramento Union is more targeted at tourists and the burgeoning tourism industry. He does this mainly through comic exaggeration of Hawaiian tourists’ culturally disrespectful mania for souvenirs. Travelers were so intent on bringing home something by which to remember their visit to Pacific Islands that Pacific Islanders often ridiculed their obsessions with securing souvenirs. Captain Cook reported on his second voyage, “It was astonishing to see with what eagerness everyone catched at every thing they saw, it even went so far as to become the ridicule of the Natives by offering pieces of sticks stones and what not to exchange, one waggish Boy took a piece of human excrement on a stick and hild [sic] it out to every one of our people he met with.” Obeyesekere writes in his interpretation of this description, “Surely the parody of the European passion for curiosities as a piece of shit would be shared by those on both sides of the cultural divide, temporarily blurring that very divide.”13 Indeed, Euro-​ Americans seemed willing and able to laugh at their own (or at least other sailors’ and tourists’) obsessions with collecting the Pacific. Twain pillories such overzealous collecting in a comic dialogue that he narrates in his seventh letter to the Sacramento Union, during this group’s tour of an ancient battlefield on which “all around everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight.” He reports, rather nonchalantly, “We picked up a lot of them for mementos,” thus turning human remains into souvenirs to be taken home as a reminder of their trip. But the real comedy comes when, as Twain puts it, “the conversation at this point took a unique and ghastly turn.” He then records the following dialogue: “Give me some of your bones, Miss Blank; I’ll carry them for you.” Another said: 132  A Laughable Empire

“You haven’t got bones enough, Mrs. Blank; here’s a good shinbone, if you want it.” Such observations as these fell from the lips of ladies with reference to their queer newly-acquired property: “Mr. Brown, will you please hold some of my bones for a minute?” And, “Mr. Smith, you have got some of my bones; and you have got one, too, Mr. Jones, and you have got my spine, Mr. Twain. Now don’t get my bones all mixed up with yours so that you can’t tell them apart.” In framing the desecration of a sacred site as part of the polite but flirtatious, almost racy, banter of men and women on a picnic outing, Twain puts into sharp relief the ways in which tourists tend to trivialize the very cultures they have ostensibly set out to learn. Twain readily admits how problematic this act is: “I did not think it was right to carry off any of these bones, but we did it, anyhow.” Here he includes himself in this critique, juxtaposing his imagination of the import of this historical site with the mundanity of his grave robbing. He writes, “I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones—of great chiefs, maybe, who had fought savagely in the fearful battle in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood—and wore the choicest of them out on Oahu [his horse] afterward, trying to make him go.”14 Mark Twain’s narration reveals how quickly the meaning of the bones changes: from body part to fossil to prized relic to horse whip and back to the ground again. Twain offers further comic critiques of souvenir hunting through his descriptions of his traveling companion Brown. Through Brown, who was based on a composite of real-life fellow travelers during his time in Hawai‘i, including his friend the author Charles Warren Stoddard, Samuel Clemens could create a conflict between Mark Twain as a genteel traveler and his comrade as a “Barbarian.”15 James Caron has noted the “outlandish and persistent souvenir hunting of Mr. Brown” in some of the letters to the Sacramento Union, published soon after his return to San Francisco.16 In letter 19, for instance, Twain portrays Brown’s ridiculous collecting as commonplace, both for Brown and for tourists in general: “As usual, Brown loaded his unhappy horse with fifteen or twenty pounds of ‘specimens,’ to be cursed and worried over for a time, then discarded for new toys of a similar nature. He is like most people who visit these islands; they are always collecting specimens, with a wild enthusiasm, but they never get home with any of them.”17 With Collecting the Pacific  133

the phrases “as usual” and “like most people who visit these islands,” Twain situates his fictional compatriot’s shamefully invasive and ultimately pointless behavior of “always collecting specimens, with a wild enthusiasm” as a microcosm of tourists’ general, and generally chauvinist, behavior in Hawai‘i and their rampant desires to capture and own a literal piece of the islands. Throughout Twain’s letters from Hawai‘i, he persistently presents himself as the voice of reason seeking to restrain Brown’s bad manners and ugly Americanism. Caron has examined the trope of “Mark Twain repeatedly thwarting Mr. Brown’s mania for souvenirs,” noting that Clemens depicts Twain “as the civilized gentleman who must constantly admonish the selfish and ill-mannered Brown.” Of course, because Clemens did not always maintain a clear distinction between Twain and Brown, some of Twain’s sanctimony in calling Brown an “egregious ass” for pilfering “the coconut stump all sheathed with copper memorials to the illustrious Captain Cook” is ironic. This is most obvious when Twain complains, “Why, Brown, I am surprised at you—and hurt. I am grieved to think that a man who has lived so long in the atmosphere of refinement which surrounds me can be guilty of such vandalism as this.”18 Any reader who had perused Twain’s other letters—in which he is sometimes himself a con man or a buffoon—knows to take his description of “the atmosphere of refinement which surrounds me” with a grain of salt. Similarly, his description of “this touching tribute of a great nation to her gallant dead” comes from the same narrator who, in letter 19, describes Cook’s death as “justifiable homicide.”19 Throughout the letters from Hawai‘i, Clemens sometimes makes Mark Twain, too, a naïve or unscrupulous tourist and one of the butts of his consistent, twinned critiques of travel writing and tourism. Even in writing not meant for publication, Clemens as Mark Twain could not help but mock the hackneyed language of touristic possession of experiences as well as objects. For instance, after visiting the active volcano Kilauea on the island of Hawai‘i, he wrote in the register of Volcano House—a famous hotel near the crater rim—an entry that parodied previous ones and played on the idea that tourists seek an experience that is unique to them but experienced in a particular, expected way. Twain wrote, upon seeing a “clod of dirt” fall into the lava lake: Oh, God! It was awful! We then took a drink. Few visitors will ever achieve the happiness of having two such experiences as the above 134  A Laughable Empire

in succession. While we lay there a puff of gas came along and we jumped up and galloped over the rough lava in the most ridiculous manner, leaving our blankets behind. We did it because it was fashionable, and because it makes one appear to have had a thrilling adventure. We then had another drink, after which we returned and camped a little closer to the lake. I mused and said: “How the stupendous grandeur of this magnificent terrible and sublime manifestation of celestial power doth fill the poetic soul with grand thoughts and grander images, and how the overpowering solemnity . . .” Here the gin gave out. In the careless hands of Brown the bottle broke. Mark Twain, 7 June 1866.20 Houston Wood points out that Twain’s entry, like those of other visitors, engages in “the conventional rhetoric of confusion” and the touristic “trope of the romantic sublime.”21 Overall, Wood judges Twain to be guilty of what Mary Louise Pratt has described as “anti-​conquest” rhetoric, that “dual work of asserting innocence while securing hegemony,” particularly by situating Hawaiian culture as a thing of the past while “mystifying Euroamerican responsibility for the violent changes associated with that past.”22 To a certain extent, this may be true. But Twain’s satire on tourists and tourism, with its focus on the colonialism-​in-​miniature of tourists’ mania for collecting “authentic” items and experiences, complicates such charges. Consistent with his other Hawai‘i writings, Clemens uses interactions between the eager tourist Mark Twain and the bumbling, ugly American sidekick Brown to undercut tourists’ ironically clichéd claims of uniquely sublime experiences through a combination of parody and slapstick. The fact that Clemens signs the real-life, unpublished register “Mark Twain” and refers to his fictional traveling companion Brown is also part of the joke, placing experience that is meant to be awesome at a further remove from authenticity. But the nineteenth century’s undisputed king of questionable authenticity was Clemens’s longtime acquaintance Phineas Taylor Barnum. “A Black Looking Specimen of Dried Monkey and Fish”: The Fejee Mermaid, Barnum’s Pacific, and the United States’ Barnum

P. T. Barnum cast such a large shadow over mid-nineteenth-century US culture that his exhibits were sometimes redeployed as symbols of Collecting the Pacific  135

US imperial ambition. In 1854, the comic newspaper Brother Jonathan commented ironically on President Franklin Pierce’s desire to annex Hawai‘i by alluding to a Barnum exhibit: the article, “The Proposed Annexation of the Sandwich Islands,” ends by imagining that “the two senators” from the future state would “be more of a curiosity than Colonel Benton and the wooly horse.”23 Barnum had taken advantage of the temporary disappearance in 1849 of the western explorer John C. Fremont and his party—and the public’s hunger for information on his mission—by exhibiting a “wooly horse” that he claimed was captured by Fremont in California. Fremont’s father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, unsuccessfully sued Barnum for fraud, which of course brought even greater notoriety to the exhibit. As the article’s analogy demonstrates, Barnum’s infamous exhibits functioned as markers of the US public’s curiosity in general, even when he deliberately created and stoked that curiosity. Additionally, the article’s imagination of future Hawaiian senators as freak-show “curiosities” demeans them and other Hawaiian politicians while highlighting Americans’ desire for Pacific spectacle. A squib in the December 18, 1869, Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu) connects Barnum and US imperialism in similar ways: “The New York papers say that Barnum intends to visit the Hawaiian Islands. As we have no ‘woolly horses’ or ‘mermaids’ to attract the great showman hither it may be that he intends to dig out and transport one of our defunct-craters for his museum, start it a going, and palm it off as the real article. This would eclipse all his previous efforts, and justly entitle him to be called the ‘Prince of Humbugs.’ ”24 The tall-tale joke takes Barnum’s acquisitiveness for granted, assuming that he would only visit Hawai‘i in order to take away some curiosity to display in the United States. The nonsensical plan of offering an inactive volcanic crater to Barnum to take as an exhibit mocks notions of exhibition and authenticity, since a crater would dwarf in size any museum it would be displayed in and also because a lavaless crater is simply a void, a no-thing meant to represent a famous geological feature of Hawai‘i. But Barnum, no doubt, would have laughed at that joke. In his first autobiography, Life of P. T. Barnum, he gleefully relates an anecdote in which the Knickerbocker editor Gaylord Clark duped him into pretending that his museum held “the club that killed Captain Cook.” As Barnum tells it, he produced from a pile of “war clubs . . . a heavy one that looked as if it might have killed Captain Cook, or anybody else whose head it came into contact with,” labeled it “The Captain Cook 136  A Laughable Empire

Club,” and showed it to Clark. Clark thanked Barnum mock-effusively, saying, “I had an irrepressible desire to see the club that killed Captain Cook, and I felt quite confident you could accommodate me. I have been in half-a-dozen smaller museums, and as they all had it, I was sure a large establishment like yours would not be without it!”25 Barnum was not alone in making jokes about the impossibility of knowing for sure the authenticity of such exhibited objects. For example, an 1874 newspaper ran a blurb announcing that “Boston has had for several years a ‘Hawaiian Club’—the one they killed Captain Cook with, maybe.”26 The “maybe” in this news item acts as a punch line that throws the very novelty (and therefore the newsworthiness) of the item into serious doubt. In Barnum’s case, his confession of the joke on him in his autobiography shows that, for him anyway, being caught in the act of humbug is all part of the fun. There, as in many of his self-representations, Barnum presents himself as a larger-than-life huckster who is part of, and sometimes even the willing butt of, the joke.27 Moreover, as his own autobiography as well as the joking news items just quoted reveal, Barnum as exhibitor was always, usually on purpose, every bit as much of an exhibit as were the attractions he advertised and displayed. Barnum was certainly not alone among nineteenth-century curators in the importance of his relationship to his exhibits. The editors of Curating Empire note the outsized “role of curators and the agency of individuals in shaping the relationship between museums and empire.” Indeed, the way that curators mediated, narrated, and promoted the objects they displayed to visitors deeply impacted how those visitors came to understand their and their country’s connection to faraway peoples and cultures.28 Studying Barnum’s Pacific exhibits, particularly how he marketed and presented those exhibits and how he narrated his relationships to them, offers insight into how Americans came to perceive the Pacific and Pacific Islanders in part through the representations of them in popular, partly comic exhibits as well as the amused and amusing reactions they stirred in popular media. The Barnum attraction that drew the most gleeful mockery was undoubtedly the Fejee Mermaid. In Life, Barnum pulls back the curtain on its origin story: Barnum confesses that in 1842 he rented the specimen, which had been shown widely but unsuccessfully for years, from a fellow showman, Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum. In order to drum up public interest, Barnum initiated a sophisticated marketing scheme in which he had letters sent from faraway locales to New York Collecting the Pacific  137

newspapers in order, he writes, “to prevent suspicion of a hoax,” all noting a “Mr. Griffin” and his “most remarkable curiosity, being nothing less than a veritable mermaid taken among the Fejee Islands.”29 Terence Whalen notes in his introduction to a reprint edition of Life that the marketing campaign for the Fejee Mermaid was successful because of Barnum’s media savvy: he “exploited the difference between local and distant news markets” and “deliberately blurred the distinction between science and myth.”30 Additionally, since the mermaid was probably originally of Japanese manufacture, Barnum’s evocation of Fiji seems meant to take advantage of a midcentury mania for Pacific islands and Islanders, whom missionaries and sailors had excitedly described as cannibals. A man in Barnum’s employ, aptly named Mr. Lyman, pretended to be Griffin and began exhibiting the mermaid in a rented hall. Barnum sparked a “mermaid fever” by sending engravings of beautiful mermaids to newspapers, which dutifully published them. Audiences expecting to see something akin to the mermaids in the engravings were no doubt disappointed to discover that, as Barnum puts it in his autobiography, “the animal was an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long.” Barnum recalls, clearly still relishing the hoax a dozen years later, “The public appeared to be satisfied, but as some persons always will take things literally, and make no allowance for poetic license even in mermaids, an occasional visitor, after having seen the large transparency in front of the hall, representing a beautiful creature half woman and half fish, about eight feet in length, would be slightly surprised in finding that the reality was a black-looking specimen of dried monkey and fish that a boy a few years old could easily run away with under his arm.”31 As with many of Barnum’s exhibits, the joke hinges on the lie of promised authenticity. The humor, which comes at the expense of Barnum’s paying customers, arises from their expectation failure upon seeing the actual curiosity. For the Barnum scholar Neil Harris, the key to exhibits like the Fejee Mermaid was the democratic way in which they proffered unmistakable ambiguity that called on their audiences to judge what was true and what was fraudulent or humbug. Harris writes, “Concentration on whether a particular show, exhibit, or event was real or false, genuine or contrived, narrowed the task of judgment for the multitude of spectators. It structured problems of experiencing the exotic and unfamiliar by reducing that experience to simple evaluation.” Harris frames such speculation as a kind of empowerment of the masses in his description of what he terms Barnum’s “operational 138  A Laughable Empire

aesthetic,” which he defines as “an approach to experience that equated beauty with information and technique.”32 But the dizzying layer of Fiji fraud upon fraud did not stop there. Barnum’s mermaid was in turn burlesqued itself, most notably by Henry Bennett’s Fudgee Mermaid and ultimately by Barnum himself. Bennett, a rival showman in New York, had taken over Peale’s Museum and used it to burlesque Barnum’s American Museum. As Barnum puts it in a later autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs, which he revised and rereleased almost annually, “His main reliances were burlesques and caricatures of whatever novelties I was exhibiting.” “Thus,” Barnum explains in Life, “when I exhibited the Fejee Mermaid, he stuck a codfish and monkey together and advertised the Fudg-ee Mermaid.” Not only did Barnum not take offense at this imposition, but he lauded the effort as “an invention creditable to his genius” that “created some laughter” at Barnum’s expense. More importantly, Barnum notes, “it also served to draw attention to my museum.” As a result, when “the novelty of Bennett’s opposition died away,” Barnum took the incredible step of purchasing the Peale’s Museum collections and its building and, “secretly engaging Bennett” as his agent, “run[ning] a spirited opposition.”33 In fact, advertisements for Peale’s Museum appeared in the New York Daily Tribune immediately below ads for Barnum’s American Museum. Copy for the American Museum ad in the November 6, 1842, Tribune extolls “the wonderful Mermaid, taken near Fejee Island.” Just below it, another ad counters, “New-York Museum and Picture Gallery, Broadway, begs leave to state that in accordance with his announcement of last week he has manufactured a fudge mermaid! which he willingly leaves to the public to pronounce whether it is not infinitely superior to the one now exhibiting.” A new ad for the New York Museum appeared the following week, again just below an American Museum ad boasting of housing “the real mermaid.” The New York Museum ad describes a “tremendous attraction!—powerful novelties!— The Real fudge mermaid!”34 Barnum’s admission in his autobiography, when considered alongside these juxtaposed advertisements, shows that Barnum appreciated jokes at his expense as “creditable to” the “genius” of their authors. More importantly and more lucratively, he sometimes co-opted them for his own profit. As with the so-called club that killed Captain Cook, in the case of the Fiji and Fudge(e) Mermaids, both Barnum and his parodists mocked his audiences’ fascination with questions regarding the genuineness of relics from the Pacific world. Collecting the Pacific  139

A related burlesque of Barnum’s mermaid hoax also appeared in a parody of Barnum’s autobiography, published in late 1854, just before the appearance of the autobiography it satirized. “Chapter the Sixth” of The Autobiography of Petit Bunkum, the Showman tells of the “Fudge Mermaid,” a manufactured curiosity in which “the head of an ape, the body of a female kangaroo, and the tail of a fish, were united with skill and singular effect. Thus was created the great ‘Fudge Mermaid,’ about which so much has been said and sung.” The parodic autobiography describes audience reaction in a way that mocks Barnum’s own self-​ promoting prose: “Crowds flocked to see this new wonder of the world. Children screamed when they beheld it; ladies tittered, and gentlemen opened their eyes. Old fogy naturalists put on their spectacles and delivered long harangues on the supposed habits and peculiarities of the ‘critter;’ and one fat old parson devoutly exclaimed, ‘Wonderful are thy works, O Lord!’ ”35 This description ridicules both Barnum’s over-thetop promotion and his audiences’ willingness to swallow it. According to a news story in the November 18, 1854, New York Herald, Barnum was named as plaintiff in a lawsuit against the publisher P. F. Harris, suing to stop publication of Petit Bunkum, which, the lawsuit alleges, “is intended to inflict . . . serious pecuniary injury upon this plaintiff, by injuring the sale of his said book, to bring this plaintiff into disrepute, to injure his character, and to hold him up to ridicule and contempt.”36 Of course, this lawsuit might have been yet another hoax or publicity stunt, which in and of itself raises questions about Barnum’s involvement with the parody. Indeed, the authorship of Petite Bunkum is still a matter of debate among Barnum scholars. Benjamin Reiss, for one, is convinced that Barnum himself wrote the thinly disguised caricature because Petite Bunkum’s voice is reminiscent of Barnum’s earlier journalistic style.37 The Barnum biographer A. H. Saxon is less sure of Barnum’s direct authorship but notes that, because the organization and content of Petite Bunkum so closely mirror the not-yet-published autobiography, it is likely that Barnum “had some hand in it.”38 Whether or not Barnum was responsible for this parody, he certainly welcomed and sought to profit from such burlesques of his own dubious exhibits and methods of promoting them. The Fejee Mermaid was such an enduring artifact of the midcentury United States that joking allusions to it abound in print culture. To offer just one example, the popular humorist Mortimer Thomson, through his persona Philander K. Doesticks (also discussed in chapter 3), references 140  A Laughable Empire

the mermaid in his madcap sketch “Special Express from Dog Paradise—A Canine Ghost,” in which Doesticks converses with the ghost of his dog, who is joined by “disembodied ghosts of all the crowd who perished with him.” They present to Doesticks some deceased celebrity animals, including “the Fee Jee mermaid,” who “said she had got tired of her Caudal appendage, and desired [Doesticks] to ask Barnum, if her tail must be continued.”39 This allusion takes for granted both the Fejee Mermaid and Barnum himself as circulating comic currency that audiences will immediately recognize and laugh at. These interrelated layers of ironic exhibits—the Fejee Mermaid, Fudge(e) Mermaids, humorous allusions to them in the media, and Barnum himself as the mischievous huckster facilitating their display while merrily stoking suspicions about their authenticity—all jointly play on the comic possibilities inherent in the mysteries of the Pacific about which American readers and amusement seekers continued to be so curious. “In Their Regions Epigastric”: Jocular Representations of and Responses to Fiji Cannibal Exhibits

Thirty years after debuting the Fejee Mermaid, Barnum again sought to capitalize on Americans’ persistent fascination with the Pacific world. Though in the 1840s the American Museum advertised a New Zealand cannibal chief, Barnum’s 1872 display of “the most rare and curious addition” to his “great show, and certainly the most difficult to obtain”—“a company of four wild fiji cannibals!”—proved a bigger draw as part of the Congress of Nations in his Great Traveling Museum. According to various newspaper reports and to Barnum himself in Struggles and Triumphs, Barnum procured three Fijians, who had allegedly been captured in war by an enemy “who was about to execute, and perhaps to eat them.” He paid gold in addition to leaving “a large sum with the American Consul” as bonds “to be forfeited if they were not returned” after a three-year period. The fourth Fijian was a Christian convert who joined the party, according to Barnum, to exert “a powerful moral influence over these savages.”40 In Struggles and Triumphs, he congratulates himself on his own benevolence in assuring readers “that the bonds for their return will be forfeited” so as to save the Fijians’ lives.41 As with his gleeful narration of his Fejee Mermaid, Barnum intentionally makes himself part of this exhibit by highlighting his role in its backstory. Collecting the Pacific  141

