This mixture of violence and cosplay did indeed have its roots in the Revolutionary period. “Many of the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, such as tarring and feathering and the Boston Tea Party, were done in the spirit of levity and play.” For the rioters, it was like “the call to arms at Lexington and Concord, the moment in American memory when common people rose up spontaneously to fend off tyranny.”
Zelnik, who grew up in Israel, finds a deeply troubling theme of racism where “being a white man in America has meant being defiantly uninhibited, even giddy, when enacting one’s manhood and nationalism.”
“American Laughter, American Fury: Humor And The Making Of A White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850” ($64.95 in hardcover from Johns Hopkins University Press; also for Amazon Kindle) focuses on the “spirit of laughter, mirth, and play” in tracing “how genuine commitments to democracy became wedded to violence and exclusion” (if you don’t “get” the joke).
For Zelnik, the key to understanding humor’s function in making “violence and oppression … palatable or even enticing” is the yearning of white male colonial settlers to see themselves as “indigenous.” “Blackface minstrelsy,” for example, “was part of a culture that rendered blackness an inherently comical and degraded category.”
In the “American experiment in self-rule,” Zelnik notes, humor created an “environment in which only white men could feel comfortable in their own skin.” The militia movement of “merry men” from Revolutionary times is a way for “white men to transform themselves through shared masquerade into ‘true’ natives and to claim ‘their’ land.” Think also of the violence visited by the masqueraded Ku Klux Klan.
Weaponized humor, it turns out, is no laughing matter.
