If you know that countries are traditionally overrun right to left, using Fire1, and that the Roman Conquest was a Good Thing, as the Britons were only Natives at that time, then you have almost certainly read 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember including one hundred and three Good Things, five Bad Kings, and two Genuine Dates. Which all historians probably should.
Americanists have their own versions—the work of John Hodgman is perhaps closest in spirit, though less thoroughly devoted to reproducing and amplifying the inimitable style of Confused Undergraduate.
I have a vague idea that one of the animating impulses behind these works, an apolitical delight in rascally behavior, once also moved serious historians of the United States. Charles and Mary Beard’s Rise of American Civilization pushes its progressive interpretation forward with a constant undercurrent of glee in the occasional bad actor; so does Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition take a certain pleasure in scoundrels.
What happened? Did the profession simply outgrow satire (after all a form perfected by juveniles)? Did history become too immediately dreadful? Does humor belong in history?
1And, according to certain unreconstructed antiquarians, the Sword.
The Edge of the American West 
49 comments
December 12, 2008 at 8:59 am
Richard
Don’t historian’s try and make their titles kinda funny?
C’mon… who hasn’t encountered a paper about the resurgence of imperialism entitled “The Empire Strikes Back”?
December 12, 2008 at 9:28 am
Buster
Interesting question. I imagine a few contributing factors: (1) increasing academic anxiety and the fear of not seeming “serious” enough, or being dubbed a “popular historian” as though that were a terrible epithet and a serious danger to receiving tenure; (2) the changing demographics of the historical profession and the loss of the easy familiarity of boys’ club humor; (3) the swarm of administrivial tasks putting all those authors in generally foul moods.
That said, I think plenty of authors insert wit into their books, but usually through the quoted voices of their subjects or a curious juxtaposition. The problem (that I’ve experienced once) is the editor who doesn’t get it and cuts the pay-off.
December 12, 2008 at 9:38 am
Michael Kazin
Carl Becker , one of my favorite Progressive (old-style) historians, was a terrific wit. At Smith college, he once quoted Henry Adams telling him that “professors can’t afford to get a reputation for being funny”– and then proceeded to make fun of that.
And, for years, the late, much lamented Roy Rosenzweig and Jon Agnew wrote “The Abusable Past,” a terrific satirical column about the history biz for the Radical History Review.
I don’t trust a historian who has no sense of humor or, at least, a well-honed ironic sensibility.
December 12, 2008 at 9:50 am
CharleyCarp
I’ll be wrapping up that new Luther Martin bio over the weekend. Bill Kaufmann has struck the right balance for me in letting humor shine through — probably too funny for the stiffer among you. Way too funny.
December 12, 2008 at 9:58 am
Matt L.
My undergraduate adviser at UC Santa Cruz, Peter Kenez has a wicked, dry sense of humor, especially about history. His classes on Soviet and Russian History made me into a history major.
I think (or hope?)my sense of humor comes out in the classroom, on the sly. In terms of scholarly production, however, humor in the dissertation was vigorously suppressed by my committee. The same has been true of journal referees. Like the practice of comparative history, junior scholars will have to wait until they turn sixty years of age at which point they will have the ‘gravitas, maturity, wisdom, and scholarly tools’ to undertake humor in their historical writing.
December 12, 2008 at 9:58 am
bitchphd
There is the “smelly old history” series for kids, which is sadly out of print. “Yuck! History’s grossest, most disgusting moments” (or something like that) is one of PK’s current favorites.
What, kids’ books don’t count? Isn’t “1066 and all that” a kids’ book?
December 12, 2008 at 10:01 am
…”and lava.” « Blurred Productions
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December 12, 2008 at 10:04 am
jim
Confused GCE student, I think, or whatever was the predecessor exam in the ’20s (Highers?). The practice exams look awfully familiar.
December 12, 2008 at 10:08 am
Jonathan Dresner
Funniest line I’ve run across recently in a history text: talking about early modern social history…
“Widowhood remained the best option for women who wanted freedom and influence. The most remarkable feature of this situation, which might have tempted wives to murder, is that so many husbands survived it.” — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The World: A Global History (2007), p. 643.
Comedy/irony is a common mode for historical writing, though it’s usually very subtle structural humor rather than textual humor. There’s also the “take one thing and do history around it” model which is kind of a long-form joke.
December 12, 2008 at 10:10 am
eric
Hey, Michael! Nice to see you around these parts. Becker being funny in the classroom—yep, but that goes along with Matt L.—a lot of people are funny in the classroom, less so in print. The Shrine of Party, for example, not nearly as humorous as the corresponding lecture course.
Also, in my memory, Becker’s review of Adams’s Education rather suggested that Becker didn’t realize how funny Adams could be.
December 12, 2008 at 10:37 am
Russell Belding
All of the jokes in the books I have written are in the footnotes and the index. For some reason, that seems to make them practically invisible.
December 12, 2008 at 10:37 am
Russell Belding
The jokes, that is.
December 12, 2008 at 10:38 am
drip
Charlie Carp– Is that a biography of the Maryland lawyer?