Though this exhibit was not itself a comic one, like many Barnum exhibits it immediately proved rife for humor and rumor. Barnum himself, as usual, seemed to encourage such reactions. One newspaper jokingly complains about Barnum’s forfeiting the bonds, “It is not vouchsafed to mortals to behold daily a group of fellow-beings who are destined to be served up in the form of steaks or sausages: and Mr. Barnum, in the too great goodness of his heart, is about to deprive us of this rare sensation. Is he not premature in his determination?”42 After Barnum brags that his Fijians “are already learning to speak and read our language” and that that he hopes “soon to put them in the way of being converted to Christianity,” he hints, somewhat ironically, that “the title of ‘Missionary’ ” should be “added to the many already given [him] by the public.”43 In thus lauding himself, Barnum actually calls attention to the contradictory interests of a showman and a missionary. To wit, if the Fijians actually did fully convert to Christianity, they would no longer be “cannibal savages,” and if they were no longer “cannibal savages,” they would no longer constitute a curiosity worthy of exhibit. This paradox is made clear in a joke that was widely reprinted in newspapers; the following version of it appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1886 under the title “The Attraction Would Be Gone”: “ ‘My dear friend,’ said a long-haired countryman to the biographical expounder of a dime museum, ‘is that unfortunate being really a cannibal?’ and he indicated a South Sea islander from Cork who was sitting on a divan. ‘Yes, sir; that great living curiosity was captured while in the act of roasting a Presbyterian missionary over a slow fire.’ ‘Great heavens!’ gasped the countryman; ‘can’t you convert him?’ ‘Convert him!’ said the biographer with disgust. ‘Do you s’pose the great American public would pay 10 cents to see a Christian?’ ”44 Here the exhibit’s prospective paying audience—“the great American public”—is made directly complicit in the showman’s unwillingness to “covert him.” In Struggles and Triumphs, Barnum follows up his tongue-in-cheek, sanctimonious self-labeling as a missionary by quoting a February 1872 piece from Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s newspaper, the New York Christian Union, that saps his self-professed altruism of its moral heft by making a cannibal joke. In the piece, Beecher jokes that he could not get any of his newspaper staff to visit and report on the exhibition: “If Barnum had remembered to specify the ‘Feeding-time,’ we might have dropped in, in a friendly way, at some other period of the day.” Barnum retorts in his autobiography, “I might add that at the above exhibition 142  A Laughable Empire

several editors brought their daughters. These blooming young ladies refused to sit on the front seat, in fear of being eaten; but I remarked that there was more danger of some of the young gentlemen swallowing them alive, than there was from the cannibals.”45 Barnum thus frames his exhibition of the Fiji cannibals as a traveling invitation for audiences to participate by making cannibal jokes, which Barnum himself also propagates in his own writings while calling attention to responses that underscore his own involvement as an integral part of the exhibit. Barnum’s symbiotic relationship with the press through self-​mocking self-promotion is further evident in press accounts of the sudden death of one of the Fijians in May 1872. On May 22, the Frederick (MD) Examiner reprints a Baltimore Sun article reporting the death and claims that, after exhibiting “symptoms of genuine grief,” “the other cannibals made an attempt to eat the corpse but were driven from their dish.” The very next sentence exhibits disbelief and blames Barnum: “No doubt the story has been gotten up by the shrewd Barnum as an advertising dodge.”46 Two weeks later, the Schenectady (NY) Reflector, which had previously reprinted a story that swallowed this cannibalism hoax, reports, “We have since learned that there is not a word of truth in the story, that the [York, PA] Daily was liberally paid for the insertion, and the whole thing was furnished to that paper, cut and dry, by the proprietors as an advertising dodge. Barnum, although confessedly a great showman, is determined not to be outdone in the work of humbugging—a reputation for which he has sustained through a long life of singular changes and fluctuations.”47 Even this recrimination of Barnum promotes him as a “great showman” and the King of Humbug. Even, or maybe especially, when his hoaxes were detected, Barnum profited from the publicity attendant with their unmasking. A humorous poem from May 1873, reprinted in the Jamestown (NY) Journal from the New York Post, comically narrates the mutually beneficial dialectic of distrust between Barnum and the press while again demonstrating the inextricability of Barnum the showman from his Pacific exhibits. In the narrative of the poem, titled, punningly, “A Literal Interview,” a reporter named “Thomas Jenks” from “the daily Morning Screw” who claims to speak Fijian expresses to Barnum his desire to interview his Fijian cannibals: I propose to ask them questions, chiefly of their inner lives; Whether “granny” hurts digestion; do they pickle extra wives; Collecting the Pacific  143

Would an hour steady toasting stop the wagging of a jaw; Would they contract for the roasting of my blessed mother-in-law. Jenks’s proposed interview questions are full of puns (e.g., “inner lives”) and domestic jokes: over the course of three lines, he misogynistically imagines the consumption of a “granny,” “wives,” and “my blessed mother-​in-law.” Predictably, soon after Jenks, “with jokes merry and laughter, entered . . . the Fe-gians’ room,” he is eaten. The poem’s speaker calls attention to Jenks’s role as a reporter when he jokes, “In their regions epigastric, interviewing, still lies Jenks.” The epilogue treats journalists even more harshly, claiming, “the moral of my ditty—this the burden of my rhymes”—is that readers should “pray on bended knees, / Either for less interviewers, or else for many more Fe-gees!” In this poem, an exhibit of supposed Fijian cannibals is leveraged to ridicule the ubiquity of journalists. More to the point, according to the poem, in the issue of the Morning Screw that “recorded his [Jenks’s] demise,” “Mr. Barnum warns all quill-men who in Cannibals confide— / Now he knows they catch and grill men—none will be allowed inside.”48 To the fictional Barnum of this poem, a journalist who can actually speak Fijian poses a threat to his exhibit’s avowed authenticity, and Jenks’s death is used as a justification to avoid such dangers in the future while further advertising the show. The joke, then, while mining the comic possibilities of savage cannibals tamed for display, is actually about journalism and Barnum’s slippery shrewdness as a showman. An 1884 article in the Kansas City (MO) Star further narrates the relationship between skeptical journalists and exhibits of purported Fijian cannibals. “Funny Looking Fiji: The Museum’s Festive Cannibals” offers a humorous play-by-play of a visit to an exhibit, leading readers to laugh at both the exhibit itself and the journalist’s incredulous descriptions of it. Much of the humor derives from the article’s juxtaposition of the carnival barker’s description of the alleged cannibals’ “savage instincts” and the former “hideous acts of cruelty they were guilty of before their capture” with the reality of the displayed Fijians’ kind and docile dispositions. The writer describes “the young man who attends the wind work for the dime museum” as a “wind artist” having “the air of a man who carried his life in his hand,” but the writer paints the Fijians as “harmless looking colored people.” He reports, “It was the general impression of the audience that the darkies who stood with clubs like piano legs in their hands, ought to have cracked the 144  A Laughable Empire

young man’s head for his insolence in abusing them before an audience. But the two man eaters only looked more good natured and amused when they heard their bloodthirsty dispositions depicted by the daring young man.”49 The journalist’s suspicion that the war clubs the Fijians held up were actually piano legs recalls Barnum’s unfussy request to the Smithsonian, discussed earlier, for “implements of any kind” to accompany his Fijians and lend an air of authenticity. “Funny Looking Fiji” gets comic mileage from the juxtaposition of the barker’s “insolence” with the supposed savages’ “good natured and amused” countenances. Additionally, the writer’s consistent cross-racialization of them as “harmless looking colored people” and “darkies” shows the relative interchangeability of racial others for the exhibit’s audience as well as the newspaper’s readers. Much like “A Literal Interview,” “Funny Looking Fiji” describes how “the evening star reporter [presumably the article’s author], who has spent several years of his life as a missionary among savage nations, and who speaks the Fiji language like his mother tongue,” attempted to converse with the Fijians but “was astonished . . . to find the Fijians could not understand his Fiji talk.” After calling into question whether the exhibited pair were even Fijian, the reporter narrates the rest of the interview, which took place in English. In answer to the question “How much do you make at this business?” one responded: “That depends on how often these rascally showmen break up to avoid paying us our salary. That is the way to get rich.” “You are catching on to American business principles rather lively for a cannibal.” “They no fool me. I am onto them,” said the savage, with a surprising use of modern slang. “How do you manage to get along without an occasional missionary steak?” “Have to,” said the fellow, with a look of amused intelligence to his wife. “What is considered the choicest part of the human body?” persisted the reporter. “The ribs are good, but the heart is the best.” “Do you take it raw?” “Yes; but we do not eat human flesh often. Only in time of war, and then an occasional prisoner. The women never eat it.” Collecting the Pacific  145

“I thought the young man said it was a favorite diet?” “Oh, well, he was just talking to draw a crowd.” And again the tame-looking savages looked amused. This exchange calls into question the exhibit’s legitimacy, as the “Fijian” gives pat answers with a knowing smile; it also demonstrates the difference between cultural anthropophagy as potentially practiced in nineteenth-​century Fiji and the sensational cannibalism described by traveling shows and cannibal jokes. In the last paragraph of the article, the writer concludes that “the only evidence of a savage nature to be found in either of the Fijians was a few red and blue chalk marks on their cheeks, otherwise they looked suspiciously like well behaved colored people who had never eaten anything more shocking than beef.” The reporter’s dialogue with the “Fijian” mainly mocks showmen as unscrupulous operators. In addition to the barb about “rascally showmen” who get out of paying their employees, the article ends by recalling, “A gentleman who was in the crowd to-day said P.T. Barnum would furnish as many Fiji Islanders as ordered to any museum and let it use his name. ‘None are genuine unless my name is blown in the bottle. Fiji cannibals are made to order.’ ”50 This joke on Barnum mocks the notion of ethnic authenticity by imagining it as a product that can be branded and mass-produced. Like the other humor about Pacific exhibitions explored in this chapter, it also capitalizes on Americans’ continuing fascination with Pacific places and peoples in order to rib Barnum and his ilk for their laughably over-the-top re-presentations of them. Here and elsewhere, the exhibited Pacific Islanders (or those pretending to be Pacific Islanders) are not themselves the butts of the jokes; instead, they serve as comic foils to shed humorous light on the antics of showmen and the audiences who eat up their disingenuous displays. The humorist Charles Farrar Browne, whose famous showman character Artemus Ward was loosely based on Barnum, had earlier poked fun at the dubious authenticity of cannibal exhibits in an 1866 contribution to London Punch that was reprinted in US newspapers. Ward tells a humorous story about how his plan to manufacture and showcase his own cannibal backfired: You prob’ly refer to the circmstans of my hirin’ a young man of dissypated habits to fix hisself up as A real Cannibal from New Zeelan, and when I was simply tellin the audience that he was the 146  A Laughable Empire

most feroshus Cannibal of his tribe, and that, alone and unassisted, he had et sev’ril of our fellow countrymen, and that he had at one time even contemplated eatin his Uncle Thomas on his mother’s side, as well as other near and dear relatives—while I was makin’ these simple statements, the mis’ble young man said I was a lyer, and knockt me off the platform. Not quite satisfied with this, he cum and trod hevily on me, and as he was a very muscular person and wore remarkably thick boots, I knew at once that a canary bird wasn’t walkin’ over me.51 In this anecdote, Ward’s poor judgment as a showman in hiring a drunk to pretend to be a New Zealand cannibal leads to embarrassment onstage. The “young man of dissypated habits” forgets his role and interrupts Ward’s “wind artistry”—that is, his outrageous lies about eating relatives—denying these claims in front of a live audience. The anecdote draws back the curtain on circus and dime-museum acts that profess to display “real Cannibal[s]” and other supposedly authentic artifacts. Of course, such ruses certainly did occur, even in more respectable contexts. For example, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a story in 1837 about a hoax perpetrated on the “Academy of Sciences” in Paris: “An unknown individual ushered in, while the Academy was sitting, a fellow dressed as a South Sea Islander, whom he represented as a native of Polynesia. The latter performed his part remarkably well, remained standing in the centre of the hall staring wildly at those around him, and even showed several parts of his body that had been tattooed. He of course attracted much curiosity; but what was the disappointment of the assembly, when M. Geoffrey de St. Hilaire announced that the savage was a European sailor.”52 This particular hoax played on the sometimes blurry lines between Euro-American sailors and Pacific Islanders, presenting tattooing as an ethnic marker instead of body art in order to hoodwink members of a scientific academy. In the less reputable and more chaotic context of Artemus Ward’s fictional traveling show, per his Punch contribution, his “real Cannibal from New Zeelan” denies his status as a racial other and therefore as a curiosity. The physical comedy that ensues when Ward is knocked off the stage and stomped on embodies audiences’ desires to exact symbolic revenge on showmen for perpetrating frauds. Ward’s comeuppance continues when a member of the crowd, “a tall, dis’greeable skoundril,” tells him, “As you hain’t got no more Cannybals to show us, old man, . . . Collecting the Pacific  147

as you seem to be out of Cannybals, we’ll sorter look round here and fix things,” and then proceeds to destroy Ward’s precious wax figures. Ward claims to have learned his lesson from the incident, saying, “I admit that my ambition overlept herself in this instuns, and I’ve been very careful ever since to deal square with the public.”53 But readers know that the fictional showman’s continued, genial unscrupulousness will get him into hilariously hot water time and time again. Some journalistic satires on Barnum’s proprietorship of the “Fiji cannibals” also operate through symbolic violence. For instance, a viral, comic poem that made the newspaper rounds in 1872 and 1873—sometimes titled “A Canni-Ballad,” sometimes “A Sad Story,” and sometimes “The Cannibal Man”—leverages the fear of cannibalism to imagine revenge against Barnum in much the same way that the “boiled missionary” jokes analyzed in chapter 3 express unease with missionary work by imagining missionaries being cooked and eaten. Responding comically to Barnum’s 1872 display of alleged New Zealand cannibals in his Great Traveling Museum, the poem’s wording changes slightly through various reprintings, but plot and meaning are consistent. Through database searches, I uncovered versions of the poem published in eighteen newspapers and magazines between February 1872 and August 1873. The iteration of “A Canni-Ballad” that appeared in the February 24, 1872, Savannah (GA) Daily Advertiser was itself reprinted from the Cincinnati Commercial. It tells of “A cannibal man who was tough and old, / When Barnum bought him and paid in gold” and wonders whether in the transaction “the man or Barnum was sold.” The “ancient cannibal,” according to the poem, has teeth “sharp as the teeth of a saw” that are Filed and polished and ready for use On any customer full of juice, Or the first fine baby that lay around loose, For babies were all his glory. Much like boiled-missionary jokes, this comic poem mocks the “cannibal man” for savage acts, but its real target is Barnum, who keeps “his man in a cage” and feeds him a meal of a human “on the sly.” This leads the erstwhile cannibal to redevelop a taste for “a white man’s meat,” and he takes to looking “with longing at rosy girls” and wondering “how they tasted.” Events reach a crisis in the penultimate stanza: 148  A Laughable Empire

It happened once, when the flesh was weak, That he snatched a bite from a rosy cheek; When Barnum entered the cage to beat him, The cannibal thought he had come to treat him, And so straightway began to eat him, Without even salt or pepper.54 Like Artemus Ward receiving an onstage beating from his unwilling cannibal, the fictional Barnum of the poem gets his just reward when he enters the cannibal’s cage “to beat him” and is quickly devoured. That the cannibal consumes Barnum “without even salt or pepper” also reflects common tropes of cannibal jokes in their juxtaposition of the mundane aspects of dining with sensationalistic depictions of savagery, as discussed in chapter 3. Of course, given Barnum’s own tendency to traffic in cannibal jokes, it is likely that he did not mind, and maybe even welcomed, the publicity and attention offered by the reprints of this poem. As with the Fudge(e) Mermaid, Barnum’s history of hoaxes and farcical exhibits licensed burlesques of him and his exhibits. Barnum’s history, his self-promotion, and his jocular attitude toward his own amusements encouraged a gleeful exercise of skepticism, ironic detachment, democratic critique, and comic mockery by his audiences and journalists as an important part of the entertainment experience. Newspaper writers, it seems, particularly took the opportunity afforded by Barnum’s Fiji cannibal exhibit to recycle or revise old chestnut cannibal jokes. For instance, in May 1873, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette ran a piece called “Human Titbits: A Talk with Barnum’s Cannibals,” which revels in the opportunity to joke about cannibalism. The writer, in noting that the Fijians did not practice cannibalism as part of the exhibit, ponders, “Is it right to deprive them of their daily bread—I mean their daily baby? Think what self-restraint they must exercise while gazing upon the toothsome infants that congregate at the circus, and, like cherubim and seraphim, continually do cry.” These overwritten musings offer readers no useful information about the exhibit; instead, they recall Mark Twain’s joke about offering to eat a baby on the lecture platform. Later in the article, the author engages in a soliloquy in which he expresses anxiety about not being fit for consumption by cannibals: Who is not vain enough to wish to look good enough to eat? Fancy being shipwrecked off the Fejee Islands, and discarded by cannibals Collecting the Pacific  149

as a tough subject, while your companions are literally killed with attention? Can you not imagine that, under such circumstances, a peculiar jealousy of the superior tenderness of your friends would be a thorn in the flesh, rendering existence a temporary burden? . . . If we fell among anthropophagi, would not our love of approbation make us long to be as succulent as young pigs? What glory to escape from the jaws of death, if the jaws repudiate us?55 The humor in this passage arises from its inappropriate disquietude and the author’s extended expression of illogical insecurities that are the very opposite of the anxieties about otherness that cannibal jokes usually attempt to laugh away. It is also emblematic of the comically riotous responses that Barnum’s exhibits engendered and even encouraged. In mentioning Barnum by name, many cannibal jokes about the exhibit of the Fijians add a critique of the museum and traveling-show industry to the standard, dual mockery of cannibals and missionaries that is common to cannibal jokes. For instance, a Chicago Evening Post joke from January 1873 takes cannibalism nonchalantly for granted; the real joke is about the museum viewing experience: “Barnum has a cannibal girl on exhibit in New York. Parties visiting her with the view of seeing her eat are required to furnish the missionary themselves.”56 The joke pretends to pillory Barnum, not for the immorality of his implied connection to eating missionaries but for his miserliness as a showman in not springing for missionaries as cannibal fodder and thus requiring attendees to create the spectacle themselves. In giving the exhibition’s audience an active part in the experience, it also lays blame on the show-going public for its role in objectifying Pacific Islanders. In all of the preceding examples, the jokes are not particularly about real Pacific Islanders but rather the ridiculousness of their display to the public as authentic. While they traffic in Barnum’s name and reputation as a comically unscrupulous operator, these jokes also force Americans to reckon, through laughter, with their own often misinformed fascination with Pacific artifacts and exhibits. As we have seen, Barnum is a common butt of these jokes in part because he welcomed and profited from them, as they kept his name and his exhibits in continual circulation in the press. But, in an even more audacious public-relations stunt, Barnum would also attempt to turn a real, and regal, Pacific Islander visiting the United States into an entertainment commodity. 150  A Laughable Empire

“king kalakua at barnum’s”: Representation and Resistance in a Royal Visit

Hawaiian King David Kalākaua’s 1874 visit to the United States created its own crowd-drawing spectacle that Barnum sought to use to his business advantage. In doing, so Barnum further blurred the lines between authentic and synthetic, real person and fictionalized exhibit, in essence attempting to turn Kalākaua into an exhibit not much different from his Fejee Mermaid.57 But Kalākaua resisted this and other transformative representations through his deliberately dignified demeanor and through targeted, media-savvy counterimagery. Everywhere Kalākaua went in 1874, he was observed and commented on, as he visited tourist attractions, took in shows, and met with dignitaries. Throughout his visit, US newspapers and magazines gleefully shared his itinerary and ran profiles of the king and commentary on his visit. As I mention in chapter 1, the New York comic paper the Arcadian ran several pieces mocking Kalākaua during his visit to the city in December 1874. The front page of the Christmas Eve issue expresses sarcastic excitement about his royal visit and includes a large cartoon depicting Kalākaua in disheveled military garb, a mélange of fancy accessories from different countries, one shoe, and a bottle of wine in his hand (fig. 12). The patch on the uniform infantilizes the sovereign with the label “for a good child.” The accompanying article describes this as “full Sandwich Island court dress” and says that “the illustration represents Kaly as he appeared before Congress in Washington in his native uniform, which, as may be seen, consists of voluntary contributions from the various nations whose vessels have called at Honolulu.”58 This description attempts to reframe Kalākaua’s polished cosmopolitanism as not a laudable trait that makes him well qualified for diplomacy but the result of geographical happenstance and uncouth naïveté. The December 5, 1874, issue of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant offers a more ambiguous treatment of Kalākaua in featuring him as both its cover image (fig. 13) and its lead story. The cover drawing, though a cartoon, offers a decently respectful rendering of Kalākaua that is, however, threatened by two comic figures that look down at him laughing from the masthead, as well as a misspelling of his name at the bottom. The next page features a lead article titled “Kalakaua” that refers the reader to the cover image. It begins with an epigraph that frames Kalākaua through stereotyped caricature: Collecting the Pacific  151

FIG. 12  “Our illustration represents Kaly as he appeared before Congress in Washington in his native uniform, which, as may be seen, consists of voluntary contributions from the various nations whose vessels have called at Honolulu.” New York Arcadian, December 24, 1874, 1. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Okay pokay winky wam, Flippity flappity busky bam; And every morning he said, “I am The King of the Sandwich Islands!” As I discuss shortly, Kalākaua was intently aware of such racist characterizations. The ensuing article does not further demean Kalākaua’s character but does attempt to dissuade readers from fawning over Kalākaua because the United States, as a republic, should be beyond notions of royalty.59 This is, of course, unintentionally ironic, since, by using him for the cover and lead story, the magazine accedes to and further stokes readers’ fascination with Kalākaua and the Kingdom he represents. Barnum, seeking to profit from this dialectic of voyeuristic spectacle, invited Kalākaua to attend his “Great Roman Hippodrome,” the 152  A Laughable Empire

FIG. 13  “His Majesty King Kalakua [sic], now on a visit to the United States.” Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, December 5, 1874, cover. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

three-ring circus, menagerie, and “freak show” that he had been running since 1870 and that “brought his white patrons in contact with the East through cross-racial desire and identification,” in part by framing “its Orientals in empowering political categories such as nationality and monarchy.”60 An item in newspapers announcing the visit seems to advertise Kalākaua himself as an addition to the menagerie. The December 28, 1874, New York Daily Graphic ran the following: king kalakaua at barnum’s! his majesty, king kalakaua, having accepted mr. barnum’s invitation to visit the great roman hippodrome, in company with the committee and his suite, has designated tuesday afternoon, dec. 29, at 2 o’clock, as the occasion!61 Collecting the Pacific  153

