Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The National Joker
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.iup.edu/english/faculty/permanent-faculty/thompson,-todd/ * https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-national-joker/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015013530
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015013530
HEADING: Thompson, Todd Nathan
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100 1_ |a Thompson, Todd Nathan
670 __ |a The national joker, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Todd Nathan Thompson) data view (an associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
670 __ |a Email from publisher, Mar. 3, 2015 |b (Todd Nathan Thompson; The national joker is his first book; he is not editor of “Silver linings” and “On wings of the wind”)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Illinois—Chicago, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, associate professor of English, director of Master of Arts in Literature and Master of Arts Generalist, 2009–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Todd Nathan Thompson is an associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania—located in the town of Indiana and the state of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire, which examines the ways in which the sixteenth president of the United States used humor to make political points. “Lincoln was THE ultimate satirist-statesman, Thompson discovered—a prominent national leader who used humor as a political tool,” wrote Chris Mackowski in an interview with Thompson appearing on the website Emerging Civil War. “`That the central figure in American history was also its ultimate satirist-statesman, whose satiric discourse was also his political discourse, speaks to the heretofore unexamined prevalence and power of political satire in nineteenth-century America,’ Thompson points out in Joker. And that led Thompson into the Lincoln rabbit hole. ‘It changed me from someone who studies modernism to someone who studies the 19th century,’ Thompson said.”
The National Joker is not primarily interested in examining Lincoln’s sense of humor or his many stories. There are many collections of Lincoln stories, some of them published while he was still president. Instead, Thompson’s monograph looks at how the politician’s humor worked; how he used humor to make points that spoke directly to the audiences he was addressing. It also looks at the ways in which Lincoln’s broad sense of humor was understood and represented by others, including the president’s political opponents. “Thompson’s interest lies in the ways that Lincoln manipulated the conventions and complexities of humor itself,” explained Fiona Halloran in the Journal of Southern History. “Thompson examines many of the nuts and bolts of humor, identifying not only its themes but also the fundamental operational structure that underlies its successes and failures.” “Lincoln’s routine of using nonpolitical anecdotes allegorically for political situations typified the American sense of humor in his day and placed him firmly in a tradition of statesmen-satirists including Benjamin Franklin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and David Crockett,” declared Rosemary Gallagher in Studies in American Humor. “Thompson describes Lincoln’s humor as modest and self-deprecating, drawing simultaneously on tropes such as horse sense and the Fool character, creating an image that was ‘comically fallible, but, nonetheless, wise.’” For Thompson, Lincoln’s stories seemed to be a way of bridging borders, rather like modern social media outlets. “Those who follow the cult of Lincoln—or even those who don’t,” stated Meg Nola on the Foreword Reviews website, “will surely find The National Joker to be a fascinating look at mid-nineteenth-century social media.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Fiona Halloran, review of The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire, p. 942.
Studies in American Humor, Volume 2, no. 2, 2016, Rosemary Gallagher, review of The National Joker, p. 300.
ONLINE
Emerging Civil War, https://emergingcivilwar.com/ (December 8, 2015), Chris Mackowski, “‘The National Joker’ Is Serious Stuff: An Interview with Todd Thompson.”
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (November 27, 2015), Meg Nola, review of The National Joker.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania Website, http://www.iup.edu/ (August 2, 2017), author profile.*
TODD THOMPSON
Todd Thompson
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Director of Master of Arts in Literature, Master of Arts Generalist
Office: 506S Humanities and Social Sciences Building
Office Phone: (724) 357-4931
E-mail: todd.thompson@iup.edu
Education: PhD, University of Illinois–Chicago, 2008
Research and Teaching Interests: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, political satire, humor studies, hemispheric American studies, poetry and poetics, New Historicism
Emerging Civil War Providing fresh perspectives on America's defining event
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“The National Joker” is Serious Stuff: An Interview with Todd Thompson
Posted on December 8, 2015 by Chris Mackowski
Thompson 01
Todd Thompson shares a moment with Abe Lincoln
Todd Thompson didn’t start out as a Lincoln man. An English professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Thompson has long been interested in satire and humor. But a few years ago, Lincoln’s sense of humor caught his attention, and Thompson got hooked. His new book, The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire, takes a serious look at Lincoln’s laughing matters.
