Post-revolutionary humorous representations of Americans in Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the analysis of humour as a means of doing American identities in the first American comedy, Royall Tyler’s “The Contrast” (1789) (Downer 1960) which introduced to the American stage the archetypal Yankee in the character of Jonathan. I will show that Tyler’s stage portrait of the Yankee, as well as other portraits of Americans in the play, are not one-sided caricatures but rather complex and engaging representations. I will follow the General Theory of Verbal Humour (henceforth GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 2001) taking a close look mostly on the target(s) of “jab lines”. Other “knowledge resources” will be addressed as well, so that the humour of the selected extracts is fully demonstrated. Among other theoretical tools, the GTVH can prove a valuable tool for the analysis of a comedy in that it will enable me to pronounce clearly the playwright’s targets of humour.