A similar advertisement appeared in New York Herald on the same date.62 Publicizing Kalākaua’s attendance in this way frames him as an exhibit and his presence as a viewer of the circus as itself a performance to be observed by paying customers. Barnum had pulled similar stunts before. For instance, Barnum attempted to make Abraham Lincoln into a temporary exhibit at his American Museum. According to the February 21, 1861, New York Herald, Barnum invited Lincoln and his family—on route from Springfield to the White House for his first inauguration—to attend the museum. According to the Herald, Barnum told Lincoln, “ ‘Don’t forget, . . . you “Honest Old Abe;” I shall rely upon you, and I advertise you.’ The advertisement appeared, but Lincoln didn’t. A great many people took this opportunity of seeing the President elect, together with the other curiosities, but they were unfortunately disappointed.”63 In advertising Lincoln, Barnum converted the president-elect from a dynamic leader of the nation into a static exhibit. The New York Herald swallowed this associational logic, connecting Lincoln “together with the other curiosities.” In the case of Kalākaua at the Hippodrome, the Daily Graphic, too, seems to have fallen prey to Barnum’s advertising. Two days later, it printed the following item: “barnum advertises in the amusement column of the Herald, his Majesty King kalakaua, to be at his museum on a certain day. Wonder how his Royalty likes the idea of being published as a curiosity, alongside the learned seal, the fat woman and such like?”64 The rhetorical question here is valid, but, as discussed earlier, the Daily Graphic had just run an item that read like an advertisement. The Graphic, then, was complicit in reifying King Kalākaua into a “curiosity” even as it complained about Barnum’s attempts to do so in another paper. Subsequent news accounts of the visit offered sensational descriptions of Kalākaua’s every move and the circus audience’s rapt attention to him. The December 30, 1874, New York World printed an article whose title, “Royal Sight-Seeing. Kalakaua Visits the Hippodrome and the Park Theatre,” captures the dialectic of Kalākaua’s observing and being observed, stressing in its subtitle that “his majesty [was] under the personal supervision of the great showman.” The article goes on to describe in detail how Barnum seated Kalākaua at specially prepared “luxurious easy chairs” to take in the show: “Here Mr. P.T. Barnum was waiting to receive the distinguished guest. He greeted him warmly, while the eleven or twelve thousand gathered in the house saluted him with long and vigorous applause. The King bowed, and took his seat 154  A Laughable Empire

by the side of Mr. Barnum.” It subsequently describes which entertainments Kalākaua seemed to enjoy most but is more interested in detailing the circus audience’s reactions to him, noting, for instance, “The announcement of the royal visit drew out an immense hippodramatic audience.” It also focuses on the details of Barnum’s special treatment of his honored guest, including “a special set of pyrotechnics, prepared for the occasion,” that spelled out “the name ‘Kalakaua’ in colored letters” as well as a carriage ride that drove Barnum and Kalākaua “around the course. [Kalākaua] bowed repeatedly as cheer followed cheer, while Mr. Barnum was in an ecstasy of delight at adding another feature to his monster list of shows. ‘It is the highest compliment the hippodrome can show Your Majesty,’ explained Mr. Barnum.” This characterization of Kalākaua stresses his status in Barnum’s Hippodrome as both a feted guest and, probably more importantly, part of the show, “another feature” of “his monster list.”65 On the same day, the New York Herald published a similarly breathless play-by-play of Barnum’s hosting of Kalākaua at the Hippodrome, emphasizing how, after the performance, “every one thronged to get a look at the King.”66 Another periodical critiqued the proceedings by conflating Barnum with his unwitting exhibit. On January 14, 1875, the New York Arcadian joked, “It is announced that Mr. P. T. Barnum contemplates getting himself up as King Kalakaua, and showing himself through the provinces. He has engaged the Rev. Mr. Talmage as his ‘expounder,’ and will be further accompanied by the ‘New York reception committee.’ ”67 Here the Arcadian takes aim at Barnum’s humbugs by suggesting the interchangeability of Barnum and Kalākaua, thereby delegitimizing the status of Kalākaua as a king and as an official who was in the United States not as a traveling exhibit but on state business. But another periodical, in demarcating the end of Kalākaua’s visit, situates Kalākaua as a comic commentator above the scrum of showmen and cheap entertainments. The April 1, 1875, issue of Dexter Smith’s uses Kalakua as a foil to mock the masses who flocked to get a glimpse of him: “King Kalakaua has got home, and says he wonders ‘if there is such another place as the United States for fools and flunkeys?’ Guess there isn’t!”68 Seven years later, during Kalākaua’s second visit to the United States, the US press recalled his prior visit to Barnum’s Hippodrome even more cynically. The October 1, 1881, Chicago Daily Inter Ocean reports, “The King is fond of amusement, but it was in vain he was urged to go to the circus; previous experience had made him wise.” It goes on to retell the Collecting the Pacific  155

story of how Barnum in 1874 had made Kalākaua his “victim” by urging “him to go to the hippodrome in the Madison Square Garden ‘to see the horses’ ” and then, “by a preconcerted arrangement,” forcing him into a carriage to parade him around the circus while the emcee “roared out, ‘Three cheers for Barnum and the King!’ ” The Inter Ocean, like previous newspapers, emphasizes the crowd’s interest in the spectacle, noting, “The audience was delighted, and cheered vociferously as the carriage rolled around the track.” But its depiction of Barnum’s duplicity and of Kalākaua’s chagrined reaction to it differ in tone from the 1874 newspaper accounts. For instance, it recounts how “his Majesty’s face grew black at the indignity. But before the circuit was completed he wisely concluded to treat the affair as a joke, and smiled in a ghastly way as he through [sic] the bouquet to a pretty equestrienne.”69 In this telling of the incident, Kalākaua seems grimly determined to maintain his royal gravity upon being made a display precisely by “treat[ing] the affair as a joke.” Though Barnum’s antics in rendering his guest into an exhibit were (typically, for Barnum) egregious, Kalākaua’s being paraded around a circus ground before a gaping crowd serves as a microcosm of his subject position in his visits to the United States. Though he was there in part on serious business—attempting to secure a trade reciprocity agreement between the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the United States—even as he met dignitaries and visited sites as a tourist, he was constantly gawked at, his every move reported for US newspaper readers whose preconceptions of Hawaiians had already been shaped in part by comic fodder in those same print outlets. On the whole, though, most US and Hawaiian newspapers, even opposition papers run by American emigrants in Hawai‘i who generally opposed Kalākaua’s regime, printed largely positive and respectful portrayals of Kalākaua’s visits to the United States. To give one example, the January 16, 1875, Pacific Commercial Advertiser summarized press reports on Kalākaua’s 1874 trip as follows: “The accounts of His Majesty’s journey through the United States, and of his reception by the government and people wherever he sojourned, continue to be of the most pleasing character. Without unnecessary parade or display, but with republican simplicity combined with a proper regard for that which is due the position of a sovereign of a small but none the less independent country, the American people have honored both our King and themselves.”70 Hawaiian press accounts tended to ignore Kalākaua’s experience at the Hippodrome; for instance, the same page of the January 16, 156  A Laughable Empire

1875, Pacific Commercial Advertiser offers a detailed, day-by-day accounting of Kalākaua’s itinerary between December 13, 1874, and January 2, 1875—including receiving a call from Mark Twain, whom Kalākaua had met during Twain’s 1866 visit to the islands—but does not mention Kalākaua’s visit to Barnum’s Hippodrome.71 One exception is the Hawaiian Gazette, which in January 1875 reports that Barnum had invited Kalākaua to the Hippodrome and that Kalākaua was eager to attend, having “anticipated much pleasure” in part because he had “heard much of the large audiences which gather in the Hippodrome, especially on holidays.” But, the Gazette explains, Kalākaua had to cancel because he was detained in “giving an audience to Hawaiians residing in this city” after visiting a gallery to have photographs taken “of the King in full uniform and in several positions.”72 These reasons for delaying his visit to the Hippodrome are important because, first, they show Kalākaua engaging in official business in addition to pleasure-seeking and, second, sitting for official photographs was one of Kalākaua’s strategies for rebutting the caricatures and other pejorative depictions of him that proliferated in both the Hawaiian and foreign press. Noenoe Silva has described King Kalākaua as “the most reviled and ridiculed of the monarchs,” while Tiffany Lani Ing, in Reclaiming Kalākaua, explains how an “arsenal of attacks” on Kalākaua “created the dominant and long-enduring portrait of Kalākaua as a drunken, reckless, poor, and ignorant Hawaiian savage.” This portrait was sketched by hostile media reports in the nineteenth century and reified by biographers and scholars who relied on those reports (and ignored others, particularly Hawaiian-language sources) in the twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries. Ing explains that Kalākaua was aware of “the caricatures and the easy dismissals of himself as the King of the Cannibal Islands circulating through the media of dominant powers” and worked adeptly to rebut these stereotypes through his dignified physical presence on his 1874 and 1881 tours as well as through “the new image technologies.” Kalākaua and other members of the royal family sat for many photographs and circulated those images as part of a public-relations campaign to proliferate more distinguished representations in response to caricatures and stereotypes.73 Though Kalākaua’s counterimaging was decidedly serious and though he was nicknamed “The Merrie Monarch” by detractors not for his humor but for his allegedly good mood while drinking, Kalākaua was also known to be a sharp wit who was not afraid to play on prevailing Collecting the Pacific  157

stereotypes. The American writer Isobel Field, who was a frequent guest at King Kalākaua’s private parties when she lived in Honolulu, recalls in her autobiography his delight at her impressions of Honolulu personages and, even more telling, remembers that he once sang and played the following on his guitar or ukulele: Hoky poky winky wum How do you like your taters done? Boiled or with their jackets on? Sang the King of the Sandwich Islands.74 Though a private performance, Kalākaua’s ironic inhabitation of naïve stereotypes about him and other Pacific Islanders evinces his cosmopolitan good humor. In more serious public utterances, though, Kalākaua could also use satire and irony to make arguments in support of Hawaiian sovereignty and self-determination. For instance, the 1881 pamphlet “The Third Warning Voice,” purported to be written by Robert Hoapili Baker but widely attributed to Kalākaua, resorts to sarcasm in impugning persistent foreign interventions into Hawaiian culture, politics, and land rights: “We were taught to be more enlightened and less barbarian, to discard the Ma-lo [loincloth] and assume a little more Parisian garb, to discontinue athletic exercise, and games of surf riding and Lua [boxing], for a little more devotion and prayer, to exclude honest work and farming for a little more Mammon, and less greediness, to give up your lands and properties for a little more Holy Ghost.”75 Here the urbane and well-​ educated Hawaiian king operates as a satirist-​statesman-​satirized, somewhat in the mold of Abraham Lincoln.76 Hawaiian nationalists during the Kalākaua era also drew on the satiric possibilities of kaona, broadly defined as a literary device comprising double or hidden meanings in Hawaiian language but also a way to communicate extra meanings to an in-group. Noene Silva explains that the use of kaona at this time was “crucial in creating and maintaining national solidarity against the colonial maneuvers of the U.S. politicians. Without knowledge of the cultural codes in Hawaiian, foreigners who understood the language could still be counted on to miss the kaona,” as they were “unable to interpret them.”77 In spite of Kalākaua’s experiences with media misrepresentations and being treated as a spectacle during his visits to the United States, 158  A Laughable Empire

he saw commercial and political possibilities in exhibitions of Hawaiian artifacts. In his 1875 “Address to the People,” Kalākaua spoke in favor of sending all Hawai‘i’s “merchantable articles of product” to be displayed in the 1876 Grand Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. He hoped that doing so would lead Hawai‘i to “become better known in the world’s commerce.” For Kalākaua, such exhibitive commerce was important because it was connected to international respect, which was in turn necessary for safeguarding Hawai‘i’s ever-endangered sovereignty. He argued, “The best way to [take care of ourselves] is to endeavor to make such material and social progress, that the powerful governments whose friendship we now fortunately possess, shall be convinced that we deserve their aid and support. Let us in short, prove to the world that Hawaii is worthy of her position among the independent nations of the world.”78 Kalākaua’s position here, even if overly optimistic about the large-scale knock-on effects of exhibiting Hawaiian goods and artifacts, underscores the complicated and sometimes contradictory political and cultural impacts of nineteenth-century exhibition culture. Kalākaua was certainly not alone among Pacific Islander leaders in seeking to turn Western exhibition practices to his nation’s own purposes. Conal McCarthy has explored how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Māori leaders also participated in exhibitions of their artifacts as a “political weapon,” not as “assimilation” but as a claim of a place in the modern world. As McCarthy puts it, “By exhibiting their taonga (cultural treasures/goods) in museums and exhibitions, Māori people were recalling the past but were also looking to the future in an active engagement with Europe and the world.” For Māori in this colonial moment, preserving and celebrating their history was a means of confirming their continued presence in British New Zealand.79 Mac­Kenzie, too, has argued that museums and exhibitions did not just offer “an arrogant cultural othering of nature and peoples” but also “simulated fresh forms of respect” in their presentations of alternate but “parallel” cultural approaches to universal human questions.80 American consumers’ and readers’ avarice for souvenirs and the mania for exhibits—whether “authentic,” parodic, or somewhere in between—connects to Americans’ urges to own the Pacific by collecting it, whether via a keepsake or an imperial gaze at a sideshow. But, as these scholars underscore, it is also possible to read some forms of collecting as subversive. Yunte Huang lists “antiquarianism” and “collecting” as two of a “host of marginalized poetic/historiographical practices” Collecting the Pacific  159

that can be used to offer “critique of the violence of the imperial double vision.” As Huang explains, counterpoetics aim for an “enactment of poetic imagination as a means to alter memory and invoke minority survival in the deadly space between competing national, imperial interests and between authoritative regimes of epistemology serving those interests.” In his reading of Moby-Dick, Huang notes “the subversive cultural poetics embedded in the antiquarian, anti-​utilitarian mode of collecting” running throughout the novel. For Huang, the novel’s persistent collecting—of cetology, statistics, objects, and anecdotes—is “anti-utilitarian” and “unsettles” its American readers’ expectations of economic domination of the Pacific Ocean and its peoples. Of course, some Pacific collecting—for example, of whale oil and of people in the case of Barnum’s Fijians and of the common practice of blackbirding (wherein a “collector ship” would take Pacific Islanders from their homes and sell them into slavery)—was intended precisely for economic benefit and imperial domination.81 This demonstrates, in a nutshell, the complexities and paradoxes inherent in seeking to uncover the subversive agency of Pacific Islanders in settler-authored texts. In chapter 5 and in this book’s conclusion, I wrestle in greater depth with the problems and possibilities of recovering the anti-imperial power of Pacific Islanders’ humor and laughter.

160  A Laughable Empire

“Didn’t Our People Laugh?”

Humor as Resistance

5.

Early on in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Queequeg relates an anecdote about a time when he, not understanding the function of a wheelbarrow he was lent, put his sea chest in it, lifted it, and carried it up the wharf. Ishmael responds, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?” Queequeg then turns the tables with a yarn about a sea captain who committed a howler of a cultural faux pas on Queequeg’s (fictional) Pacific island of Kokovoko. At a wedding feast, Queequeg relates, “the High Priest opens the banquet to the immemorial ceremony of the islands; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass.” As a punch line, Queequeg tells Ishmael, “What you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”1 His point is that not just Euro-Americans but Pacific Islanders, too, can laugh at otherness. In doing so, Queequeg flips the script on Ishmael’s laughter at his clumsiness with usages on the US shore. As Queequeg explains through his anecdote, all foreigners in foreign lands commit gaffes that are funny to natives of those lands precisely because of the ridiculous breaking of cultural norms that ensues from understandable misunderstandings. The implication here is that cultural

norms—from wheelbarrows to punch bowls—are entirely subjective social constructions. What makes Queequeg superior to the sea captain, though, is that the former realizes this while the latter does not. The captain’s mistake arises from his self-important ethnocentrism. It makes him a comic dolt because he either cannot understand different cultural conventions and his relationship to them or he understands but does not care. For Euro-Americans to laugh without being willing to be laughed at, Queequeg implies, displays a mistaken sense of racial or cultural superiority: if Queequeg hoists and carries a wheelbarrow full of his belongings, well, white people wash their hands in the punch bowl. Contact creates a clash of customs that is often ludicrous. That Queequeg narrates this in English also demonstrates that he is more open to other cultures than are the Euro-Americans he works with. Ishmael is obviously a sympathetic listener and, like his creator, Melville, a delightfully self-mocking cultural relativist. But, nevertheless, Ishmael co-opts Queequeg’s story by telling most of it for him. Queequeg’s punch line is the only dialogue he gets in his own anecdote; the rest is related to the reader by Ishmael. Though Ishmael, like Queequeg, is fictional, both Moby-Dick’s narrator and his creator are also cultural tourists who fix Native subjects in their imperial gaze and on the page. In studying nineteenth-century humor in and about the Pacific, I do not want to be like the sea captain, or Ishmael, or even Melville. How, then, can scholars (especially haole scholars like me) identify, recover, and correctly situate Pacific Islanders’ humor in response to contact and continued connections with Euro-American sailors, adventurers, imperialists, and interlopers? How can we responsibly and honestly detail the subversive power of Pacific Islanders’ comic resistance to imperialism? How do we avoid replicating what Greg Dvorak complains of as the “bizarre mix of myopia, hubris, and apathy with which American discourses often presume to own and know ‘the Pacific?’ ” Noting the field’s “long history of looking through colonial optics at indigenous subjects, marginalizing Native voices as background noise with no agency,” Dvorak calls for scholars to think instead “about articulations, not assimilations, acknowledging difference by seeing the contradictions and nuances that form cultural identity through intimate genealogies.”2 Appeals such as this for intellectual complexity should motivate humor scholars to recover or reframe Native humor, or that of other marginalized groups, in ways that highlight resiliency, agency, and cultural autonomy. 162  A Laughable Empire

Situating Native Pacific Islanders’ humor in conversations about contact demonstrates how humor and humor criticism can work as decolonial tactics. In the introduction to a 2015 special issue of American Quarterly titled “Pacific Currents,” guest editors Paul Lyons and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan claim that “critically engaging” with “the ship of American Empire as it slowly comes about (in new forms of gunboat diplomacy)” requires that scholars undertake “decolonial, anticolonial, and indigenizing approaches.”3 Such practices demand that humor scholars, too, be self-critical about our own motives and methods in order to avoid unconsciously embodying what Brandy Nālani McDougall, writing about Hawaiian-language texts and their translations, calls “colonial entitlement,” which she defines as “the naturalized authority/ownership over everyone and everything Indigenous that emerges from histories of conquest.” “Colonial entitlement,” McDougall warns, goes largely unquestioned by its wielder. Just as American settler colonialism is a foreign introduction in Hawai‘i yet asserts itself as normative, scholars who have no specialized expertise or obvious connection to indigeneity may assume a naturalized authority that, especially when accompanied by institutional and commercial support (i.e., funding and publishing opportunities, university teaching positions, national speaking engagements, and awards programs), renders them recognized experts. Simultaneously, Indigenous expertise and specialized knowledge are often boldly dismissed, denied, and exploited, and . . . “academic gatekeeping” ensures that the existence of Indigenous knowledge and expertise remains obscured. At stake is the freedom and natural right for Indigenous peoples to represent and speak for ourselves. This raises some serious issues about how, when, and whether non-​ Native scholars should even attempt to study comedy and empire. Houston Wood, in his introduction to Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai‘i, poses parallel questions and anxieties about “seeming to present [him]self as yet another haole (non-Native) expert” on “Native claims and self-representations.”4 That is, if, in our attempts to restore Native agency in our scholarship, we silence or obscure current Native voices, then we are doing more harm than good. McDougall points out that scholars who research “Indigenous histories, cultures, and issues using only English-language sources” can become unconsciously “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  163

“vulnerable to merely reproducing colonial misrepresentations and the structure of settler power that it reinforces.”5 Obviously, scholars (should) want to interrogate cultures of empire in order to do decolonial work, not to recolonize. So it behooves us, at the very least, to be aware of our own institutional privileges and biases as we work. This chapter constitutes my attempt to study humor and celebrate Native Pacific Islanders’ comic agency without unconsciously “claiming” or “usurping Indigenous authority.” I am trying to short-circuit my own entitlement by being dubious about translations and secondary sources; about the viewpoints, assumptions, and motivations of those who have written about the Pacific islands and Pacific Islanders in primary sources; and about even my own potentially ethnocentric assumptions and Western epistemology. Whereas McDougall focuses on the problems associated with relying on English translations of Hawaiian texts, Diana Looser, in an essay on precolonial Pacific theater, laments the paucity of “texts or source materials from the period that adequately represent Indigenous viewpoints on this topic.” Most of the extant records, she writes, “are inevitably mediated by the perspectives of foreigners often unfamiliar with the language or culture of their hosts.” “As written documents,” Looser surmises, “such records inscribe their own forms of authority and erasure . . . that in most cases operated in service of a broader colonial project.”6 For this reason, humor scholars who study Euro-American records of contact and empire must account for the narrators’ epistemological biases and mercantile or imperial goals while seeking alternative possible explanations for the ambiguous moments of laughter they describe. That is, note their descriptions but doubt their interpretations. One approach, then, is to read Anglo-authored texts describing comic encounters with Pacific Islanders against the grain, identifying Native agency where the authors might describe only their own confusion. Examining travel narratives’ rhetoric to seek Native Pacific Islanders’ comic power is a useful corrective to prevailing accounts of the Pacific that, as Dvorak puts it, write “off Pacific Islanders and Pacific places as the inevitable, sad, hapless victims or bulldozed landscapes of wars, colonialism, weapons testing, or sea-level rise.”7 Interpreting Native Pacific Islanders’ humor in these (highly mediated) texts while highlighting Euro-American misunderstandings of it can help reframe power relations at moments of contact from unilateral domination to complex exchange. It is also important to recover Native Pacific Islanders’ 164  A Laughable Empire

humor because, as Paul Lyons has noted, “Oceanian humor, so fundamental to Island life, is one of the most telling casualties of Pacificist discourses.”8 Similarly, William E. Mitchell notes that South Pacific “clowning as a laughter-inducing event” has been “seldom considered” in the field of anthropology.9 In the first section of this chapter, I seek to recover and reframe Native Pacific Islanders’ humor in travel narratives to highlight Native resiliency, intercultural awareness, and cultural autonomy. In the chapter’s second section, I consider moments in travel narratives in which Euro-American authors express appreciation of Indigenous Pacific Islanders’ humor and engage in moments of shared laughter. Then, in this book’s conclusion, I offer some additional methodologies for studying Indigenous humor that might be useful for scholars undertaking other projects about humor and empire. “At This They Laughed Exceedingly”: Contact, Comedy, and Resistance in the Imperial Pacific

