American Cornball

Christopher Miller's American Cornball is an indispensable history of our shared legacy of forgotten humor by one of our wittiest cultural observers; it's also "that rare book on humor that is as entertaining as its subject" (Publishers Weekly). From hiccups and henpecked husbands to outhouses and old maids, Miller revisits nearly two hundred comic staples, their (often unseemly) origins, their cultural roots, and what they reveal about American society. The result is a grand tour of the world we came from and too often forget—a world of black and white, highborn and lowbrow, witty and wacky, the awkward and the sublime.Complete with more than two hundred period illustrations, American Cornball is a masterwork of cultural excavation . . . and a genuine laff riot.