SOURCE: Rickels, Milton. “The Grotesque Body of Southwestern Humor.” In Critical Essays on American Humor, edited by William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner, pp. 155-66. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984.

In the following essay, Rickels considers the grotesque image of the body as a fundamental technique in Southwestern humor literature.

The most significant esthetic achievement of the humor of the Old Southwest is its language. Such writers as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris realized their characters, settings, and actions in versions of regional dialect. “I am often amused,” wrote Longstreet of the talk of old women, “and have amused them with a rehearsal of their own conversation, taken down by me when they little dreamed that I was listening to them.”¹ Thorpe, too, creates as first person narrator an attentive gentleman steamboat passenger bemused by the language and experiences...