The problem with trying to recover Native voices and agency in Anglo-authored travel narratives is that travelers necessarily view (and judge) other cultures through the lenses of their own cultures. Thankfully, scholars have leveraged newfound tools to read the nuances of contact that lie just under the surface in travel narratives. Tim Youngs praises developments in research on travel writing that have led scholars “to question the earlier models of imposition and domination and to stress instead processes of negotiation, transculturation and even exploitation by ‘native’ peoples.” Such approaches, Youngs notes, see the complexities of “exchange and contestation” in colonial contact instead of just “compliance, submission and imposition.”10 When scholars eschew pat documentation of domination, they can see in even the most imperial narratives moments in which power is in play and in flux. My inspiration to cull through travel narratives looking for moments of Native Pacific Islanders laughing at confused Westerners derives in part from Nicholas Thomas, who undertakes an oppositional reading of John Hawkesworth’s influential 1773 Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, which was compiled from James Cook’s and Joseph Banks’s journals. Cook had written in his journal about an “odd scene” in Tahiti in 1769: “[A man] above 6 feet high lay with a little Girl about 10 “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  165

or 12 years of age publickly before several of our people and a number of Natives. What makes me mention this, is because, it appear’d to be done more from Custom than Lewdness, for there were several women present particularly Obarea and several others of the better sort and these were so far from shewing the least disapprobation that they instructed the girl how she should act her part, who young as she was, did not seem to want it.” Hawkesworth’s narrative further eroticizes this scene of what would now be considered statutory rape, concocting details for what Thomas calls “rhetorical effect” to play on European stereotypes about Tahitians’ lack of sexual shame. Indeed, Thomas argues, Hawkesworth makes the scene seem normal and unsurprising to its viewers. But, Thomas points out, a 1769 pamphlet by the astronomer William Wales claims that the performance described by Cook and reimagined by Hawkesworth was a put-on, was the “contrivance” of Purea, the Tahitian queen, “and that the island was ransacked to find out two actors.” Thomas builds on this counternarrative to claim that the performance was a mocking parody of white lust and public fornication: “We know,” he writes, “that Islanders frequently performed theatricals of one sort or another, which often included dramatization of contact with the Europeans or satire upon them.” Weighing this and other historical evidence, Thomas concludes, “If we can never finally be certain why this ‘odd Scene’ took place, it does seem most likely that it was not merely Purea’s contrivance, as Wales asserted, but that it contrived a parody of the mariners’ behaviour. It was their custom, not that of the Tahitians, to fuck in public. Purea—who comes across as an astute woman with a sense of humour—was improvising a little performance that drew attention to this gross behaviour.” In Thomas’s reading, then, this “odd scene” of public sex with an underage girl, which so titillated British and American readers and further reified the stereotype of the sensuality of Pacific Islanders, was in fact a mockery of the ridiculousness of British, not Polynesian, lust. Of course, the problem with interpreting humor, especially the comedy of contact zones, is that it is impossible to determine intent with any surety. Making things even more difficult through the haze of history is that, if this was indeed a parody, the white sailors who journaled the incident and the writers who romanticized and disseminated it did not get the joke. Like the sea captain in Queequeg’s story, their ethnocentrism blinded them to the possibility that they could be mocked as inferior by Pacific Islanders. As Thomas puts it, “The Enlightenment sophisticates who thought they were being clever when they used a Tahitian custom to question 166  A Laughable Empire

European morals did not realize that they had been beaten to the game. They could credit Tahitians with innocence, happiness, and sensuality, but not with critical intelligence. They had no idea that mere savages might be satirists, too.”11 Thomas’s astute reading accounts for the ways that ethnocentric prejudice can blunt understandings of satire. It also offers a model for considering competing textual accounts of the same instance of cultural contact that has been severely mediated by imperial assumptions and narrative tropes. Gananath Obeyesekere performs similarly oppositional readings in his chapter “Cannibalism and the Parodic” in Cannibal Talk. There he traces several parodies of European habits and behaviors staged by Pacific Islanders and depicted in “uncomprehending account[s]” by travelers in their journals. He describes parody as a tactic for “dealing with a troubling or incomprehensible situation,” but the very lack of comprehension of these accounts makes them “difficult to recover” because they must be “imaginatively reconstructed.” His method, which he repeats multiple times, is to offer a European account of Māori cannibalism and then to perform a culturally informed close reading of it to demonstrate how the ethnographer’s source is most likely pulling their leg. This is usually evident through moments of ridiculous hyperbole— for instance, claiming that they will use a knee bone as a pipe or a leg bone as a flute—that a little research will reveal does not map to Māori cultural practices. In these accounts, as Obeyesekere explains, “there is internal evidence in its exaggeration of known detail, its forays into wild improbability, and its feigned seriousness that bind the Māori narrator with forms of life that seem to transcend the cultural boundaries that we create to isolate the other as a specimen or a cultural species radically different from our own.” But such evidence has often been ignored by anthropologists due to the very nature of satire. As Jonathan Swift famously put it, “Satire is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their Own, which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it.” For Obeyesekere, so it was and is with Euro-American travelers and the anthropologists who rely on their firsthand accounts. European cannibal discourse preceded and colored European contact with Polynesia, and explorers and scholars have long been so eager to believe and reify the conceptions of that discourse that, as “parodied subject[s],” they assume “humorlessly and pompously the very things the satirist protests against.”12 “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  167

In what follows, I attempt to correct such biases by engaging in “reconstructive criticism,” seeking potential comic agency in travel narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.13 Examples of Native Pacific Islanders’ comic performances, according to Lyons, “pervade the colonial archive.”14 Because I am interested in how humor can both express and diffuse power, how it can either separate or connect peoples, I have read travel narratives about the Pacific with an eye for moments of comic contact in which the writers may not quite see the joke but that we, over two hundred years later, can, or at least should. The Hawaiian concept of kaona might once again be useful in reading Euro-American travelers’ confusion and misunderstandings. Though kaona is a linguistic concept pertaining to hidden meanings and doubleness particular to Hawaiian thought and language, Noelani Aristi has suggested that kaona can also be used as a broader interpretive method, a heuristic for conceptualizing history and culture “in a way that reflects Hawaiian systems of thought and connection and their tolerance and preference for multiplicity in the relation between not only words but also worlds.” Such an approach derives from Hawaiian linguistic structures and epistemologies but can be leveraged to challenge “monoperspectival Euro-American interpretations of contact, colonization, and resistance,” particularly in “reenvisioning moments of understanding and miscommunication in contact situations between continental and oceanic peoples—between New Englanders, Britons, and Hawaiians, for example—and other peoples living oceans apart.”15 In this way, the epistemological spirit of kaona might be leveraged to read Euro-American accounts of contact through a Hawaiian-based comparative perspective. In McDougall’s book on kaona in contemporary Hawaiian literature, she highlights the playfulness of kaona as “fun or entertaining” and likens “the experience of receiving kaona [to] being part of a private joke. To be in on the joke, you would need to have some shared history and experience, some connection, with at least one other person to draw from (of course, it’s also helpful if you and that other person have a similar sense of humor).” Purposeful linguistic ambiguity creates in-group and out-group dynamics through multiple meanings meant for in-group auditors, while out-group audiences can only grasp, at best, one meaning. Those who grasp secondary meanings enjoy “human connections made within shared exclusive spaces” and “feel they are understood and have a sense of belonging.” Out-group auditors might realize that they 168  A Laughable Empire

are missing something, and the “secrecy or exclusivity involved may motivate” them to learn more so as to be included.16 This dynamic is apparent, for example, in the 1792 travel narrative A Voyage to the South Sea, written by the British navigator William Bligh, who is remembered mostly for being commander of the HMS Bounty at the time of its famous mutiny. In it, he recounts a conversation with a Tahitian priest: “He asked me if I had a God? if he had a son? and who was his wife? I told him he had a son but no wife. Who was his father and mother? was the next question. I said he never had father or mother; at this they laughed exceedingly.”17 Here Bligh foregrounds both his perplexity and his status as an object of the Tahitian priest’s laughter at his belief system. For Tahitians and many other Native Pacific Islanders, genealogy was and is exceedingly important; it structures many cultural traditions and beliefs. For this reason, upon hearing of the Englishmen’s parentless God who sired a son without a wife, they “laughed exceedingly” at what to them was a logical impossibility that did not square with their worldview. Their shared laughter affirms their own beliefs at the same time that it mocks Bligh’s. Since this book appears as part of the Humor in America series, let me justify the inclusion of some British examples. Dvorak, in describing the coming together of American studies and Native Pacific studies, explains that the notion of a US Pacific is a geopolitical construct. He writes that, just as we can imagine a US Pacific, “there is also a Japanese Pacific, a British Pacific, a French Pacific, a German Pacific, a Chinese Pacific, and so forth.” Similarly, though the Pacific Ocean spans some twelve thousand miles and features many different cultures, following Epeli Hau‘ofa’s lead to consider Pacific Islanders as “Oceanic Peoples” allows us to see some similarities of kinship across vast spaces.18 When studying the humor and laughter of Native Pacific Islanders at moments of contact, the nationality of the visitors—whether they be American, British, French, and so on—often matters less than the particular Pacific Islanders’ own geopolitical concerns. Another example of Native Pacific Islanders’ laughter at Euro-​ American visitors appears in the British mariner George Mortimer’s 1791 narrative Observations and Remarks Made During a Voyage to the Islands of Teneriffe, Amsterdam . . . , an account of a journey led by the explorer John Henry Cox from 1789 to 1791. Mortimer narrates how, as the exploring party arrived on Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) in 1789, when the third mate tried to initiate communication, the “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  169

islanders imitated his movements exactly and “laughed heartily” before retreating. The next day, this scenario repeated as they conducted trade: “We spent some time in endeavoring to inspire these poor people with confidence; but though they appeared to be very merry, laughing and mimicking our actions, . . . they kept retiring very fast.”19 This combination of mocking mimicry and precipitous retreat amounts to a tactic for dealing with the visitors: the shared laughter creates social cohesion among the Tasmanians by othering the visitors through exaggerated impersonations of their behavior, speech, and manners, while their persistent but temporary retreats are exercises in appropriate caution at the potential danger that the visitors pose. Later that same year, Mortimer’s ship arrived at Tahiti, where they took in a Heiva, a dramatic performance. Though the Tahitian context differs from that of Tonga or Samoa or Mangaia, Mortimer’s account constitutes another entry in the colonial archive of performative ridicule. Mortimer describes the performance in some detail, but his account, like those of so many other travelers to the Pacific, mostly emphasizes his own confusion. He writes: We could not clearly make out the subject of the comedy or farce we saw acted: but it was impossible to mistake the looks and gestures of some of the actors, several of whom were great mimics, and displayed no small share of humour; which had a wonderful effect upon the risible faculties of the audience, who testified their approbation by repeated peals of laughter. I was particularly struck with a droll fellow who had twisted his hair into a variety of whimsical forms during the entertainment; and I took a pencil and piece of paper out of my pocket with an intention to take a sketch of him; but he, having some intimation of what I was about, withdrew the moment he saw me take my eye off him to look at the paper; so that upon lifting up my head again to take another view, I found he was gone. This was reckoned an excellent joke, and met with universal applause; the man repeating it several times at my expence. Indeed, not only in this case, but in several other instances, I observed that we were made the objects of their ridicule; and if they were witnesses of any action of ours on board of ship that appeared to them ludicrous or absurd, they never failed to take notice of it on the stage, with considerable embellishments.20

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In this remarkable passage, Mortimer expresses genuine appreciation for the Tahitians’ humor, even if he does not entirely understand it and even while admitting that it was often at his expense and that he and his fellow sailors were “made the objects of their ridicule.” Despite his confusion, Mortimer’s testimony that Tahitians “never failed to take notice of ” behavior “that appeared to them ludicrous or absurd” offers self-effacing evidence of how Tahitians mined comic material for their performances from their observations of visitors. James Cook’s Voyages expresses a similar confusion over a Native “comedy and dance” that New Zealand Māori invited the crew to witness: “The subject we could not well find out; though we heard frequent mention of Capt. Cook’s name during the performance.”21 Though the narrative refuses to acknowledge it, the “comedy” was probably at the expense Cook and his compatriots. James Oliver’s 1846 narrative Wreck of the Glide: With an Account of Life and Manners at the Fiji Islands describes a reversal of the roles of performers and audience. In it, Oliver’s crew decides to put on a play for their Fijian hosts, dramatizing “the various mishaps that had attended [their] voyage.” The Fijians were at first quiet and confused, Oliver writes: [When] our arrival at the Fijiis was brought forward, and the trafficking and haggling were mimicked by an officer, playing the part of a Fijiian, and a common sailor that of the trading master, . . . our drift was more exactly comprehended, and the progress of the action more eagerly watched. And, when the baffling of the natives’ occasional efforts to cheat us was set forth, the mirror thus being too truthfully held up to nature to be longer mistrusted, the sense of the whole matter flashed upon our audience, like the meaning of the differential calculus on the mind of a student, long perplexed in trying to grasp it, and the Boore [a structure for gatherings] resounded with the spontaneous uproar of savage delight.22 Though Oliver attributes the audience members’ laughter to their recognition of themselves as swindlers in trading, he could not know for sure their true and full reasons for laughter any more than the Fijians could understand the portion of the play that dramatized the Glide’s other travels and travails. Though I, too, am at several removes from this incident—distanced historically, culturally, and by Oliver’s mediating account—it is quite possible that the Fijians were laughing at

“Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  171

the incongruity of a sailor “playing the part of a Fijiian” and the play’s probably clumsy and inaccurate depictions of Fijians and their culture. Oliver describes the play as “very laughable and incitive to laughter,” but it might not be for the reasons he thinks. Travel narratives also abound in instances in which Native Pacific Islanders play practical jokes on Euro-American visitors. For example, in the 1818 Narrative of Voyages and Travels by Amasa Delano (who was later adapted into the haplessly ethnocentric narrator of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno), Delano admits to being hoodwinked by Hawaiians on O‘ahu into eating dog. After remarking to his hosts that he “had a peculiar prejudice against eating these animals,” he was told that he “should not know the difference between a dog and a pig when it was cooked.” The next day, he devoured multiple helpings of what he thought was pork but was, of course, baked dog. After the meal, he reports, “In the course of the afternoon there were many jokes passed on the subject of eating dogs, till at last I began to suspect there had some trick been played upon me. After inquiring into the affair, they satisfied me that what I had made so hearty a meal of was a dog. It caused me some disagreeable sensation for the moment, and I was a little angry; but on reflection, and seeing my comrades make themselves merry at my expense, I thought it was the most prudent way to turn it off with a laugh.”23 In this case, Delano’s Hawaiian hosts take advantage of their own generous hospitality in preparing meals for Delano to trick him into partaking of their customs and laughing at his ignorance of this fact. By attempting to “turn it off with a laugh,” Delano seeks to disarm the ridicule by making their laughter shared in a gesture of goodwill. A similar “What did I eat?”–style practical joke—but with larger stakes—plays out in “A Voyage to the Fijiis,” published serially in the Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu) in seventeen weekly installments between December 1868 and April 1869. In it, a Fijian noble named Thaukanauto, who mostly goes by “Phillips” (in what follows, I use his Native name), consistently sees humor in and makes merry over the narrator’s fear of and disgust at cannibalism. The series is a mostly serious, occasionally sensational travel narrative about the narrator’s sojourn to Fiji on a merchant ship, seeking biche de mer and tortoise shells to sell in the Manila market. In attempting to draw in readers, the account takes pains to emphasize the dangers of cannibalism in its first paragraph: “The trade with those islands, at the time of which I am about to speak, was extra hazardous, on account of the savage character of the inhabitants. They 172  A Laughable Empire

were savages, in every sense of the word—barbarous, cruel, treacherous, and thorough cannibals. Yet the trade was a very profitable one, and although several vessels had been cut off, and their crews massacred and eaten, yet the Salem merchants did not abandon the trade.”24 The author here uses many of the words associated with prevailing notions of Pacific savagery—“savages” (twice), “barbarous, cruel, treacherous and thorough cannibals,” and “massacred and eaten”—as a linguistic shorthand both signaling to the reader the dangers to be described in ensuing installments and tapping into a storehouse of stereotypes familiar to readers from other narratives. As in Melville’s Typee, these descriptions build tension for adventures that the author may relate in future installments; such suspense is necessary to retaining readers’ interest in the serialized narrative. But the author may also be straining to make clear a distinction between the Natives and dangers in and of Fiji and those in and of Hawai‘i. Since the series is advertised in the subheading of each entry as “Written for the Gazette,” the author assumes an Anglo-Hawaiian audience, offering throughout the series depictions of Fijian landscape, customs, and Natives through comparison to their counterparts in Hawai‘i. From the paper’s founding in 1865 until it turned to private hands in 1873, the English-language Hawaiian Gazette served as the “official government voice” of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.25 The paper therefore had an interest in accounts making Hawai‘i appear “civilized” in comparison to other Pacific islands. The Gazette articulates its particular interest in the “savage” elements of “A Voyage to the Fijiis” in its notice of a similar narrative published in another newspaper, the Australian, justifying its decision not to reprint that account because of its similarity to the still-running “A Voyage to the Fijiis,” aside from its lack of sensational accounts of cannibalism. The article, “Later News from the Fiji Islands,” reports, “although our readers generally have frequently expressed their interest in the perusal of the series of articles from a contributor entitled ‘A Voyage to the Fijiis,’ yet we cannot devote too much space to that distant though interesting archipelago. The correspondent of the Australia does not differ materially in his description of the country and habits of the people, from that given by our contributor, except that there appears to be less danger to be apprehended from the now semi civilized savages, and that cannibalism is not mentioned.”26 For the Gazette, then, cannibalism equals interest and determines which narratives receive space in its columns. Such admissions evince how editors, even those located in Hawai‘i, “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  173

through their decisions of what to print and reprint, helped to disseminate and reify preexisting stereotypes of savagery and assumptions of Pacific Islanders’ cannibalism and otherness. The consistent unease, disgust at Native barbarity, and occasional hair’s-breath escapes of “A Voyage to the Fijiis” narrator are, for the most part, anything but jocose. But its occasional moments of comic relief are almost all about cannibalism, with a Fijian Native laughing at the narrator’s fear of it. Though the narrator never witnesses Thaukanauto take any part in cannibal feasts, Thaukanauto consistently makes merry over the narrator’s disgust at cannibalism. Thaukanauto—whose nickname, “Phillips,” and relative fluency in English imply his status as a cultural mediator between Fijians and white traders—exerts his power over the narrator and other whites by playing on their cultural naïveté. For instance, when the narrator worries over his pork at a dinner, thinking it “possible that they might attempt to smuggle on [him and other visitors] some of their horrible food,” Thaukanauto takes advantage of his squeamishness: “Phillips came near turning my stomach, by remarking, in good English, ‘I would rather have a piece of baked man, than the best pig that ever squeaked.’ ”27 Unlike in the passage from Delano’s narrative, the confusion is not between pig meat and dog meat but between pig meat and human meat. And unlike in Delano’s narrative, the joke is merely verbal and, presumably, not practical. Instead, Thaukanauto, who understands his visitors’ cultural norms and their abhorrence of cannibalism, merely mocks the narrator for his unease and outsider status. As the narrative continues, the narrator on multiple occasions describes himself as the butt of cannibalistic humor. At one point, the narrator describes “a crowd of boys, of all ages, from three or four years up to thirteen or fourteen, dragging after them the dead body of a man, to the legs of which was attached a rope. Some, armed with clubs, were running behind, and every now and then struck the body about the shoulders and thighs.” When the narrator asks Thaukanauto the meaning of such brutality, Thaukanauto replies, dryly, “Oh . . . that is to make him tender.” This punch line mocks the narrator’s, and readers’, notions about savagery and civilization. What the narrator perceives as the wanton cruelty of “children dragging a dead body through the streets of a town, bravely banging it with clubs amidst the admiring plaudits of their fathers and mothers” Thaukanauto redescribes as the careful preparation of a gourmand.28 Whether the children’s actions constitute adroit tenderizing or cruelly beating a dead person with sticks is in 174  A Laughable Empire

the eye of the beholder. In each of Thaukanauto’s humorous replies, he, though serving as a cultural guide and translator, toys with the narrator by playing on his inability to discern what is happening and on his disgust with cannibalism. Cannibalistic humor takes another odd twist in the next installment, when the narrator and Thaukanauto go far inland to visit a community with little to no previous contact with white visitors. The Natives there respond with abject fear at the narrator’s approach. He reports, “As the younger of the children caught sight of the white faces—probably for the first time in their lives—they screamed with terror, and ran as if for their lives, hiding in the bush or disappearing among the houses, whence they peeped at us as we passed.” Once again, the narrator looks to Thaukanauto to explain Fijians’ unaccountable behavior, and again Thaukanauto chuckles at his naïveté: “Phillips told me, with a laugh that it was the custom of the native women to tell their children that white men were very fond of broiled baby.”29 This reversal pins cannibalism on white interlopers instead of Natives; Thaukanauto turns it into a joke through the specificity of “broiled baby” and the physical humor of the mass hysteria that the whites’ visit has caused. Here it is the Fijians, not the white traders, who are afraid of the cannibal other. Thaukanauto is once again at the center of it all as a cultural translator, and his knowing laugh implies the knowledge that these backcountry Fijians’ fears are, to a certain extent, justified. Thaukanauto yet again mocks the narrator’s cultural misreadings later in “Number Twelve,” when the narrator sees a canoe on which he “observed something that looked like a man lying on his back on the raised platform and observed to Phillips, that perhaps that was the chief, asleep.” Thaukanauto responds risibly: “He laughed merrily, and replied, ‘Yes, he sleep; long time, too. I no tink he wake up very soon.’ And then he burst out laughing again at his own wit. At length he explained that what I had seen was the dead body of one of the Mbenga chiefs, who had escaped to the mountains at the time of the sacking of the town but had since been captured and killed. They were taking it to the king, as a most acceptable present, and as a means of prolonging their horrid orgies.”30 Thaukanauto, in agreeing, “Yes, he sleep; long time, too,” ironically accepts and extends the narrator’s mistaken perception before “at length” explaining the situation. When he “burst[s] out laughing at his own wit,” Thaukanauto acts as both joke teller and audience. The joke seems to have two butts: the dead Mbenga chief, who will not “wake up very soon,” and the narrator, “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  175

who for a second time has mistaken a dead body (that may or may not be eaten) for a resting one. In this case, cannibalism does not enter the picture until the joke has ended and Thaukanauto offers a full explanation. Thaukanauto has again exerted his superiority over the narrator in the fields of cultural knowledge and accurate perception. And yet Thaukanauto still serves as a bilingual intermediary between the narrator’s party and Fijian culture. He maintains this status in part by eschewing the “cannibal orgies,” “notwithstanding he had so often bragged to [the narrator] of his fondness for the taste of human flesh.” The narrator is not sure if this is because he is a good host or because he is partly “civilized”: “He devoted himself entirely to the mate and his party (of which I was one) and seemed to be very solicitous to amuse and make us comfortable. Whether this was from want of inclination to join the horrible saturnalia of his countrymen, or out of compliment to us, I cannot say, but he treated our party very kindly.”31 One answer may be that Thaukanauto wants to recruit the narrator to himself be a cultural intermediary. In the last few installments of the travel narrative, Thaukanauto announces that he has taken a liking to the narrator and tries to convince him to slip away from his ship and remain in Fiji. Indeed, it is at this point—in “Number Thirteen,” when Thaukanauto convinces the narrator to abscond from the ship—that Thaukanauto finally lets him in on his jokes about cannibalism. In this installment, the narrator and Thaukanauto meet one of the latter’s subjects, a white beachcomber who had run away from a ship a few years earlier. This beachcomber has come to Thaukanauto to complain that his wife (a Native woman he calls “Moll”) had run away from him temporarily. Thaukanauto is unimpressed with this beachcomber and tells the narrator that the man is a “d——d fool” who “don’t know how keep a woman.” Thaukanauto pulls the narrator aside and says, “You see,” he says, “I make him scare,” before pulling an elaborate practical joke playing on threats of sacrifice and cannibalism. He tells the beachcomber that, since he and his wife “could not live together comfortably and quietly,” he had “given orders to have her cooked for dinner, as being the best use he could put her to! The oven, he declared, was being then heated for this purpose.”32 The beachcomber, who has lived with Thaukanauto’s tribe for years, fully believes in the feasibility of this threat. Having reduced the beachcomber to “tears and entreaties,” Thaukanauto lets him beg for Moll’s life and then “did not utter a word” for a few minutes, with “a very stern look on his face.” But, during this critical, 176  A Laughable Empire

high-tension moment, Thaukanauto was “occasionally giving [the narrator] a sly wink,” thus keeping him in on the joke and assuring him of his benign intentions. Finally, Thaukanauto says to the beachcomber, “Well, I no eat him [Moll] this time, but spose you come again and make talk about that woman, I knock him [Moll] on the head, sure.” The beachcomber leaves without ever being let in on the joke, which it seems has been played for Thaukanauto’s and the narrator’s own amusement, as well as for a show of chiefly power. After they leave, Thaukanauto “rolled over and over on the mats, laughing very heartily and saying, ‘Didn’t I scare that fellow, eh? He big fool.’ ”33 Here Thaukanauto finds humor in frightening another white émigré, just as he had previously done to the narrator. It seems, then, that the narrator has graduated to a new status in Fiji, one that gets him “in” on jokes that mock whites’ fear of and misunderstandings about cannibalism instead of being the butt or target of such jokes. In including the narrator on this joke and excluding the beachcomber, Thaukanauto deliberately uses what Moira Smith has called “unlaughter” to “heighten exclusionary social boundaries” and perform political power. Smith stresses unshared laughter’s role in constructing “exclusion.” Smith argues, “Shared laughter enhances solidarity, and accompanying unlaughter from those who are outsiders or marginal only magnifies this effect.” Unlaughter thus becomes a deliberate strategy by “well-integrated individuals” in a community; they “provoke it” at the expense of “marginal group members,” who “become the repeated butts of targeted jokes precisely because they are marginal.”34 In this case, Thaukanauto seeks to express “solidarity” with the narrator by cueing him into the joke while demonstrating to the beachcomber his continued marginality within their community. For the narrator and the story’s readers, violence remains a real possibility even alongside knowing Fijian laughter. In this and all the aforementioned instances, Thaukanauto’s laughter and his extended jokes about cannibalism are very much about exercising power over the powerful visitors to his island. Even if the narrator were to settle with him (he does not; his attempted escape from his ship is thwarted, and he eventually sails for home), this last episode with the beachcomber shows that Thaukanauto intends to retain control of when, where, how, and to whom insider status, and the safety of laughter, is given. In doing so, he uses humor to exert power over a potential colonizer and redraws lines between their cultures that their commercial partnership has threatened to ease or erase. “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  177