“Lincoln, time and time again throughout his political career, repurposed jokes for political ends, in the process transmuting humor into satire,” Thompson writes in Joker, which looks at the many ways Lincoln used satire: from making an indirect point about a controversial topic to making fun of himself in order to take the sting out of attacks from his critics. “Satire is a way to offer political education,” Thompson added during a phone interview earlier this month.
Joker Cover
The National Joker by Todd Nathan Thompson, published by Southern Illinois University Press (2015)
“I came at this not as a Lincoln scholar but a scholar who studies humor,” Thompson explained. “The Lincoln stuff was a smaller part of my study of satirist-statesmen.”
But Lincoln was THE ultimate satirist-statesman, Thompson discovered—a prominent national leader who used humor as a political tool. “That the central figure in American history was also its ultimate satirist-statesman, whose satiric discourse was also his political discourse, speaks to the heretofore unexamined prevalence and power of political satire in nineteenth-century America,” Thompson points out in Joker.
And that led Thompson into the Lincoln rabbit hole.
“It changed me from someone who studies modernism to someone who studies the 19th Century,” Thompson said. “That’s the thing about the time period—the politics are always there, right on the surface.” As a result, looking at Lincoln and his use of humor really offers an insightful look at America itself. “Satire is an articulation of who we are,” Thompson explained. “It offers a reflection of us as a nation.”
Thompson offers a formal definition of satire: “an aesthetic attack mounted in a humorous or playful tone through literary indirection (e.g. metaphor or allegory or hyperbole) against a public figure, policy, or idea.” The key elements, he says, are attack, indirection, and public-ness. “Satire can use humor, can be humorous,” he explains. “Humor becomes satire, for me, when it becomes attack and becomes public.”
Thompson cites an example from Lincoln’s campaign against Stephen Douglas: “When Lincoln repurposes a nonpolitical joke in a speech to mock Douglas’s policy positions, he takes that joke out of the realm of humor-only and into satire.”
“I’m interested in that fuzzy border between humor and satire,” he says.
Lincoln proved to be such a fascinating subject not only because of his own love of and use of humor but because the times themselves were so steeped in it because printing technology made reading material so widely available. Political cartoons were on the rise because new engraving technology was emerging. The political atmosphere was hypercharged. “To do a ‘responsible reading’ of Lincoln’s jokes, I had to peel back all the layers there,” Thompson explained.
Lincoln intentionally portrayed himself as a homespun frontiersman—what Thompson calls “consciously performed rusticity”—but he was actually a ravenous consumer of the written word. “He was a newspaper junkie. He loved joke books. He immersed himself in print culture in a way a western lawyer would not be expected to be,” Thompson said. “He was incredibly media savvy.”
He was also incredibly politically savvy. “People want to see the legend of Lincoln as being above the politics,” Thompson said, “but Lincoln was very much a politician. And I think that’s okay.”
Thompson 02
Todd Thompson, associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has taught at I.U.P. since 2009.
Thompson was also impressed by what he called Lincoln’s “humanity.” “Maybe I already knew this a little,” he conceded. “But reading his notes and the things he wrote, I could see his quiet reflection and thoughtfulness. . . . I’m not a biographer. I don’t know that we can really know his inner life, although plenty of people try. But you can get a feel for it if you read a lot of his material.”
In fact, that relates to one of Thompson’s concerns about the book. “I was nervous about presenting this as ‘another Lincoln book’ or ‘another Lincoln biography,’” he admitted. “Historian Jason Silverman has written that a new Lincoln book comes out every five days. You wonder what more is there to say about Lincoln—but there is!”
Indeed, because of Thompson’s interdisciplinary approach, The National Joker adds some fascinating insights to the Lincoln literature. “I was a little nervous as a literary scholar writing a book that’ll be read mostly by a history audience,” he conceded. The book, though, opens great new understandings of Lincoln for history buffs.
In most cases, if you have to explain why something’s funny, you ruin the joke. But in Thompson’s case, explaining Lincoln’s humor only deepens one’s appreciation for Lincoln’s powerful intellect and rich gifts for language. The National Joker is seriously interesting stuff.
