SOURCE: "Humor of the Old Southwest," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Rutgers University Press, 1973, pp. 105-16.

In the essay that follows, Cox celebrates the unique quality of Southern humor writing, stressing its necessary intertwining of refinement and vulgarity.

First of all, there is the South. And the South is, as everyone must confess but very few remember to think about, beneath the North on all globes and wall maps. Even to go South in the mind is to go toward sin as well as sun. The Southerner is seen in the dominant Northern imagination as a little more poor, more ignorant, more lazy, more lawless, more violent, and more sensual than the Northerner. He is, after all, a figure of the lower regions, located, as he is, nearer to the equatorial belt which girdles the world.

If the location of...