In describing the importance of Indigenous humor in a different but related context, the American Indian Movement in the twentieth-​ century United States, Vine Deloria Jr. characterizes humor as “the cement by which the coming Indian movement is held together. When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anything drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive.”35 For Deloria in the context of Native and Euro-American relations, as for the Indigenous Pacific Islanders described in the travel narratives analyzed here, humor is power, a method of survivance. I do not know to what extent any of the anecdotes I have discussed are true, made up, or somewhere in between, a mélange of fact and fiction that Neil Rennie has characterized as the “far-fetched facts” of the “South Seas.”36 Scholars must, of course, read these sources with skepticism, even suspicion. Nevertheless, examining these narratives’ rhetoric to seek Native Pacific Islanders’ comic agency remains a useful counter to scholarly accounts that emphasize only Euro-American domination and Native victimhood. Even reading into Euro-American travel writers’ confusion about what they are witnessing can be productive. The historian Joseph Boskin, in an essay on the Sambo character and other African American comic stereotypes, stresses the counteragency of “the stereotyped, particularly those who are locked into a comic role.” He explores the possibility of comic “revenge through a complexity of words, body language, and physical disguises,” as well as the prospect of “role-reversal whereby the stereotyped ascribe to the oppressor the same negative features being used against them.” Such reversals, Boskin explains, are usually undertaken “in a furtive manner, in a code that is beyond comprehension by those in authority.”37 Scholars, then, can read travel narratives seeking the comprehension that their authors either could not or refused to gain, all while copping to our own relative ignorance and incomprehension. Efforts to highlight Indigenous Pacific Islanders’ agency through their comic triumphs, as I have attempted to do here, are not without their dangers: such interpretations might reflect, and recursively reinforce, unconscious ethnocentrism. As the historian Nolelani Arista points out in her history of the relationship between Hawai‘i and the United States in the nineteenth century, even well-intentioned “revisionist work’s emphasis on restoring ‘agency’ to Hawaiian historical actors carries another risk: the unreflective use of Western historiographical 178  A Laughable Empire

paradigms, tropes, and plots in telling histories of culturally Othered peoples.”38 This is a trap that scholars must seek to avoid when reading imperial narratives against the grain. How else, then, might those who study American humor and empire avoid repeating the ethnocentric and imperial impulses of historiography? One potential approach is to reread Euro-American-authored travel narratives with any eye for something slightly different: moments in which Euro-American travelers write to express their appreciation of Pacific Islanders’ humor, associating their risibility with intelligence and intercultural acumen. “We Could Enter into the Spirit of His Wit and Humour”

Identifying and analyzing moments of shared laughter and Western visitors’ recognition of Native Pacific Islanders’ senses of humor can destabilize prevailing “histories of encounter,” which, as Arista notes, “tend to emphasize fatal impacts, worlds colliding, with contention and conflict defining the interpretation of events.” Cultural histories can benefit from rereading encounters as, instead, a “confluence of worlds, where the mixing of numerous languages, social practices, and ways of defining life works fluidly.” Doing so, according to Arista, “highlights what occurs when people from different meaning-making systems engage with one another” and the important historical effects that “moments of understanding and misunderstanding” generate.39 Through shared laughter, members of both sides of an encounter express their intentions (benign or otherwise), their mutual bewilderment, and their reciprocal realizations of the constructedness of their own epistemologies. Such moments in Euro-American-authored travel narratives resist the notion of contact as unilateral domination, even when they occur in texts whose larger project is precisely such domination. Kim Leilani Evans, in an essay on the mutual laughter of contact, claims that “ ‘laughing with’ a stranger over strangeness is a legitimate interaction, where the connection is (awkward, mutual) misconnection that serves a purpose.”40 Following Evans’s insight, scholars should look for recorded moments not just when Pacific Islanders laugh at white visitors but also when they laugh with them. James Caron’s distinction between the ludicrous and the ridiculous is useful here. For Caron, something that is ridiculous “laughs at its object, indicates emotional distance and potential antagonism,” whereas something that is ludicrous “laughs with its object, indicates emotional proximity with a measure “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  179

of tolerance and sympathy.” If the ridiculous “produces a comic laughter designed with the potential to improve its object,” the ludicrous “produces a comic laughter designed to tolerate and even appreciate the object as it is.” Hence, the ridiculous is associated with satiric critique, and the ludicrous, in its accepting appreciation of the “humorous eccentricities” of “comic characters,” is aligned with humor.41 In comic practice, of course, the ludicrous and the ridiculous tend to intermingle promiscuously. But, in many cases of cultural contact, laughing at the sheer irrationality of the interaction lays bare each side’s ways of knowing and how they previously thought knowing worked, making all parties more open to competing epistemologies while more skeptical of surety in their own. This realization is often funny, as theorized by the ontic-​ epistemic theory of humor articulated by Peter George Marteinson.42 When the joke that cultural norms are just norms, and entirely variable, is understood by all, that joke becomes shared and can relieve the tension of contact. The laugh here is not, or not just, at the other; it is at the other’s norms, one’s own norms, and the very fact of being committed to any norms at all. Shared laughter, even at the impossibility of clear communication, clears the way for understanding and exchange. As an example, Evans points to a Māori account of Banks’s visit to New Zealand: “They stood and talked to us, or they uttered the words of their language. Perhaps they were asking questions, and, as we did not know their language, we laughed, and these goblins also laughed, so we were pleased.” Later in this same narrative, the Māori once again see the comedy of incomplete communication, recalling how Banks and his crew “made much gabbling noise in talking”: “We thought [it] was questions regarding our mats and the sharks’ teeth we wore in our ears, . . . but as we could not understand them we laughed, and they laughed also.” Moments like these show the Māori ready and willing to conceive of their visitors’ difference from them as relative to their own probable difference in their visitors’ eyes. It is a cosmopolitan relativism built into Māori epistemology that could see and accept otherness at contact. Evans writes, “Not to say that no Māori ever laughed at a European, but foolish foreigners were not disqualified by the humor they aroused. Their ridiculousness was fed, housed—entertained by the imagination. It was given the space to find connection—even through absurdity, even through difference.” Evans argues that the unease of contact with the other does not, or should not, simply reify other groups because they are nonnormative. Rather, “The reaction to otherness that inevitably, 180  A Laughable Empire

uncomfortably throws us back upon ourselves, forces us to pay attention to ourselves as knowers, is often controlled by a joke. Laughing at something reduces its power over you.”43 Similarly, passages in Anglo-authored travel narratives in which visitors express appreciation of the comic acuity of Pacific Islanders can reveal surprising undercurrents in these narratives that destabilize prevalent notions of cultural difference and inferiority that are often used to justify imperial and missionary projects. For instance, Delano takes pains in his Narrative to praise “Abba Thulle, the king” in Palau as “a most sportive and delightful companion.” In doing so, Delano frames Abba Thulle’s good humor as emblematic of effective leadership qualities. He writes, “He was distinguished for his pleasantry in the hours of relaxation in his house, or among his friends, as he was terrible in the field, able in council, and sagacious in morals. . . . Our officers and myself have often seen him, in the flow of good feeling and good nature, make amusement for himself, the women, and us, without the least offence to any individual.”44 In this description, Delano suggests that intercultural amiability based in part on humor is key to diplomacy and maintaining fruitful relationships between Pacific Islanders and American visitors. That certainly appears to be true in this case, as the context of these remarks is Delano’s second visit to Palau after initial contact in 1798. But just as important to this account as Abba Thulle’s good humor is Delano’s openness to it. Delano writes, “We had become so much acquainted with the language, that we could enter into the spirit of his wit and humour, and were able to find new sources of admiration for his character in his moments of the greatest levity.”45 Though their exchange is multiply mediated through Delano’s translation as well as his own memory and self-portrayal, the fact that Delano locates his “admiration” for Abbe Thulle “in his moments of the greatest levity” shows the power of humor and laughter to connect across cultures, even as it can sometimes be used to reify cultural difference. Unlike Delano’s fictional namesake, whose unshakeable ethnocentrism blinds him to the truth of a slave revolt in Melville’s Benito Cereno, Delano in his 1818 narrative learns Abba Thulle’s language so that he may understand “the spirit of his wit and humour” more or less on its own terms. Familiarity with a native language especially opens up potential understanding of linguistic aspects of humor and the accompanying cultural norms encoded in wordplay. This is apparent in Rev. John Williams’s 1837 Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South “Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  181

Sea Islands. Though Williams was British and his account originally published in London, his narrative was popular in the United States, and the anecdote that he told as “an example of [the Pacific Islanders’] wit and humour” was probably familiar to American audiences, having been reprinted at least thirty-one times in newspapers, magazines, and jest books between 1838 and 1879. (See chapter 2 for an in-depth study of this joke.) In praising Pacific Islanders’ senses of humor, he singles out wordplay: “Of the pun they are very fond, and use it frequently. I could give numerous examples of this: but the point of such witticisms is so much blunted by translation, that I think I should not do their authors justice by presenting them to the English reader.”46 Williams’s point about Pacific Islanders’ humor being “so much blunted by translation” parallels McDougall’s lament about misguided studies of translations of the Hawaiian creation chant the Kumulipo. McDougall writes, “Translations are never exact linguistic, cultural, or transnational transactions, though they simulate exactness. As translations are often the only means through which nonspeakers may interact with Hawaiian-language texts, the biases within English translations of Hawaiian literature and analysis can be invisible to readers unfamiliar with Hawai‘i’s colonial history and politics.”47 For similar reasons, it seems, Williams declines even to attempt translation of the puns he so values. Instead, he assures his readers that Pacific Islanders’ wordplay is evidence of their cleverness and intelligence. In doing so, Williams questions not only stereotypes about Pacific Islanders’ alleged inferiority to Europeans but also the criteria by which such stereotypes are created. Williams muses: It will depend, however, upon the standard by which we measure intellectual capacity, whether we pronounce the South Sea Islanders inferior to other races. . . . If wit, ingenuity, quickness of perception, a tenacious memory, a thirst for knowledge when its value is perceived, a clear discernment and high appreciation of the useful; readiness in acquiring new and valuable arts; great precision of force in the expression of their thoughts, and occasional bursts of eloquence of a high order, be evidence of intellect, I hesitate not to affirm, that, in these, the South Sea Islander does not rank below the European: and that many of them would, if they possessed equal advantages, rise to the same eminence as the literary and scientific men of our own land.48

182  A Laughable Empire

“Wit” is only one ingredient in Williams’s characterization of Pacific Islanders’ capabilities, but the fact that this evaluation appears in a section of his narrative titled “Polynesian Wit and Humor; Their Proverbs; Their Good Sense” shows just how connected “Polynesian wit and humor” was, for Williams anyway, with “their good sense.” Just as important, if we trust his self-reporting, Williams, like Delano, was willing to put in the cultural and linguistic work to learn to appreciate these qualities. For Williams, appreciating Pacific Islanders’ wit is a way for visitors to understand and temporarily immerse themselves in another culture through aesthetic experience. In the essay “He huaka’i ma Hā’ena,” Gregory Clark and Chelle Pahinui consider the community-building possibilities of the aesthetic, which, they argue, “works to provide diverse people with a common experience” by “communicating identity” in a way that “offers an opportunity to experience that agreement by inhabiting with others at least for a moment a common identity.”49 In order to achieve that momentary cultural identification, Williams must suspend his ethnocentrism. As a missionary, of course, Williams’s ultimate goal was not so much to understand and celebrate Pacific cultures as to convert Pacific Islanders to Christianity. But in spite of, or maybe because of, his professional and religious directive, Williams’s narrative exhibits a surprising cognizance of cultural relativity in its comparative ethnography. Williams writes, “It is a remarkable fact, that almost every race thinks itself the wisest. While in the pride of mental superiority, civilized nations look upon barbarous tribes as almost destitute of intellect, these cherish the same sentiments towards them; and even Britons have not been exempted from degrading representations. . . . With the South Sea Islanders, it is common to say, when they see a person exceedingly awkward, ‘How stupid you are; perhaps you are an Englishman.’ ”50 Williams’s willingness to record an islander’s comic insult about his countrymen, and to use it as an example of all peoples’ ethnocentrism, displays both his and these Pacific Islanders’ relative recognition of both the complexities of cultural contact and the usefulness of shared laughter in demystifying it. But, just as I closed this chapter’s previous section by enumerating the possible pitfalls of seeking Indigenous agency through identifying moments when Pacific Islanders laugh at Westerners, let me end this section with a blunt admission that analyzing Westerners’ appreciation of Pacific Islanders’ humor has potential dangers as well. First, in

“Didn’t Our People Laugh?”  183

highlighting moments of comic communication and mutual respect in travel narratives, we run the risk of naïvely eliding these narratives’ overarching imperial, mercantile, religious, scientific, and/or self-promoting purposes. In other words, because we only have one side of the story, we might falsely celebrate figures like Delano and Williams as “good guys,” thus occluding or excusing the systems of domination and exploitation that structured and funded their travel and framed their subsequent descriptions of it. Second, it might simply be too optimistic to assume that comic cooperation necessarily led to equal cultural exchange and mutually positive outcomes. After all, it did not turn out so well for Williams, who in 1839 visited a part of the Vanuatu islands where he was unknown and was killed and allegedly devoured by Natives. To quote a popular cannibal joke from later in the century, “Ah, that missionary was certainly a good fellow!”51 For this reason, I want to be clear that the methodologies I have experimented with in this chapter come with caveats. But even so, they remain useful heuristics for reading Euro-American-authored, otherwise empire-building narratives for moments of mutual admiration and fruitful communication based in part on comic exchange. Instances of Native Pacific Islanders laughing at Euro-American explorers and of those explorers appreciating Native Pacific Islanders’ humor do not constitute major tropes of pre-1900 European and American travel writings about the Pacific world. On the contrary, the examples analyzed in this chapter are traces that I specifically looked for, pulled out of those narratives, and re-presented alongside each other in the context of this book. But something interesting happens with such de- and recontextualization. Though overall these narratives tend to commodify and exoticize Pacific islands and their inhabitants, the moments that present and/or celebrate Native Pacific Islanders’ laughter seem to waver, if only momentarily, in the narratives’ ethnocentrism as the authors at least partially and temporarily see themselves from the Islanders’ points of view. Whether these writers and their compatriots get the joke or not, realizing that they are its butt forces them to recognize, if not fully authorize, a competing epistemology. In this way, these moments offer a curious string to pull at that threatens to undo the whole calico of the cultural superiority that many of these narratives were authored to assert.

184  A Laughable Empire

Conclusion Our story is serious our literature is serious our commitment is serious. Let us take them seriously let us be careful not to take ourselves seriously. —Chantal Spitz (translated by Jean Anderson), “let’s pull in our nets”

Building on the work of chapter 5, which considers the promise and pitfalls of reading Euro-American travel narratives against the grain, I want to conclude A Laughable Empire by suggesting a few other methodologies and models for conducting responsible scholarship on humor and empire. Though the tactics I offer stem from my work with nineteenth-​ century humor about and by Native Pacific Islanders, these approaches are intended to be applicable to other contexts of Indigenous humors. In developing these strategies, I build on the insights of other scholars working in the field of Pacific studies. The historian Gary Okihiro, in Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States, for instance, provides one inspiring model. Instead of proceeding, as most histories do, by recounting the United States’ effects on Hawai‘i, Okihiro reverses the object and subject in a counternarrative that instead studies “the Islands’ press against the continent, causing it to move and endowing it, accordingly, with historical meaning.”1 Another historian, David A. Chang in The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, similarly reorients the relationship between Kānaka Maoli and the rest of the world, situating them not as “passive objects of that exploration” but rather as “active agents of global exploration.” For Chang, nineteenth-century Hawaiian concepts of “global geography” mitigated how they as well as “their would-be colonizers understood and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism.”2 The spirit of Okihiro’s and Chang’s scholarly projects can be applied to humor studies as well; though part of this book’s job has been to analyze the political meaning and valence of humor about the Pacific and Pacific Islanders

in relation to US politics, the mere act of considering the reverse—that is, the cultural and political value of Pacific Islanders’ humor about American, European, and Asian visitors—puts them on equal footing as objects of political and cultural study. One tactic for producing nuanced scholarship about humor and empire is, quite simply, to seek out, read, quote, and cite Indigenous scholars. In chapter 5 and throughout this book, I have attempted to highlight and give credit to recent scholarship undertaken by Native Pacific Islanders. The burgeoning field of Native Pacific Studies works to counter traditional Pacific studies’ longtime tendency treat Native Pacific Islanders as subjects in ways that minimize their voices and deny them agency.3 By consciously seeking to intermingle the voices of Native Pacific scholars with my own arguments and insights, I have tried to avoid what Brandy Nālani McDougall has described as the tendency for “Indigenous expertise and specialized knowledge” to be “boldly dismissed, denied, and exploited.”4 Eschewing such exploitation sometimes means resisting the urge to foreground our own voices in scholarly conversations. For instance, because scholars such as Vilsoni Hereniko and Caroline Sinavaiana have already done impressive work on clowning, parody, and satiric performances that ridicule Euro-​American visitors, I decided not to take up these topics in chapter 5 of this book; instead, I invite you to read their work.5 Alternatively, when working in similar territory, it is important to give credit to Native Pacific Islander scholars who have laid the groundwork for extensions of their studies. In seeking to learn from the work of Native Pacific Islanders, we should also be willing to expand our definitions of scholarly genres. Researchers in oceanic studies do not limit their scholarship to the familiar genres of academic articles and monographs; indeed, important ideas also inhere in research conducted and presented by Native Pacific Islanders through genres such as creative writing, journalism, speech writing, and other forms that trouble standard Euro-American definitions of scholarly work. For instance, McDougall’s book Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature intersperses her own poetry with scholarly readings of Hawaiian literary works in order to blur “lines between the genres of critical and creative writing, as creative writing can be critical, presenting astute and complex analyses in the same way that critical writing can be poetic, using figuration and analogy to deepen the complexity of an argument or claim.”6 Seeking out and celebrating such work produced by Native Pacific Islander 186  A Laughable Empire

scholars and activists not only amplifies their voices but also enriches and expands the scope of everyone’s work. A second tactic for conducting responsible scholarship on Indigenous humor involves focusing on depictions of transcultural figures who operate and mediate between two worlds. The comedy of cultural clashes that these characters embody can tell us about how different cultures view each other. Melville’s Queequeg, in Yunte Huang’s reading, is one such figure, no longer quite a Pacific Islander or a New Englander in his ridiculously composite dress. Huang also studies the happa haole (part-European, part-Hawaiian) translator Bill Ragsdale, whom Mark Twain remembers fondly in his writings on Hawai‘i and whose mischievous translations in the Hawaiian legislature I discuss in this book’s introduction.7 Another example is Marnoo, the “taboo man” in Melville’s Typee; moving easily among the competing groups of the Typee, the Happar, and the French, Marnoo remains protected in and by his multiple cultural fluencies. As Tommo describes Marnoo’s visit to the Typee valley, “He had a word for everybody; and, turning rapidly from one to another, gave utterance to some hasty witticism, which was sure to be followed by peals of laughter. To the females, as well as to the men, he addressed his discourse. Heaven only knows what he said to them, but he caused smiles and blushes to mantle their ingenuous faces.”8 Marnoo’s easy comic charm offers him a passport into the societies of warring tribes as well as the French imperialists encamped in the port. The Euro-American beachcombers who populate Melville’s and others’ accounts of the Pacific can also be examined as intermediaries between Euro-American and Native Pacific cultures. Studying the comic elements of literary depictions of characters who straddle societies and epistemologies can offer insights into both worlds and those worlds’ interactions with each other, as mediated by these adventurers. A third tactic for offering responsibly revisionist scholarship on Indigenous humor and culture involves uncovering and countering the cultural misreadings of Euro-American witnesses to Indigenous cultures, revisiting and correcting the mistakes of comic commentators and the scholars who write about them. One example of corrective rereading of Pacific history is Noelani Arista’s The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States, which retells the story of changing Hawaiian laws during the 1820s. Arista draws from Hawaiian-​language sources to reconstruct this time period and Conclusion  187

castigates previous historians for trusting and reifying the “erroneous perceptions of the captains and sailors who blamed the New England missionaries” for forcing Hawaiian leaders to ban women from going aboard foreign ships. In fact, as Arista shows, it was the ali‘i (chiefs) who “recognized the need to adopt kānāwai, or written and published law in the islands as the best way to control and discipline foreigners behaving badly on Hawaiian soil.”9 In identifying and explaining how sailors’ misperceptions were unreflectively repeated by historians of Hawai‘i, Arista corrects the record and restores the historical power and influence of the chiefs who regulated foreign trade in nineteenth-​century Hawai‘i with their own interests in mind. Such corrective rereadings, as well as the other tactics I outline in this conclusion, participate in what Huang has labeled “counterpoetics,” which I reference both in this book’s introduction and in chapter 4. Scholars of humor should read (and, when necessary, reread or read between the lines of) comic moments that, in Huang’s words, “invoke minority survival” in and against imperial narratives.10 A fruitful example of corrective rereading from the field of humor studies is James Caron’s reinterpretation of Mark Twain’s misunderstanding of a performance of hula that he attended while in Hawai‘i in 1866. Caron does so in order to explain, in part, Twain’s “centric position” in critiquing the hypocrisy of some American missionaries while at times echoing their moral judgments on Hawaiian cultural practices. Caron does this through a deeply historicized reading of hula in nineteenth-​ century Hawai‘i and the lens through which Clemens viewed it. As Caron demonstrates, when Twain in his newspaper correspondence condemns the hula “on moral grounds” as “lascivious,” he is following other Western viewers in referring only to one type of hula dance, the hula ma’i, which features sexual themes. The other types of hula that Clemens watched in the performance he either misinterpreted or did not label as hula at all. This mistake led him to “fail to appreciate the aesthetic of hula” and, as a result, to “misunderstand the hula’s political dimensions,” particularly how Hawaiian chiefs ordered and oversaw performances of hula in the nineteenth century as “a way to assert their own power against the influence of the American missionaries.” Caron’s reading shows that Clemens’s misunderstandings are important because they are self-​perpetuating: they are derived from his preconceptions based on other Westerners’ previous accounts, which Twain re-creates and recirculates in his own writing. His misinterpretation also prevents 188  A Laughable Empire