The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of
Satire
Fiona Halloran
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p942.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire. By Todd Nathan Thompson. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2015. Pp. xiv, 178. $29.50, ISBN 978-0-8093-3422-3.)
Devoted to an examination of not only the image of Abraham Lincoln but also the ways Lincoln shaped portrayals of himself, this short book
manages to achieve a great deal in a very few pages.
Todd Nathan Thompson begins with satire, showing how Lincoln reoriented satirical stories in order to use them politically. Lincoln's ability to
manipulate narrative extended to his self-fashioning, too. He transformed his poverty, lack of beauty, and even his political mistakes into assets by
accepting them and preempting mockery with his own self-deprecating jokes. Not everyone embraced Lincoln's humility. For critics in the South,
Lincoln could never joke away his associations with emancipation, often linked directly to diabolical intent. For English observers, Lincoln
represented everything rough about American culture and politics. In examining these negative portrayals, Thompson's interest lies in the ways
that Lincoln manipulated the conventions and complexities of humor itself.
Thompson examines many of the nuts and bolts of humor, identifying not only its themes but also the fundamental operational structure that
underlies its successes and failures. This analysis is helpful to identify the approach Lincoln used in his humor. Writing at length about Lincoln's
use of satirical leveling, for example, Thompson uses Lincoln's attacks on Lewis Cass to show how comparison can serve as a humorous tool in
which self-deprecation knocks down the pretensions of an opponent. Having established that point, Thompson moves to Lincoln's treatment of
Stephen A. Douglas in order to illuminate the value of satiric flattery. By exaggerating another man's strengths far beyond their true power
Lincoln made them seem less meaningful, as Douglas learned to his cost.
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499646669541 2/2
These examinations of the inner workings of humorous political expression offer Lincoln scholars and anyone interested in humor a way to
identify its complexities. Political cartoons, satirical speeches, letters, articles, and books all rely on the approaches Thompson explores. He relies
for inspiration on not only cartoons and utterances from Lincoln's lifetime, but also theoretical examinations of humor and satire from a wide
range of thinkers. Another strength of Thompson's approach is his use of examples. Just as readers of a book about political cartoons hope to
enjoy many images, readers of a Lincoln book expect to be amused. Thompson delivers. Many of Lincoln's best jokes and tales appear here.
Occasionally, several examples establish a point when one would have done. For example, establishing Lincoln's ability to make the general
specific, or his love of twisting a folktale into a political message, Thompson offers readers many versions of the same insight. Despite this minor
quibble, on the whole The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire offers scholars and Lincoln enthusiasts much to enjoy and
plenty to think about.
FIONA HALLORAN
Rowland Hall
Halloran, Fiona
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Halloran, Fiona. "The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 942+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867697&it=r&asid=a4d464f885b7bcef4ff8488eeccc1b09. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867697
The National Joker
Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire
Reviewed by Meg Nola
November 27, 2015
The National Joker is a fascinating look at the savvy way Abraham Lincoln used mid-nineteenth-century social media.
Before he became part of the Mount Rushmore quartet and one of America’s most revered presidents, Abraham Lincoln was just a man trying to get elected. It may seem like he loped humbly into public office while splitting rails and telling tales, but according to Todd Nathan Thompson’s The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire, Lincoln was quite savvy at creating his own legend.
Thompson, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania’s Indiana University, follows Lincoln’s famed journey from a log cabin to the White House. Honest Abe knew his strengths and weaknesses and managed to use both skilfully. He laughed at his tall, lanky frame and less-than-perfect features; he modestly boasted about being self-taught and unsophisticated and, in doing so, deflected criticism from opposing parties. Prior to the eloquence of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s speeches were peppered with jokes and anecdotes that made the presidential hopeful come across as distinctly intelligent, yet still able to connect with the common man. Even in matters of style, Lincoln often favored a rumpled look.
The National Joker includes numerous examples of political cartoons and literature, illustrating how Lincoln was a subject to be praised and vilified. Cartoonists and pamphleteers who supported Lincoln were apt to play up his rangy build and folksy, forthright attitude. On the other side of the generally pro-slavery fence, cartoonists presented Lincoln as divisive or arrogantly naive, changing the good-natured joker image into a glib court jester.