Twain from seeing Native agency in Native cultural practices; that is, instead of noting political autonomy and cultural self-​preservation in the performance, he aims for comedy by mocking the mele chants as “howling” and “unearthly caterwauling.”11 As Caron’s historicized corrective shows, unpacking how Euro-American comedians’ humor springs from misperceptions (whether willful or naïve) can be useful in understanding their ethnocentrism as well as Pacific Islanders’ agency and the fraught cultural exchanges between the two. It is quite possible that Twain misinterpreted the hula he witnessed because he missed its kaona and focused only on the surface-level meanings he felt confident that he understood. Unlike Indigenous Hawaiians at the performance, he lacked knowledge of the “potential for kaona” in the first place. But, as McDougall points out, “Knowing that kaona is a possibility is just the beginning. The audience must also be willing and able to trace connections in order to understand the allusions, allegories, analogies, symbolism, and figuration within kaona. If the audience is able to complete this meaning-making process by receiving the kaona in this way, then ‘the spirit’ of kaona connectivity is shared among the audience members and the composer of kaona.” There are, of course, dangers in applying the concept of kaona as an interpretive strategy, as I do in chapter 5 of this book, where I draw on McDougall’s analogy to inside jokes to explain kaona and Euro-American travelers’ confusion and potential misinterpretations of Pacific Islanders’ communications with and about them. McDougall makes that analogy, she says, in order to “explain the practice of kaona to a wide audience,” but she writes, “I must also be somewhat exclusive in describing kaona, as it is a cultural practice that draws from our unique experiences and values as Hawaiians.”12 Arista has pointed out that, in order to properly read kaona in Hawaiian literature and culture, scholars need to immerse themselves in the nuances of the Hawaiian language through “deep learning.” But, because the language has been “devalued” through “colonial historiography” and other colonial legacies, such deep learning remains difficult even in Hawai‘i and nearly impossible outside it.13 (As someone who has studied Hawaiian via the Duolingo app almost every day for the past six years, I can certainly attest to this. I can ask if the bathroom is at the end of the hallway or for mayonnaise to be left on the side, please, with some alacrity, but I am in no way qualified to identify and interpret kaona in nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers.) Kaona, then, is not merely another rhetorical device to be co-opted and yielded Conclusion  189

transculturally by haole scholars like me who must be careful not to (mis)appropriate it un-self-reflectively. These tactics, and the methodologies I have used throughout this book to recover and reread popular humor’s power to enact as well as to resist imperial ideologies and actions, are applicable to other subjects and time periods in studies of the relationship between American humor and US empire. There is certainly space for more such work to be done. In my research for this project, the primary sources that I consulted— joke books, comic almanacs, newspapers and magazines, travel narratives, and more—abound in humor that expresses Americans’ anxieties about US imperialism and expansion into, for instance, Mexico during the US-Mexico War, the Caribbean near the end of the antebellum era, Native American territories in the American West throughout the nineteenth century, and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century.14 Each of these topics deserves its own extended treatment through careful scholarship that tells the complex, messy, ambivalent story of US empire and its discontents through the study of humor.

190  A Laughable Empire

Appendix: Detailed Information on Reprinted Jokes TABLE 1  “A Yankee Boast,” Reprints by Month, 1855–58 Year

Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Total

1855

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

7

7

1856

18

8

2

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

30

1857

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

2

1858

1

4

12

13

5

1

2

0

2

0

0

0

40

TABLE 2  “A Yankee Boast,” Reprints by Year, 1855–77 Year

Reprints

Year

Reprints

1855

7

1867

9

1856

30

1868

1

1857

2

1869

0

1858

40

1870

1

1859

3

1871

0

1860

0

1872

0

1861

0

1873

0

1862

0

1874

1

1863

2

1875

0

1864

7

1876

0

1865

0

1877

1

1866

1

 Total

105

TABLE 3  “A Yankee Boast,” Reprints by State, Plus Hawai‘i, 1855–77 State

Reprints

State

Reprints

Massachusetts

12

Iowa

4

New York

10

Vermont

4

Pennsylvania

9

Connecticut

3

Tennessee

8

Maine

3

Louisiana

6

Rhode Island

3

Ohio

6

Virginia

3

North Carolina

5

Georgia

2

South Carolina

5

Hawai‘i

2

California

4

Michigan

2

Indiana

4

Minnesota

2

Note: Only states with at least two reprints of the joke appear in this table. TABLE 4  “The Wit and Wisdom of the South Sea Islanders,” Reprints by Year, 1838–79 Year

Reprints

Year

Reprints

1838

3

1864

1

1839–45

0

1865–66

0

1846

7

1867

10

1847

1

1868

1

1848

0

1869

0

1849

1

1870

1

1850–57

0

1871–74

0

1858

2

1875

1

1859–60

0

1876–78

0

1861

2

1879

1

1862–63

0

 Total

192  Appendix

31

TABLE 5  “The Wit and Wisdom of the South Sea Islanders,” Reprints by State, Plus Washington, DC, 1838–79 State

Reprints

Massachusetts

6

New York

5

Ohio

4

Vermont

3

Illinois

2

Pennsylvania

2

Washington, DC

2

Note: Only states with at least two reprints of the joke appear in this table. TABLE 6  “The Wit and Wisdom of the South Sea Islanders,” Most Common Titles, 1838–79 Title Ad for Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative (no title)

Reprints 10

“Mr. Nott and His Wig”

5

“The Wit and Wisdom of the South Sea Islanders”

3

“The South Sea Islanders”

3

“The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders”

2

“A Wig in Tahiti”

2

“The Thatched Head”

2

“Sowing Seed”

2

“Fun with a Wig”

1

No title

1

Appendix  193

TABLE 7  Reprinted Excerpts of Mark Twain’s Sandwich Islands Lecture, by Year, 1866–1911 Year

Reprints

Year

Reprints

1866

10

1881–83

0

1867

24

1884

5

1868

5

1885

0

1869

26

1886

1

1870

13

1887–89

0

1871

2

1890

1

1872

0

1891

1

1873

67

1892

1

1874

4

1893–94

0

1875

19

1895

1

1876

4

1896–1910

0

1877–79

0

1911

1

1880

2

 Total

187

TABLE 8  Reprinted Excerpts of Mark Twain’s Sandwich Islands Lecture, by State, Plus Hawai‘i and Washington, DC, 1866–1911 State

Reprints

State

Reprints

New York

35

Tennessee

6

Pennsylvania

13

Wisconsin

6

Illinois

12

Washington, DC

5

Massachusetts

11

California

4

Nevada

9

Indiana

4

Ohio

8

Iowa

4

South Carolina

7

Louisiana

4

Hawai‘i

6

Michigan

4

Missouri

4

Note: Only states with at least four reprints of the joke appear in this table.

194  Appendix

TABLE 9  Most Often Reprinted Excerpts of Mark Twain’s Sandwich Islands Lecture, by Topic, 1866–1911 Topic

Reprints

Offer to eat a baby to demonstrate cannibalism: “The lecture was not illustrated”

49

“Unlettered as the backside of a tombstone”

18

Joke on dogs as “American sausage, with the mystery removed”

16

Description of Hawaiians’ clothing: “smile or a pair of spectacles”

7

Joke on population decline: “seminaries would finish them completely”

6

Reprint of letter offering to lecture to “allay this unwholesome excitement”

6

Appendix  195

Notes Introduction 1. Quoted in Forbes, Hawaiian Bibliography, 4:143. 2. Dole, Vacuum, 15–16. 3. Quoted in Forbes, Hawaiian Bibliography, 4:215. 4. Atkinson and Purvis, Gynbergdrinkenstein, 13–14, 22. 5. Atkinson and Purvis, Gynberg Ballads, 19. 6. Quoted in Forbes, Hawaiian Bibliography, 4:224. 7. Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 347. 8. Wood, Displacing Natives, 2. 9. Nicholson, “Victorian Meme Machine.” 10. Lee, “American Humor,” 23, 11. 11. “Immortality of Jokes,” Honolulu Polynesian, July 29, 1865. Unless otherwise noted, nineteenth-​century newspaper articles were accessed through Readex America’s Historical Newspapers. 12. Twain, Tramp Abroad, 575. 13. Bhabha, “Other Question,” 18. 14. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. 15. Melville, Moby-Dick, 70. 16. Cook, Collection of Voyages, 483. 17. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 228. 18. Peiffer, Coyote at Large, 10–12. 19. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 276. 20. Oring, Jokes and Their Relations, 14–15.

21. “Immortality of Jokes.” 22. Quoted in Dorson, Jonathan Draws, 14. 23. Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Nogelmeier, “Mai Pa’a I Ka Leo,” 113. 24. Leonard, News for All, 13; Kielbowicz, News in the Mail, 3, 58, 84. 25. Leonard, News for All, 13. 26. McGill, American Literature, 4; Barnhurst and Nerone, Form of News, 102. 27. Cordell, “Reprinting,” 421; Cordell and Smith, “Viral Texts Project.” 28. Sloane, introduction to American Humor Magazines, xxiii. On the predominance of pseudonyms in nineteenth-century US comic writing, see Bier, Rise and Fall, 114. 29. Blair, Essays, 28. 30. Cordell, “Reprinting,” 428. 31. Ibid., 417–18, 421. 32. Nicholson, “‘You Kick the Bucket,’” 277. 33. Nicholson, “Victorian Meme Machine.” 34. Matsuda, “Pacific,” 770, 759. 35. Lyons, American Pacificism, 32. 36. Sugden, Emergent Words, 37–38, 41–42, 46. 37. “Satan Correcting Sin,” New York Lantern, April 17, 1852, 146, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection.

38. Honolulu Friend, August 17, 1855. 39. Wheeling (WV) Daily Intelligencer, July 6, 1868. 40. Shu and Pease, “Introduction,” 2. 41. Chapin, Shaping History, 53. 42. “What They Say about Us,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), February 22, 1873. 43. Kahaleole, “Which of These Things,” 727. 44. Dvorak, “Oceanizing American Studies,” 611. 45. Salesa, “‘Travel-Happy’ Samoa,” 176. 46. Okihiro, Island World, 17. 47. Brawley and Dixon, South Seas, 1. 48. Lyons, American Pacificism, 20, 25, 27. 49. Matsuda, “Pacific,” 771. 50. N. Thomas, Possessions, 132. 51. Wrobel, Global West, 21–22. 52. Melton, Mark Twain, 20–21. 53. Ibid.; Caron, Mark Twain. 54. Bryant, Melville and Repose. 55. Evans, “Pacific Poetics.” 56. McBride, Colonizer Abroad, 75–76; Twain, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 321. 57. Twain, Following the Equator, 63. 58. Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 4, 18. 59. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 9. 60. Lyons, American Pacificism, 11. 61. Youngs, Cambridge Introduction, 159. 62. Dening, Islands and Beaches, 238; Lyons, American Pacificism, 10. 63. Wood, “Cultural Studies,” 340. 64. Kauanui, “Imperial Ocean,” 634. 65. Carr, Hawaiian Music, 124; Campbell, “Culture Contact,” 30. 66. McGill, American Literature, 4. 198  Notes to Pages 16–35

Chapter 1 1. Kempt, American Joe Miller, 130. 2. Avery, 1000 Comical Stories, 6. 3. Seba Smith, My Thirty Years, 273. 4. Burke, “Why Satire,” 314–15. 5. Hughes, “Hysterical Power,” 45. 6. Epp, “Humor Industry,” 362–63. 7. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 9, 17. 8. Lee, “American Humor,” 23. 9. Rourke, American Humor, 123. 10. Crockett Almanac 1854, n.p. 11. Keough, “Violence of American Humor,” 134–36. 12. Bier, Rise and Fall, 45–46. 13. Whalen, “Average Racism,” 4. 14. Zall, “Old Age of American Jestbooks,” 3. 15. Winship, “Pirates,” 6–7. 16. Secor, “Humor in American Almanacs,” 549. 17. Lofaro, “Davy Crockett,” xix. 18. Secor, “Humor in American Almanacs,” 557. 19. Fisher’s 1876, n.p.; Fisher’s 1850, n.p. 20. Dewy, Art of Ill Will, 5. 21. Marryat’s, n.p. 22. Fisher’s 1876, 15. 23. Fisher’s 1846, back cover. 24. Comic Almanac 1876, n.p. 25. Fisher’s 1853, n.p. 26. Lofaro, “Davy Crockett,” xv. 27. Hutton, “Going to Congress,” 13; Winship, “Pirates,” 8. 28. Lofaro, “Davy Crockett,” xvi. 29. Caron, “Backwoods Civility,” 165. 30. Lofaro, Davy Crockett’s Riproarious Shemales. 31. Hutton, “Going to Congress,” 18. 32. Quoted in Dorson, Davy Crockett, 157.

33. Cassuto, Inhuman Race, 8–9; Cole, How the Other Half Laughs, 31–32. 34. Lofaro, “Davy Crockett,” xvi. 35. Albanese, “Savage, Sinner, and Saved,” 486, 487, 489. 36. Caron, “Backwoods Civility,” 165. 37. Hutton, “Going to Congress,” 15. 38. Crockett Almanac 1841, n.p. 39. Crocket Almanac 1854, n.p. 40. Howitt and Owusu-Bempah, “Race and Ethnicity,” 50. 41. Stevens, American Expansion, 43. 42. Crockett Almanac 1856, n.p. 43. Rediker, Outlaws, 13–14, 19. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 107, 123–26. 46. Old American Comic Almanac 1842, n.p. 47. Martingale, “Bill Deadeye,” 250–52. 48. Ibid., 257–58. 49. Poe, “South-Sea Expedition,” 254. 50. Martingale, Salt Water, 213–22. 51. Burton, “Cape Codder,” 288. 52. Ibid., 289. 53. Justus, Fetching the Old Southwest, 66. 54. Burton, “Cape Codder,” 289. 55. Ibid., 290. 56. Boskin and Dorinson, “Ethnic Humor,” 205–6. 57. Davies, Ethnic Humor, 9. 58. Davies, Mirth of Nations, 13. 59. Davies, Ethnic Humor, 125; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 210. 60. Boskin, “Complicity of Humor,” 250–51. 61. Burton, “Cape Codder,” 291. 62. Ibid., 292. 63. Ishii, Bad Fruits, 2.

64. Chang, “We Will Be Comparable,” 879. 65. McDougall, Finding Meaning, 45. 66. Arvin, Possessing Polynesians, 4. 67. “Arrival of the Flying Machine,” New York Picayune, August 9, 1851, 1. 68. “The Courtly Flatterer,” Young America, January 5, 1856, 107, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 69. “Progress of Civilization,” Young America, January 5, 1866, 120, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 70. Hawaiian Cascade & Miscellany (Honolulu), January 28, 1845, 14, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 71. Daws, Shoal of Time, 184. 72. Okihiro, Island World, 196. 73. Sloane, “Humor in Periodicals,” 55–56. 74. Nickels, “Yankee Notions,” 322–23. 75. Sillin, “Cuban Question,” 306. 76. Stevens, American Expansion, 42. 77. Ibid., 43, 56. 78. Ibid., 41–43. 79. Ibid., 61; Daws, Shoal of Time, 152–53. 80. Stevens, American Expansion, 39. 81. “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands; or, Young American Diplomacy,” Yankee Notions, February 1, 1854, 360, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 82. Sillin, “Cuban Question,” 309. 83. Rourke, American Humor, 25. 84. Dewey, Art of Ill Will, 15. 85. Lee, “American Humor,” 34. 86. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 177. Notes to Pages 36–54  199

87. Osorio, “All Things Depending,” 211. 88. “Nick’s Notes,” New York Arcadian, December 3, 1874, 7, American Antiquarian Society Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764–1877. 89. “A Letter from King Kalakaua,” New York Arcadian, December 31, 1874, 3, American Antiquarian Society Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764–1877. 90. Arvin, Possessing Polynesians, 3–4. 91. Saranillio, “Insurrection of Subjugated Futures,” 640–41. 92. Freud, Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, 103. 93. Lewis, Comic Effects, 35, 39. 94. Sloane, “Wild Oats,” 491. 95. “A Bean-Eater on the Rampage,” Wild Oats: An Illustrated Journal of Fun, Satire, Burlesque, Hits at Persons & Events of the Day, September 1, 1875, 3, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 96. Slick, Clockmaker, 534–39. 97. Royot, “Sam Slick,” 128. 98. Slick, Clockmaker, 40. 99. H.W., “From the London and Westminster Review: Yankeeana,” Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1839, 77, EBSCOhost. 100. Royot, “Sam Slick,” 128–29. 101. “Antipodean Diver,” 49–50. 102. Zall, “Old Age of American Jestbooks,” 3. Chapter 2 1. McGill, American Literature, 4. 2. Cordell, “Reprinting,” 424. 3. Cohen, Fabrication of American Literature, 7–8. 4. Nicholson, “‘You Kick the Bucket,’” 280. 200  Notes to Pages 55–70

5. Cordell and Mullen, “Fugitive Verses,” 31, 33, 34. 6. Barnhurst and Nerone, Form of News, 7; see also Thompson and Showalter, “Satire in Circulation.” 7. Johannsen, To the Halls, 16. 8. “Yankee Boast,” Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch, December 24, 1855, Chronicling America, https://​ c‌ hroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84024738‌/1855‌-12‌-24‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4. 9. Rourke, American Humor, 25. 10. Hendrickson, “Yankee,” 325–26. 11. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” 5. 12. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 8–9, 24. 13. Cordell and Mullen, “Fugitive Verses,” 30. 14. “Extent and Growth,” New York Evening Post, January 30, 1867. 15. Hupfeld, Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom, 846. 16. Cordell, “Reprinting,” 432. 17. Ibid., 435n35. 18. “Not to Be Outdone,” Boston Herald, March 4, 1858; Boston Herald, April 2, 1864. 19. “A Yankee Boast,” Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, December 24, 1855; “A Yankee Boast,” Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, April 11, 1864; “A Yankee Boast,” Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, August 8, 1867. 20. “Going West,” Raleigh (NC) Semi-Weekly Standard, January 19, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn83045450‌/1856‌-01‌-19‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-2; “Going West,” Raleigh (NC) Weekly North Carolina Standard, January 23, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84045030‌/1856‌-01‌-23‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4;

“Not to Be Outdone,” Raleigh (NC) Semi-Weekly Standard, March 27, 1858, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn83045450‌/1858‌-03‌-27‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 21. “Yankee Progress,” Gleason’s Literary Companion, January 9, 1864, 32, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection; “Wit and Humor,” Gleason’s Literary Companion, April 21, 1866, 256, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection; “Wit and Humor,” Gleason’s Monthly Companion, June 1, 1874, 287, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 22. Nicholson, “‘You Kick the Bucket,’” 280. 23. “Extent and Growth,” New York Evening Post, January 30, 1867. 24. “Growth of Our Country,” Wheeling (WV) Daily Intelligencer, August 3, 1867, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌​ .gov‌/lccn‌/sn84026844‌/1867‌-08‌-03‌/ed‌​ -1‌/seq‌-1. 25. “A Yankee Boast,” Providence (RI) Manufacturers’ and Farmers’ Journal, August 8, 1867. 26. “Celebration of the Landing,” Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch, December 24, 1855, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn84024738‌/1855‌-12‌-24‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4. 27. “Republican Simplicity,” Belmont Chronicle (St. Clairesville, OH), April 1, 1858, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌​ .gov‌/lccn‌/sn85026241‌/1858‌-04‌-01‌/ed‌​ -1‌/seq‌-1. 28. “Going Ahead,” Brooklyn Circular, July 22, 1867, American

Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 29. Hupfeld, Encyclopedia, 846. 30. “Mormon Grasshopper,” Mineral Point (WI) Tribune, February 26, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85033189‌/1856‌-02‌-26‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4. 31. “Length of the Mississippi,” Athens (TN) Post, January 4, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84024443‌/1856‌-01‌-04‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 32. Haweis, “From ‘American Humorists,’” 30. 33. “One of the Speeches,” Clearfield (PA) Raftsman’s Journal, January 23, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85054616‌/1856‌-01‌-23‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-7. 34. “History of Cuba,” Bloomsburg (PA) Star of the North, May 28, 1856, Chronicling America, https://​ c‌ hroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85025182‌/1856‌-05‌-28‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 35. “Pacific Railroad Humors,” Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner, November 23, 1867, 416, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 36. Williams, Missionary Enterprises, 134. 37. “Fun with a Wig,” Harrisonburg (VA) Rockingham Register, June 26, 1869, Access Newspaper Archives; “Wit and Humor,” Honolulu Polynesian, March 17, 1849, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn82015408‌/1849‌-03‌-17‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4. 38. Zion’s Herald & Wesleyan Journal (Boston), July 8, 1846, 108, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection.

Notes to Pages 70–79  201

39. “The Thatched Head,” Youth’s Companion (Boston), August 12, 1858, 123, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 40. “The South Sea Islanders,” Youth’s Companion (Boston), May 2, 1861, 72, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 41. Sunbury (PA) American, April 13, 1867, Chronicling America, https://​ c‌ hroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84026403‌/1867‌-04‌-13‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-3. 42. Epp, “Humor Industry,” 364. 43. “Sowing Seed,” Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, October 1, 1868, 398, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 44. “Sowing Seed,” Hillsdale (MI) Standard, January 18, 1870, Access Newspaper Archives. 45. “The South Sea Islanders,” Weekly Novelette, May 18, 1861, 158, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 46. Woertendyke, Hemispheric Regionalism, 105. 47. “Fishing for Bass,” Daily Albany (NY) Argus, August 9, 1871. 48. Chang, World and All the Things upon It, x. 49. “Fishing for Bass,” Providence (RI) Evening Press, August 10, 1871; “Strange, but True Story,” Weekly Alta California (San Francisco), September 2, 1871; “Strange but True Story,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), October 11, 1871, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌​ /lccn‌/sn83025121‌/1871‌-10‌-11‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 50. “A Surprised Fisherman,” Youth’s Companion (Boston), September 28, 1872, 31, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 51. San Francisco Bulletin, June 10, 1871. 202  Notes to Pages 80–87

52. Brownstown (TX) Banner, August 31, 1871, Access Newspaper Archive. 53. Austin Mower County (MN) Transcript, September 7, 1871, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85025431‌/1871‌-09‌-07‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4. 54. Greensburg (IN) Standard, August 24, 1871, Access Newspaper Archive; Paw Paw (MI) True Northerner, August 25, 1871, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn85033781‌/1871‌-08‌-25‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-3. 55. “Items,” Plattsburgh (NY) Republican, March 8, 1856. 56. Fenn, World of Wit and Humor, 422; Harper’s Bazaar, January 25, 1873, 64, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 57. Magnolia (MS) Gazette, April 4, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85034447‌/1873‌-04‌-04‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-2. 58. Saratoga Springs (NY) Daily Saratogian, January 29, 1873, Access Newspaper Archive; Columbia (TN) Herald, March 28, 1873; Donaldsonville (LA) Chief, April 26, 1873, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn85034248‌/1873‌-04‌26‌​/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1; Louisiana Cotton-Boll (Attakapas), April 2, 1873, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn86079083‌/1873‌-04‌-02‌​ /ed‌-2‌/seq‌-1; Thomasville (GA) Times, April 19, 1873, Access Newspaper Archive. 59. Columbia (TN) Herald, March 28, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85033386‌/1873‌-03‌-28‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1; Louisiana Cotton-Boll (Attakapas), April 2, 1873.

60. Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, 65. 61. Twain, Roughing It, 449. 62. “Mark Twain on Sandwich Islands,” Wheeling (WV) Daily Register, October 28, 1873, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn84026847‌/1873‌-10‌-28‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-3. 63. Twain, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 185. 64. Wuster, Mark Twain, 38. 65. Zmijewski, “Man in Both Corners,” 62. 66. Foner, Mark Twain, Social Critic, 240. 67. Caron, “Blessings of Civilization,” 55–56. 68. Columbia (SC) Daily Phoenix, February 16, 1873, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌​ .gov‌/lccn‌/sn84027008‌/1873‌-02‌-16‌/ed‌​ -1‌/seq‌-4. 69. Caron, “Blessings of Civilization,” 58–59. 70. “Humorous,” Eaton (OH) Weekly Democrat, March 13, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn85034457‌/1873‌-03‌-13‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 71. “Gleanings,” Buchanan County (IA) Bulletin, March 14, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84027186‌/1873‌-03‌-14‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌1; “Cream of Our Exchanges,” Ottawa (IL) Free Trader, March 22, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84038582‌/1873‌-03‌-22‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-2. 72. “Notes Here and There,” Rock Island (IL) Daily Argus, January 30, 1875, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn92053942‌/1875‌-01‌-30‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-4.

73. Twain, Mark Twain Speaking, 8. 74. Twain, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 435. 75. Petroleum Centre (PA) Daily Record, November 17, 1869, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn84026005‌/1869‌-11‌-17‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-2. 76. Twain, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 434. 77. Ibid. 78. Washington (DC) Evening Star, February 22, 1873, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌​ .gov‌/lccn‌/sn83045462‌/1873‌-02‌-22‌/ed‌​ -1‌/seq‌-2. 79. Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), March 29, 1873, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn82015418‌/1873‌-03‌-29‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-3. 80. Boston Evening Transcript, December 26, 1866. 81. Caron, Mark Twain, 380–81. 82. Twain, Mark Twain Speaking, 10. 83. Saturday Night, September 7, 1867, 8, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection; “Gas-Light Reading,” Saturday Night, November 16, 1867, 3, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 84. “Floating Paragraphs,” Fireside Companion, December 21, 1867, 4, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 85. Jackson (MI) Citizen Patriot, November 20, 1869. 86. Portland (ME) Transcript, October 8, 1870, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 87. Wood, Displacing Natives, 86.

Notes to Pages 87–96  203

Chapter 3 1. “His Little Joke,” Tacoma (WA) Daily News, January 8, 1895; “His Little Joke,” Bay City (MI) Times, January 31, 1895; “His Little Joke,” Biloxi (MS) Herald, March 9, 1895. 2. “Unequal Contest,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 9, 1897. 3. “Eleven Original Jokes,” Boston Sunday Herald, May 3, 1908. 4. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 15, 1, 10, 14. 5. Hulme, “Introduction,” 3. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. Obeyesekere, “Cannibal Feasts,” 71. 8. Sanborn, Sign of the Cannibal, 17. 9. Ibid., 58. 10. Marteinson, Problem of the Comic, 22, 44. 11. “Fixed Facts and Facts Fixed. Being the Current News with Yankee Doodle’s Comments,” Yankee Doodle, May 29, 1847, 194, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 12. “Cheering for Ye, Cannibal,” Vanity Fair, August 31, 1861, 106, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 13. “Sad Story,” Wilmington (DE) Daily Commercial, September 16, 1871. 14. Scharnhorst, “Howells’s ‘A South Sea Tragedy,’” 94–95. 15. McGill, American Literature, 4. 16. “He Wants Something New,” New York Tribune, July 3, 1896. 17. Scharnhorst, “Howells’s ‘A South Sea Tragedy,’” 95. 18. “Progress of Civilization,” Boston Herald, November 17, 1856. 19. Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, November 25, 1856; “Progress of Civilization,” Dollar Newspaper (Philadelphia), November 26, 1856; 204  Notes to Pages 97–106

“Progress of Civilization,” Saint Paul (MN) Daily Times, December 17, 1856; “Progress of Civilization,” Nick-Nax for All Creation, January 1, 1857, 264; “Wayside Gatherings,” Ballou’s Pictorial, January 3, 1857, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 20. Sydney Smith, Wit and Wisdom, 444. 21. “Christian Cannibal,” Portland (ME) Transcript, November 29, 1856, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 22. “One for Sidney,” Ormsby’s New York Mail Bag: Packed with Literature, Jokes, Wit, Humor & Romance, February 1860, 4, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 23. Honolulu Friend, April 1, 1872. 24. Auden, preface to Selected Writings, vii; Halpern, Sydney Smith, 5, 144. 25. “American Humor,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, November 11, 1873. 26. “Progress of Civilization,” NickNax for All Creation; “A Christian Cannibal,” Nick-Nax for All Creation, February 1, 1857, 301, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 27. Sanborn, Sign of the Cannibal, 58. 28. “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly, July 29, 1865, 475, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 29. “Wit and Humor,” Kalamazoo (MI) Gazette, September 10, 1878; “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly, August 31, 1878, HarpWeek. 30. “Very Tender,” New York Picayune, May 24, 1851, 4. 31. “Flattering Preference,” New York Picayune, July 19, 1851, 1.

32. Jackson (MI) Citizen Patriot, November 20, 1869. 33. “Equality of the Sexes in Fiji,” Wild Oats: An Illustrated Journal of Fun, Satire, Burlesque, Hits at Persons & Events of the Day, February 19, 1874, 2, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 34. “Nick’s Notes,” New York Arcadian, November 11, 1874, 7, American Antiquarian Society Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764–1877. 35. Wharton, “Pee-wi Ho-ki,” 333. 36. [Shillaber], Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag, 279. 37. Wharton, “Pee-wi Ho-ki,” 333. 38. “Fixing His Whereabouts,” Rockford (IL) Morning Star, January 4, 1891. 39. “Some Funny Business,” National Police Gazette, March 25, 1882, American Periodicals Series Online. 40. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 94. 41. Wharton, “Pee-wi Ho-ki,” 334. 42. Ibid., 334. 43. Ibid., 334–35. 44. Ibid., 335. 45. Davies, Ethnic Humor, 306. 46. [Shillaber], Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag, 31. 47. S. S. Cox, “American Humor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1, 1875, 693, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 48. Davies, Ethnic Humor, 306. 49. Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), January 1, 1868. 50. “Civilized Cannibals,” Demorest’s Young America, December 1, 1873, 373, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 51. “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly, September 28, 1867, 561,

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 52. “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly, November 9, 1867, 711, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection; Jolly Joker, September 1876, 13. 53. “Brevities and Levities,” Daily Albany (NY) Argus, April 6, 1872; “Humors of the Day,” Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1872, 351, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 54. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582. 55. Lyons, American Pacificism, 73. 56. Bryant, Melville and Repose, viii. 57. Melville, Typee, 76, 97. 58. New York Commercial Advertiser, March 19, 1846. 59. “Our Book Table,” Dollar Newspaper (Philadelphia), March 25, 1846; quoted in “Strange Affair,” Alexandria (VA) Gazette, July 11, 1846; “Residence on the Marquesas,” Honolulu Polynesian, October 17, 1846. 60. Walt Whitman, review of Typee and Omoo, by Herman Melville, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 5, 1847. 61. Bryant, Melville and Repose, 22. 62. Lyons, American Pacificism, 77. 63. Sanborn, Sign of the Cannibal, 77. 64. Melville, Typee, 234. 65. Twain, Roughing It, 474. 66. Twain, Mark Twain Speaking, 10. 67. Twain, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 473. 68. Twain, Roughing It, 441. 69. Mortimer S. Thomson, “Doe­ stick’s Account of His Visit to Coney Island,” Brother Jonathan, August 2, 1856, 3, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. Notes to Pages 106–120  205

70. Mortimer S. Thomson, “Diversions of Doesticks. Number Twenty,” New York Mercury, May 1861, 8, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 71. Mortimer S. Thomson, “Doesticks’ Letters: Doesticks Attends a Horse Dinner,” Street & Smith’s New York Weekly, December 31, 1868, 8, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 72. Nye, Bill Nye’s Chestnuts, 103. 73. Webster, Hawaii, a Snap Shot, 55. 74. Ibid., 60. 75. Sillin, “Laughing at ‘Young Bull,’” 270. 76. Dewey, Art of Ill Will, 25–26. 77. Harper’s Weekly, July 1, 1893, 631, HarpWeek. 78. St. Albans (VT) Messenger, May 24, 1901. 79. “What They Say About Us,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), February 22, 1873. 80. “Want to Put It Out of Business,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 10, 1907. 81. “Abolishing the Cannibals,” Omaha Sunday World-Herald, July 17, 1898. Chapter 4 1. Quoted in Doudna, “Thoreau and Sandwich Islanders,” 437; quoted in Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 335. 2. Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 332; Igler, Great Ocean, 159. 3. Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 359. 4. Arista, Kingdom and the Republic, 53, 54, 65. 5. Ibid., 65. 6. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, 7–8, 2. 206  Notes to Pages 121–138

7. Longair and McAleer, “Introduction,” 1, 5. 8. Barnum to Henry, June 15, 1876, in Selected Letters, 199. 9. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 77. 10. McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori, 19–20; Maitland, American Slang, 85. 11. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 22–23. 12. Melville, Mardi, 1036, 1042–43. 13. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 88. 14. Twain, Twain and Hawaii, 292. 15. Florence, Persona and Humor, 53. 16. Caron, Mark Twain, 311. 17. Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 213. 18. Caron, Mark Twain, 318, 322; Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 241. 19. Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 241, 215. 20. University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, “Volcano House Register.” 21. Wood, Displacing Natives, 66. 22. Ibid., 40–41, 45. 23. “The Proposed Annexation of the Sandwich Islands,” Brother Jonathan, September 30, 1854, 2, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 24. Pacific Commercial Advertiser, December 18, 1869, 3, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn82015418‌/1869‌-12‌-18‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-3. 25. Barnum, Life, 206–7. 26. “Minor Topics,” New York Daily Graphic, December 28, 1874. 27. See Thompson, “‘Satire upon All of Us.’” 28. Longair and McAleer, “Introduction,” 8, 9. 29. Barnum, Life, 231–33. 30. Whalen, introduction to Life of P. T. Barnum, xviii.

31. Barnum, Life, 234–39. 32. Harris, Humbug, 78, 57. 33. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 159; Barnum, Life, 242–43. 34. New York Daily Tribune, November 16, 1842; New York Daily Tribune, November 22, 1842. 35. Autobiography of Petit Bunkum, 30–31. 36. “Supreme Court,” New York Herald, November 18, 1854, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌​ /sn83030313‌/1854‌-11‌-18‌/ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 37. Reiss, “P. T. Barnum,” 107. 38. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 13. 39. Thomson, Doesticks, 267. 40. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 166–67; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 866. See also Crum, History of the Fiji Cannibals. 41. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 867. 42. “Barnum and the Cannibals,” Wooster (OH) Republican, February 29, 1872. 43. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 867. 44. “The Attraction Would Be Gone,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 31, 1886. 45. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 867. 46. “Death of One,” Frederick (MD) Examiner, May 22, 1872. 47. “How Barnum’s Cannibals Did Not Eat Each Other,” Schenectady (NY) Reflector, June 6, 1872. 48. Samuel Ettinger, “Literal Interview,” Jamestown (NY) Journal, May 30, 1873. 49. “Funny Looking Fiji,” Kansas City (MO) Star, September 26, 1884. 50. Ibid.

51. Artemus Ward [Charles Farrar Browne], “Artemus Ward in London,” Portland (ME) Eastern Argus. 52. “A Hoax,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 15, 1837. 53. Ward, “Artemus Ward in London.” 54. “A Canni-Ballad,” Savannah (GA) Daily Advertiser, February 24, 1872. 55. “Human Titbits: A Talk with Barnum’s Cannibals,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, May 1, 1873. 56. “Pith and Point,” Chicago Evening Post, January 23, 1872. 57. I offer my thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript in draft form for pointing out this connection. 58. New York Arcadian, December 24, 1874, 1, American Antiquarian Society Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764–1877. 59. “King Kalakaua,” Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, December 5, 1874, 1–2, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection. 60. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 165. 61. New York Daily Graphic, December 28, 1874. 62. New York Herald, December 28, 1874, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/data‌​ /batches‌/hihouml_azure_ver01‌/data‌​ /sn83025121‌/00211108861‌/1875060901‌​ /0265‌.pdf. 63. “Heads of the Nation,” New York Herald, February 21, 1861, Chronicling America, https://‌chroniclingamerica‌​ .loc‌.gov‌/lccn‌/sn83030313‌/1861‌-02‌-21‌​ /ed‌-1‌/seq‌-1. 64. New York Daily Graphic, December 30, 1874. 65. “Royal Sight-Seeing. Kalakaua Visits the Hippodrome and the Park

Notes to Pages 138–155  207

Theatre,” New York World, December 30, 1874. 66. “The Royal Visitor,” New York Herald, December 30, 1874, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/data‌​ /batches‌/dlc_juneberry_ver01‌/data‌​ /sn83030313‌/00271743889‌/1874123001‌​ /1145‌.pdf. 67. “Our Personals,” New York Arcadian, January 14, 1875, 8, American Antiquarian Society Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764–1877. 68. “Sparks,” Dexter Smith’s, April 1, 1875, 126. 69. “Aristocratic Thieves,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, October 1, 1881. 70. “The Pacific,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 16, 1875, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/data‌​ /batches‌/hihouml_ariel_ver01‌/data‌​ /sn82015418‌/00212474289‌/1875011601‌​ /0556‌.pdf. 71. “King Kalakaua in America,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 16, 1875, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/data‌​ /batches‌/hihouml_ariel_ver01‌/data‌​ /sn82015418‌/00212474289‌/1875011601‌​ /0556‌.pdf. 72. “The Royal Progress: King Kalakaua in the United States,” Hawaiian Gazette, January 20, 1875, Chronicling America, https://​ ‌chroniclingamerica‌.loc‌.gov‌/data‌​ /batches‌/hihouml_azure_ver01‌/data‌​ /sn83025121‌/00211108861‌/1875012001‌​ /0185‌.pdf. 73. Ing, Reclaiming Kalākaua, 2, 17, 76, 103; Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 89. 74. Field, This Life I’ve Loved, 175. 75. Quoted in Allen, Kalakaua, 180. 76. For more on this concept, see Thompson, National Joker. 208  Notes to Pages 155–169

77. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 8. 78. Quoted ibid., 81–82. 79. McCarthy, “Carving Out a Place,” 56–57, 76. 80. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, 4–5. 81. Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 4–5, 53, 68. Chapter 5 1. Melville, Moby-Dick, 70. For an alternative reading of this passage, see Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 18. 2. Dvorak, “Oceanizing American Studies,” 609. 3. Lyons and Tengan, “Introduction,” 547–48. 4. Wood, Displacing Natives, 3. 5. McDougall, “M’okū ‘auhau,” 750, 775. 6. Looser, “Piece ‘More Curious,’” 523. 7. Dvorak, “Oceanizing American Studies,” 614. 8. Lyons, American Pacificism, 15. 9. Mitchell, “Introduction,” 34. 10. Youngs, Cambridge Introduction, 164. 11. N. Thomas, Extraordinary Voyages, 155–59. 12. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 90, 88, 96, 104–6; Swift, “Preface.” 13. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 561. 14. Lyons, American Pacificism, 24. 15. Arista, “Navigating Uncharted Oceans,” 666, 668. 16. McDougall, Finding Meaning, 32. 17. Bligh, Voyage to the South Sea, n.p. 18. Dvorak, “Oceanizing American Studies,” 615; Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean, 51.

19. Mortimer, Observations and Remarks, 18–19. 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Cook, Collection of Voyages, 483. 22. Oliver, Wreck of the Glide, 111–12. 23. Delano, Narrative of Voyages, 397–98. 24. “Voyage to the Fijiis,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), December 30, 1868. 25. Chapin, Shaping History, 47. 26. “Voyage to the Fijiis,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), March 3, 1869. 27. “Voyage to the Fijiis,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), March 17, 1869. 28. Ibid. 29. “A Voyage to the Fijiis,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), March 24, 1869. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. “A Voyage to the Fijiis,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), March 31, 1869. 33. Ibid. 34. M. Smith, “Humor,” 151, 150, 161. 35. Deloria, Custer Died, 167. 36. Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts. 37. Boskin, “Complicity of Humor,” 261. 38. Arista, Kingdom and the Republic, 7. 39. Ibid., 10. 40. Evans, “Pacific Poetics,” 207. 41. Caron, Satire, 21–22. 42. Marteinson, Problem of the Comic. 43. Evans, “Pacific Poetics,” 207–8, 205. 44. Delano, Voyages and Travels, 188.

45. Ibid. 46. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 134. 47. McDougall, “M’okū ‘auhau,” 767. 48. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 134. 49. Clark and Pahinui, “He huaka’i ma Hā’ena,” 219. 50. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 134. 51. Omaha Sunday World-Herald, August 30, 1896. Conclusion 1. Okihiro, Island World, 2. 2. Chang, World, vii. 3. Dvorak, “Oceanizing American Studies,” 611. 4. McDougall, “M’okū ‘auhau,” 750. 5. See Hereniko, “Clowning as Political Commentary”; Sinavaiana, “Comic Theater as Indigenous Media”; Sinavaiana, “When the Spirits Laugh Last.” 6. McDougall, Finding Meaning, 19. 7. Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 83, 18. 8. Melville, Typee, 138. 9. Arista, Kingdom and the Republic, 136–37. 10. Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 4–5. 11. Caron, Mark Twain, 299–300, 306. 12. McDougall, Finding Meaning, 35. 13. Arista, “Navigating Uncharted Oceans,” 666. 14. For a compelling account of comic enactments of empire in a mid-nineteenth-century humor periodical, see Sillin, “Cuban Question.”