Those who follow the cult of Lincoln—or even those who don’t—will surely find The National Joker to be a fascinating look at mid-nineteenth-century social media. “Abraham Africanus the First,” a chapter detailing Civil War portrayals of Lincoln, features scathing cartoons and writings that depicted the president as Satan or a vampire, and even questioned his race. By then the national joker had become the leader of a bitterly broken country, and as Thompson notes, Lincoln realized the need to make his humor more “humanely invested” and compassionate as he began his second, fateful term.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
Studies in American Humor
Series 4, Volume 2, Number 2, 2016
pp. 300-304
Todd Nathan Thompson’s first monograph, The National Joker, explores the politics of Abraham Lincoln’s humor and the humor in his politics. Though written in elegant but simple prose, and not overly theoretical, the book assumes a knowledge of humor theory, while historical or political context is always provided for the jokes described. The complex relationship between Lincoln’s carefully constructed self-image and representations of him in the press is the main subject of the book, asking the question: did Lincoln’s sense of humor and physical appearance inoculate him from satiric attack?
Taking its name from cartoonist Frank Bellew, The National Joker suggests that we understand Lincoln’s joke work in the satiric tradition, and the introduction outlines Lincoln’s most frequently employed comic tactics. [End Page 300] Lincoln’s routine of using nonpolitical anecdotes allegorically for political situations typified the American sense of humor in his day and placed him firmly in a tradition of statesmen-satirists including Benjamin Franklin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and David Crockett. Thompson describes Lincoln’s humor as modest and self-deprecating, drawing simultaneously on tropes such as horse sense and the Fool character, creating an image that was “comically fallible, but, nonetheless, wise” (4). Lincoln, the “consummate satirist-satirised” (5), used self-satire to ingratiate himself with audiences and political opponents alike and from this denigrated position launched humorous but pointed attacks on his opponents without appearing negative or cruel. Thompson acknowledges his indebtedness to previous scholars’ explorations of Lincoln’s comic sensibility (citing Benjamin P. Thomas, Robert Bray, and P. M. Zall) as well as Lincoln’s many biographers. What sets The National Joker apart is its exploration of precisely how Lincoln leveraged his depiction in the press for political gain. As Thompson establishes Lincoln’s comic sense, he supports each of his assertions with numerous examples, offers concise historical and political context, and presents the anecdote or punch-line along with an analysis of the comic function and political outcome of each of Lincoln’s little stories.
In Chapter 1, Thompson argues that by drawing on nonpolitical jokes and anecdotes and using them allegorically Lincoln moved from humor—which Thompson defines as an attack on comic stereotypes, such as the country minister or the Yankee—to satire, that is, an attack on a specific political figure or policy (11). Thompson outlines several sources for Lincoln’s material— including biblical stories, Aesop’s fables, comic almanacs, joke books, and satiric newspapers (for example, Joe Miller’s Jests was found in Lincoln’s desk drawer after his death [24])—and describes how Lincoln reused the source material. In discussing Lincoln’s Southwestern humor, Thompson tallies with “recent generations of humor scholars” (20), although he does not name specific scholars, who reject the view that Old Southwestern humor was an elitist exercise performed by political Whigs poking fun at rural inhabitants. Though Southwestern humor was produced “largely by a new class of professionals” (21)—which included circuit lawyers as well as journalists, doctors, and shopowners—the often itinerant lifestyle of these humorists inspired a special kind of observational humor, which they shared among their peers (20). The second half of this extensive chapter focuses on press backlash against Lincoln’s joking: he was simultaneously praised for his sense [End Page 301] of humor and reviled as “tasteless,” particularly as a Civil War president. Thompson, however, describes a “dilemma of hypocrisy” facing cartoon critiques of Lincoln’s wit. Such cartoons generally appeared in the kinds of magazines read by people who appreciated Lincoln’s sense of humor regardless of its appropriateness during wartime (28).
Chapter 2 focuses on Lincoln’s self-deprecating humor as a platform from which to launch attacks on political opponents, and Thompson’s exploration of Lincoln’s preemptive self-mockery is excellent. Robert Bray appropriated the label Little Big Man to describe Lincoln’s method of self-deprecating satire. Thompson illustrates this technique with several examples, including Lincoln’s mockery of Democratic candidates Senator Lewis Cass and General Zachary Taylor in 1848, and...