Notes to Pages 170–190  209

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Index Italicized page references indicate illustrations Abba Thulle, 181 “About a Remarkable Stranger, Being a Sandwich Island Reminiscence” (Twain), 119 Adams, Bluford, 129 African Americans, Pacific Islanders racialized as, 49–50, 54, 55, 56, 124 Albanese, Catherine, 36 almanacs, comic, 29–41 American Comic Almanac (Ellms), 29–31 American Comic Almanac 1835, The, 30 American Indian Movement, 178 American Joe Miller, The: A Collection of Yankee Wit and Humour (Kempt), 25, 61 American Pacificism, 19 “Antipodean Diver,” 61 Arens, William, 98 Arista, Noelani, 127–28, 168, 178–79, 187–88, 189 Arvin, Maile, 49, 56 Atkinson, Alatau T., 3–5 Auden, W. H., 104 Australia, 173 authenticity and Fiji cannibal exhibits, 145–46 of souvenirs and curiosities, 128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138 Autobiography of Petit Bunkum, the Showman, The, 140–41 Baker, Robert Hoapili, 158 Ballou, Maturin Murray, 76, 81–82

Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, 81–82 Banks, Joseph, 180 Barnhurst, Kevin G., 65 Barnum P. T. exhibits of, 129, 136–43, 146, 148–49, 150–51 and King Kalākaua’s visit to United States, 151–59 and “live off me” cannibal joke, 114–15 and relationship with the press, 143–44 “Barrett’s Vegetable Hair Restorative,” 80–81 Bayonet Constitution, 2, 4 “Bean-Eater on a Rampage, A,” 57–59 Beecher, Catherine, 115 Beecher, Henry Ward, 142–43 Bennett, Henry, 139 Benton, Thomas Hart, 136 Bhabha, Homi, 8 Bier, Jesse, 28 “Bill Deadeye and the Anaconda,” 41–43, 44 Billig, Michael, 46 Blair, Walter, 12 Bligh, William, 169 boiled-missionary jokes. See cannibalism and cannibalism jokes; missionaries Boskin, Joseph, 46, 178 Brawley, Sean, 18 Browne, Charles Farrar (Artemus Ward), 146–48 Browne, J. Ross, 41 Bryant, John, 20, 116 Burke, Kenneth, 26–27

burlesques, 129–30 See also collections and exhibits; souvenirs Burton, William, 44–48 Campbell, I. C., 23 cannibalism and cannibalism jokes, 97–100, 122–26 in “A Bean-Eater on a Rampage,” 58 and conceptions of Pacific islands and Islanders, 125 extinction of, 125–26 fantasy of, 98 Fiji cannibal exhibits, 141–51 and humor as resistance, 167 and imperial anxiety in periodical humor, 100–115 and jokes against Euro-Americans in travel narratives, 172–77 pervasiveness of, 124–25 recycling of, 149–50 as stereotype, 8 in travel writing, 116–22 and Twain’s lectures on Hawai‘i, 92–95 “Canni-Ballad, A,” 148–49 “Cannibal Man, The,” 148–49 “Cape Codder Among the Mermaids, A” (Burton), 44–48 Caron, James E., 20, 35, 36, 89, 90, 93–94, 133, 134, 179–80, 188–89 Cassuto, Len, 35–36 Chang, David A., 48, 84, 185 “Christian Cannibal, A,” 103 Christianity, and cannibalism jokes, 114 See also missionaries Clark, Gaylord, 137 Clark, Gregory, 183 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark Clockmaker, The; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slicksville, 59, 60 Cohen, Lara Langer, 64 Cole, Jean Lee, 36 224  Index

Collection of the Exploring Expedition, 127 collections and exhibits, 127–30, 159–60 Fiji cannibal exhibits, 141–51 and King Kalākaua’s visit to United States, 151–59 of P. T. Barnum, 136–43 See also souvenirs colonial entitlement, 163–64 colonialism. See settler colonialism Columbia (SC) Daily Phoenix, 89 comedy, as contact, 7–10 See also humor; satire(s); southwestern humor; tall tales; Yankee humor Comic Almanac for the Year 1876, The, 34 comic almanacs, 29–40 comic periodicals, 50–59, 100, 106, 114 contact and clashing of cultural norms, 161–63 comedy as, 7–10 contact zones, 8, 10, 43, 45, 76, 105, 166 contextual close reading, 65, 72–77 Cook, James, 9, 132, 137, 165–66, 171 Cordell, Ryan, 13, 63, 64, 69, 70 counterpoetics, 21, 160, 188 Cox, John Henry, 169–71 Cox, S. S., 113 Crockett almanacs, 28, 29, 35–40 “Crockett among the Cannibals,” 37–39 “Crockett Out-Diving the Pearl Divers,” 39 cruelty, in American humor, 28–29 cultural norms, as social constructions, 161–62 cultural tourism, 22 curiosity cabinets, 130 Davies, Christie, 46, 112, 113 Daws, Gavan, 49 Delano, Amasa, 172, 181, 184

Deloria, Vine Jr., 178 Dening, Greg, 22 Dewey, Donald, 31, 123 Dixon, Chris, 18 Doesticks, Q. K. Philander (fictional character), 12, 120–21, 141 dogs Delano tricked into eating, 172 in Twain’s lectures on Hawai‘i, 92–93 Dole, James, 2 Dole, Sanford Bradford, 1–2, 4 Dorinson, Joseph, 46 Downing, Jack (Seba Smith), 12, 26, 27, 54 Dvorak, Greg, 162, 164, 169 Eco, Umberto, 9 Ellms, Charles, 29–31, 35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 127 Emma, Queen, 89 entelechial principle, 26–27 entitlement, colonial, 163–64 Epp, Michael H., 27, 81 Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (Browne), 41 ethnic humor, 46 ethnocentrism, 22, 42, 77–78, 102, 111, 113, 162, 166–67, 178–79, 181, 183–84, 189 Evans, Kim Leilani, 179, 180–81 exaggeration, 23, 25–30, 33, 40, 60, 67, 74–76, 104, 132, 167 exclusion, through unlaughter, 177 exhibitions. See collections and exhibits expansionism and “A Yankee Boast,” 67 in Crockett almanacs, 35–36, 37 See also imperialism; Manifest Destiny Exploring Expedition (1838–42), 127 fantastic, in comic almanacs, 34 Fatout, Paul, 91

fear, 33–34, 116, 118, 148 Fejee Mermaid, 137–40, 141 Fenn, George Manville, 86 Field, Isobel, 158 Fiji, 8, 17, 58, 94–95, 106–7, 114–15, 171–77 Fiji cannibal exhibits, 129, 141–51 Fillmore, Millard, 73–74 Fisher’s Comic Almanac, 30–31, 32–33, 34 “Fishing for Bass—A Strange but True Story,” 82–85 “Flattering Presence,” 106 food jokes, 8, 58, 112, 113, 172 See also cannibalism and cannibalism jokes Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner, 76 freeloading, and cannibalism jokes, 114–15 Fremont, John C., 136 Freud, Sigmund, 57 “From the Sandwich Islands,” 86–88 Fudge(e) Mermaid, 139, 140, 141 fugitive humor, 64–72 “Funny Looking Fiji: The Museum’s Festive Cannibals,” 144–46 gender roles, 106–7 Gibson, Walter Murray, 1, 2, 3, 4–5 “Going Ahead,” 74 Grand Duke of Gynbergdrinkenstein, The: A Burlesque in Three Acts, Respectfully Dedicated to the Public of Duchy (Atkinson and/or Purvis), 3–4 Great Britain, 17, 66–68, 73–74 Great Roman Hippodrome, 153–57 Gregg, David Lawrence, 51 Gynberg Ballads (Atkinson and/or Purvis), 4–5 Hale, Sara Joseph, 115 Haliburton, Thomas, 59–61 Harper’s Weekly, 81, 105, 113, 114, 115, 124, Index  225

Harris, Charles Coffin, 91–92 Harris, Neil, 138–39 Harris, P. F., 140 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 18, 169 Hawai‘i 1–6, 15, 49, 67, 125, 156–57, 159, 163, 173, 178, 185, 187–88, 189 Barnum’s visit to, 136 and Manifest Destiny, 51–54 practical jokes against Euro-​Americans in, 172 trade reciprocity agreement with United States, 67, 156 Twain’s lectures and letters on, 15, 17, 20–22, 87–96, 106, 111, 118–20, 133–35, 188–89, 194–95 US annexation of, 15–17, 39, 51–54, 67, 86, 89, 101, 122, 136 Hawaii, a Snap Shot, Being the Record of a Trip to the “Paradise of the Pacific” in Which the Truth of General Impressions More than Literal and Often Misleading Fact Is Offered (Webster), 121–22, 123 Hawaiian Gazette, 157, 173–74 Hawaiian Kingdom, The (Kuykendall), 6 Hawaiian language, 86–88, 182, 189 Hawaiian League, 4 Haweis, H. R., 75 Hawkesworth, John, 165–66 Henry, Joseph, 129 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 186 History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveler in the Tropics (Ballou), 76 Howells, William Dean, 101 “How Folks Differ,” 112–13 Howitt, Dennis, 38–39 Huang, Yunte, 21, 160, 187, 188 Hughes, Jennifer, 27 hula, 188–89 Hulme, Peter, 98 “Human Titbits: A Talk with Barnum’s Cannibals,” 149–50 humor 226  Index

American imperialism and, 7, 20–22, 27–28 and audience attitude toward butt of jokes, 57 cruelty in American, 28–29 ethnic, 46 fugitive, 64–72 as method of survivance, 178 methodologies and models for scholarship on empire and, 185–88 ontic-epistemic theory of, 99–100, 180 perspective shifting as element of, 9 representations and misrepresentations of Pacific spread through, 22 reprinting of, 10–13, 61, 62–65 settler colonialist projects as supported by, 57–59 of travel writing, 20–22 universality and unifying property of, 7–8 Yankee, 26–27, 51, 59–60, 66 See also cannibalism and cannibalism jokes; comedy; jokes; parody, mocking Euro-Americans; resistance, humor as; satire(s); southwestern humor; tall tales humor industry, 27 Hutton, Paul Andrew, 37 imperialism American humor and, 7, 10, 16, 20–22, 26–28, 39–40, 46, 57–59, 60 and Barnum’s exhibits, 136–41 and cannibalism jokes in periodical humor, 100–115 and colonial entitlement, 163–64 critiques of, 19, 89, 119 methodologies and models for scholarship on humor and, 185–88

and racial othering in sailors’ yarns, 44, 46–48 in tall tales, 25–26 and Twain’s lectures on Hawai‘i and Hawaiian language, 89–91 See also expansionism; Manifest Destiny; settler colonialism Ing, Tiffany Lani, 157 Ingraham, Joseph, 128 Ishii, Izumi, 48 Jenks, Thomas (fictional reporter), 143–44 jest books, 29–40, 61 “John Tabor’s Ride,” 41 jokes audience attitude toward butt of, 57 food, 8, 58, 112, 113 juxtaposition of editorial matter and, 72–76, 85 racist, 38–39, 49 reprinting of, 10–13, 61, 62–65 universality and unifying property of, 7–8 See also cannibalism and cannibalism jokes; humor; resistance, humor as; viral jokes “Jonathan’s Talk with the King of the Sandwich Islands; or, Young American Diplomacy,” 50, 51, 52–55 Jones, Conflagration (Clarence Webster), 121–22 Kahaleole, Lisa, 18 Kalākaua, King David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 55–56, 109, 151–59 Kamehameha III, King, 51, 52–53, 54 Kamehameha V, King, 49 Kant, Immanuel, 9 kaona, 158–59, 168, 189–90 Kaplan, Amy, 115 Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani, 23 Kempt, Robert, 25, 61

Keough, William, 28 Kilgour, Maggie, 109 Kingdom and the Republic, The (Arista), 127–28, 178–79, 187–89 “King of the Cannibal Islands,” 31, 32 Knickerbocker Magazine, 50 Kollick, Joe, 75–76 Kumulipo, 182 Kuykendall, Ralph S., 6 laughter as defense mechanism, 99–100 mutual / shared, 179–84 unlaughter, 177 laziness, and cannibalism jokes, 114–15 Lee, Judith Yaross, 7, 27, 53–54 Lehuu, Isabelle, 27 “Length of the Mississippi,” 75 Lewis, Paul, 57 Lili‘uokalani, Queen, 54 Lincoln, Abraham, 154, 158 “Literal Interview, A,” 143–44 London Punch, 16 Looser, Diana, 164 ludicrous, versus ridiculous, 179–80 Lyons, Paul, 14, 18–19, 22, 116, 117, 163, 165, 168 MacKenzie, John M., 128, 159–60 Magee, James, 128 Manifest Destiny, 15, 20, 25, 26, 40, 51–54, 65–72, 76 See also expansionism; imperialism Māori, 108–12, 159, 167, 171, 180 Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (Melville), 131–32 Marquesas Islands, 106 Marryat’s Comic Naval Almanac, 32 Marteinson, Peter George, 99–100, 180 Martingale, Hawser (John Sherburne Sleeper), 41–42, 43–44 Matsuda, Matt K., 14, 19 McBride, Christopher, 20–22 McCarthy, Conal, 159 McCorkle, Joseph Walker, 51 Index  227

McDougall, Brand Nālani, 48, 163–64, 168–69, 182, 186, 189 McGill, Meredith, 12, 63 Melton, Jeffrey, 19–20 Melville, Herman, 20, 22 Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, 131–32 Moby-Dick, 8–9, 130, 160, 161–62, 187 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, 20, 116–18, 173, 187 missionaries as businessmen, 54 and cannibalism jokes, 58, 97, 99, 100–115, 119, 120, 122, 124–26 in “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders,” 77–82 in Twain’s lectures on Hawai‘i, 90, 91 “Missionary Perils,” 108 Mitchell, William E., 165 Moby-Dick (Melville), 8–9, 130, 160, 161–62, 187 Moretti, Franco, 68 “Mormon Grasshopper, A,” 74–75 Mortimer, George, 169–71 Mullen, Abby, 64 museums, 127–29, 159–60 See also collections and exhibits Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (Williams), 77–79, 181–82 Narrative of Voyages and Travels (Delano), 172, 181 Native Americans connections to Pacific Islanders, 48 Pacific Islanders racialized as, 18, 48, 50, 55–56 as stereotype in “A Cape Codder Among the Mermaids,” 46–48 Native Pacific studies, 18, 23, 169, 186–87 Nerone, John, 65 newspapers, circulation of, 11–12 See also periodicals; reprinting 228  Index

New York Arcadian, 55–56, 151, 152, 155 New York Daily Graphic, 153–54 New York Lantern, 15–16 New York World, 154–55 Nicholson, Bob, 6, 13, 64, 70 Nickels, Cameron C., 51 Nick-Nax for All Creation, 103, 104–5 “Not to Be Outdone”. See “Yankee Boast, A” Nye, Edgar Wilson (Bill), 12, 121 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 98–99, 131, 132, 167 Observations and Remarks Made During a Voyage to the Islands of Teneriffe, Amsterdam (Mortimer), 169–71 Okihiro, Gary, 18, 50, 185 Oliver, James, 171–72 “One for Sidney,” 103–4 “One of the Speeches,” 75–76 Oring, Elliot, 9 Osorio, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole, 54–55 O’Sullivan, John L., 67 othering and otherness cannibalism jokes and anxieties about Pacific, 99, 102, 115, 116 of King Kalākaua, 55–56 laughing at, 161–62 of Pacific, 14, 159 in sailors’ yarns, 44–46 and shared laughter, 170, 180–81 and stereotypes, 7, 8, 49, 56, 90, 113 “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” (Twain), 118–19, 120 Owusu-Bempah, Kwame, 38–39 “Pacific 1848, the,” 15 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 17, 156–57 Pacific islands and Islanders American fascination with, 14–23, 28, 130

cannibalism jokes and conceptions of, 125 confused Western conceptions of, 56 epistemological disconnect between Euro-Americans and, 54–55 Euro-Americans as butt of jokes of, 165–79 methodologies and models for scholarship on, 185–86 Native Pacific studies, 18, 23, 169, 186–87 racialized as African American, 49–50, 54, 55, 56, 124 racialized as Native American, 18, 48, 50, 55–56 shared laughter of Euro-Americans and, 179–84 stereotyped in comic periodicals, 50–51 wordplay and wit of, 181–83 See also Fiji; Hawai‘i; Māori; Marquesas Islands; resistance, humor as; Tahiti Pahinui, Chelle, 183 parody, mocking Euro-Americans, 165–67, 170–72 Patch, Sam, 60 Peale’s Museum, 139 “Pee-wi Ho-ki, the Tahitian Cannibal” (Wharton), 108–12 Peiffer, Katrina Schimmoeller, 9 periodicals, 10–13, 50–59, 62–65 boiled-missionary jokes and imperial anxiety in, 100–115 circulation of “A Yankee Boast,” 65–72 circulation of “Fishing for Bass—A Strange but True Story,” 82–85 circulation of “From the Sandwich Islands,” 86–88 circulation of “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders,” 77–82

comic, 50–59, 100, 106, 114 contextual close reading of, 65, 72–77 Twain’s lectures on Hawai‘i, 88–96 See also newspapers; press; reprinting perspective shifting, 9 Pierce, Franklin, 39, 136 Poe, Edgar Allen, 28–29, 42–43 “Polynesian Wit and Humor; Their Proverbs; Their Good Sense” (Williams), 77–82, 183 practical jokes, against Euro-Americans, 82–85, 172–177 Pratt, Mary Louise, 8, 22, 135 press Barnum’s relationship with, 143–44 and Fiji cannibal exhibits, 143–45 and reprinting of jokes, 10–13, 61, 62–65 See also newspapers; periodicals primitivism, 57 “Progress of Civilization,” 102–4 publication clusters, and studying reprinted texts, 68–70 puns, 105, 181–82 Purea, 166 Purvis, Edward William, 3–5 queues, 44 racial mixing, 21, 35–36 racism in Crockett almanacs, 35–36 and cruel humor of midnineteenth century, 28–29 in sailors’ yarns, 46–48 racist jokes, 38–39, 49 Ragsdale, Bill, 20–21, 187 Raymond, Henry Jarvis, 15–16 Rediker, Marcus, 40 Reiss, Benjamin, 140 Rennie, Neil, 178 Repplier, Agnes, 97 Index  229

reprinting, 10–13, 31, 61, 62–65, 68–71, 191–95 See also periodicals “Republican Simplicity,” 73–74 resistance, humor as, 161–65 and Euro-Americans as butt of Pacific Islanders’ jokes, 165–79 and shared laughter of Pacific Islanders and Euro-Americans, 179–84 ridiculous, versus ludicrous, 179–80 Roughing It (Twain), 87, 95, 118, 119 Rourke, Constance, 28, 66 Royot, Daniel, 60 “Rufus Armstrong: or, Practical Jokes,” 43–44 “Sad Story, A” (1871), 100–102 “Sad Story, A” (1872), 148–49 sailors in “Fishing for Bass—A Strange but True Story,” 82–85 racial difference among, 84 “Sailor’s Yarn, A,” 37 sailors’ yarns, 37, 40–50, 98–99 See also sea yarns Salesa, T. Damon I., 18 Salt Water Bubbles or, Life on the Wave (Martingale), 43–44 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 99, 117 Saranillio, Dean Itsuji, 57 satire(s) in Hawaiian histories, 6 mocking Euro-Americans, 165–67, 170–72 and political debates of 1880s, 1–6 scholarship on and theory of, 6, 167, 170 Saxon, A. H., 140 Scharnhorst, Gary, 101, 102 sea yarns, 37 See also sailors’ yarns Secor, Robert, 29–30 settler colonialism, as supported through humor, 50, 57–59 230  Index

See also imperialism Seward, William H., 51 Sillin, Sarah, 51, 53, 123 Silva, Noene K., 54, 157, 159 Sinavaiana, Caroline, 186 Sleeper, John Sherburne (Hawser Martingale), 41–42, 43–44 Slick, Sam (fictional character), 27, 59–61 Sloane, David E., 50 Smith, Moira, 177 Smith, Sydney, 103–4, 108 southwestern humor, 25, 27, 34, 45, 50, 67, 75 See also Crockett almanacs souvenirs, 131–35, 127 See also collections and exhibits Spirit of the Times, 50 Spitz, Chantal, 185 “Spread Eagle Toast, A,” 25–26 Spreckels, Claus, 3 stereotypes, 8, 10, 18, 19, 29, 30, 46, 48, 50–51, 57, 61, 66, 94, 95, 96, 99, 113, 117, 122, 130, 157–58, 166, 173–74, 178, 182 See also Othering and otherness; Pacific islands and Islanders Stoddard, Charles Warren, 133 Strong, T. W., 51 Sugden, Edward, 15 Swift, Jonathan, 167 Tahiti, 78–80, 108–12, 165–67, 169, 170–71 Tales of the Ocean: Essays for the Forecastle (Martingale), 41–42 tall tales, 25–26, 29, 37–39 “Tall Talk,” 25 Tasmania, 30–31 Tengan, Ty P. Kāwika, 163 “Third Warning Voice, The” pamphlet, 158 Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, 152–53 Thomas, Nicholas, 19, 165–67

Thomson, Mortimer, 120–21, 141 See also Doesticks, Q. K. Philander (fictional character) Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 109 Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), 8 translation, 20–21, 163–64, 182 travel narratives cannibalism jokes in, 116–26 critique of souvenir collecting in, 131–35 developments in research on, 165 Euro-Americans as butt of Pacific Islanders’ jokes in, 165–79 humor in, 14, 20–22 shared laughter of Pacific Islanders and Euro-Americans in, 179–84 as source of American readers’ information, 19–20 Twain, Mark “About a Remarkable Stranger, Being a Sandwich Island Reminiscence,” 119 cannibalism jokes of, 8, 93–94, 111, 118–20 Jones as inspired by, 122 lectures and letters on Hawai‘i, 15, 17, 20–22, 87–96, 106, 111, 118–20, 187, 194–95 misunderstanding of hula performance, 188–89 Roughing It, 87, 95, 118, 119 on souvenir collecting, 132–35 Tramp Abroad, A, 8 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville), 20, 116–18, 173, 187 United States American Pacificism, 19 annexation of Hawaiian Islands, 15–17, 39, 51–54, 67, 86, 89, 101, 122, 136 comic exaggeration and natural features of, 74–75

comparison of Great Britain and, 73–74 Exploring Expedition (1838–42), 42–43, 127 fascination with Pacific, 14–23, 28, 130 humor and imperialism of, 7, 27–28 Kalākaua visits, 31, 151–59 unity, through humor, 7–8 unlaughter, 177 Vacuum: A Farce in Three Acts (Dole), 1–2 “Van Dieman’s Land,” 30–31 “Very Tender,” 105–6 violence in Crockett almanacs, 28, 35, 36, 37–38, 39 in ethnic humor and racist jokes, 38–39, 46 in Sam Slick, 59–60 Fiji cannibal exhibits and symbolic, 148–49 in sailors’ yarns, 44 viral jokes, 10–13, 63–64 circulation of “A Yankee Boast,” 65–72 circulation of “Fishing for Bass—A Strange but True Story,” 82–85 circulation of “From the Sandwich Islands,” 86–88 circulation of “The Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders,” 77–82 contextual close reading of, 72–77 detailed information on, 191–95 Viral Texts Project, 12, 13, 63, 70 “Voyage to the Fijiis, A,” 172–77 Voyage to the South Sea, A (Bligh), 169 Wales, William, 166 Ward, Artemus (Charles Farrar Browne), 146–48 Webster, Clarence (Conflagration Jones), 121–22 Index  231

Whalen, Terence, 28–29, 138 Wharton, G. M., 108–12 Whitman, Walt, 117 Wild Oats: An Illustrated Journal of Fun, Satire, Burlesque, Hits at Persons and Events of the Day, 58 Wilkes, Charles, 127 Williams, John, 77–79, 181–83, 184 Winship, Michael, 30 wit, 78, 182–83 “Wit and Humor of the South Sea Islanders, The,” 77–82, 192–93 Woertendyke, Gretchen, 82 women’s rights movement, 95, 106–107 Wood, Houston, 96, 135, 163

232  Index

wordplay, 105, 181–82 Wreck of the Glide (Oliver), 171–72 Wrobel, David, 19 Wuster, Tracy, 88–89 Wyllie, Robert, 51 “Yankeeana,” 60 “Yankee Boast, A,” 65–72, 74, 76, 191–92 Yankee humor, 26–27, 51, 59–60, 66 Yankee Notions, 51, 52, 53 Youngs, Tim, 22, 165 Youth’s Companion, 80 Zall, P. M., 29, 61