December 12, 2008 at 10:40 am
kid bitzer
one striking thing about 1066 is its ending with a full stop.
the full stop is america, post-ww ii, and the ending is the ending of british history as the history of the world. i.e., 1066 marks the shift from when an empire can see its own narrative as the narrative of all humanity (“sun never, etcets”), to when a former empire realizes it has been subsumed into other, now-larger historical narratives.
that shift in perspective creates a certain opening for irony, satire, wry bemusement. one sees one’s past efforts in a different light as well. if we’d known it would turn out this way, we wouldn’t have worked so bloody hard.
so here’s hypothesis: american historians aren’t funny, because american history still takes itself too seriously, i.e. still believes it is the central narrative in world history. despite the fact that most academic historians are opponents of american empire, and many strive to see the world through non-american eyes, there is still the pervasive underlying seriousness.
we’ll have our 1066 when our history comes to a.
December 12, 2008 at 11:01 am
CharleyCarp
Yes. ‘Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet’
December 12, 2008 at 11:05 am
RobinMarie
Humor absolutely belongs in history, and it has always bothered me that there is not more of it. It’s not entirely surprising that the lay folk don’t always consider a history book the most stimulating read when someone can pound out a 300 to 500 page tome without a single attempt at being clever. That takes out half the fun of intelligent discourse as far as I am concerned.
And it also has the nice effect of keeping us from taking ourselves and our work too seriously, which personally I don’t think is a bad idea at times.
December 12, 2008 at 11:10 am
ben
Hodgman tries too hard.
December 12, 2008 at 11:10 am
kid bitzer
of course, there is always larry gonick’s cartoon history of the universe.
parts of which are pretty fucking brilliant.
December 12, 2008 at 11:13 am
drip
He’s not forgotten in Maryland. He’s revered for his ability to drink, for his insistence on a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, and for getting a personal assessment on every lawyer in the state for his personal welfare. That’s a trifecta.
December 12, 2008 at 11:22 am
jazzbumpa
Speaking as a lay person (though I’m actually sitting at the moment) I say hell, yes. Humor belongs in all human endeavor. Opposable thumbs be damned, it’s what separates us from the neocons. Well, that along with integrity, common sense, and an ideology that at least marginally correlates with the real world.
December 12, 2008 at 11:26 am
Charlieford
Wit is the indulgence of a leisured–or at leat comfortable–class, secure in its sense of national belonging. The practitioners of identity politics of the 70s and 80s, coming in on the wave of social history, was all very, very serious. You don’t make jokes about the oppressed, or the oppressors.
December 12, 2008 at 11:29 am
dana
Charlieford, I’d be willing to bet money that what you just said isn’t true.
December 12, 2008 at 11:30 am
bitchphd
Wit is the indulgence of a leisured–or at leat comfortable–class
My version of this was to tell my students that the academic sense of humor is to understate things drastically, which is why students never laugh at their professors jokes, and that they can get mega bonus points from their profs by learning how to use this kind of thing in their essays.
December 12, 2008 at 11:37 am
kid bitzer
surely there are different kinds of wit corresponding to different power roles.
the wit of bertie wooster is not the wit of the gravedigger in hamlet is not the wit of mirabell and millamant is not the wit of chris rock.
December 12, 2008 at 11:44 am
Charlieford
“Charlieford, I’d be willing to bet money that what you just said isn’t true.” If you’ll insert an “always,” I’ll join you.
December 12, 2008 at 11:47 am
Buster
Charlieford, I’m with dana–iif you’ve spent any time around social movement folks, it’s pretty clear that they need humor and wit to make it through the day. On the academic front, there’s plenty of studies of working-class culture that hit up the humor front. The work of Paul Buhle comes immediately to mind. I think the stereotype of feminists, queers and people of color not having a sense of humor (or Communists for that matter–I’m thinking of Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were) is derived from the fact that (a) they laugh at different things and (b) they didn’t cooperate with being derided as jokes. Funny that.
December 12, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Buster
(My apologies for the extra i in if and extra a in Barbra above. And the two fronts in one sentence. But it’s just a blog comment, alright?)
December 12, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Anderson
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody deserves a mention in this context — Will Cuppy insisted that everything in his book was factual, which of course is not the same as “true.”
Pretty funny, in that 1950s New-Yorkerish kinda way.
December 12, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Russell Belding
On something of the same line as Cuppy, “Dave Barry Slept Here” is a funny American history textbook, in a Dave Barry kind of way, of course. But, this is admittedly more of an answer to the question “Does history belong in humor?”
December 12, 2008 at 12:52 pm
andrew
<Principal Skinner>Yes. Yes, it does.</Principal Skinner>
December 12, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Platypus
I always try and use humor in my classroom (I teach English Comp) and I feel that is a great way to make the classroom more comfortable and at ease.
As for American History, I’m not familiar with any humorous history texts, but The Daily Show’s American the Book is about the only one I can come up with at the moment (and that is not really a ‘history’ book).
December 12, 2008 at 3:43 pm
“How did the war start?” « More or Less Bunk
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December 12, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Charlieford
“I think the stereotype . . .” I have to confess, my experience largely, though not entirely, tended to confirm the stereotype. But I’m sure there’s plenty of counter-examples.
December 12, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Cosma
Let me second kid bitzer’s plug for Larry Gonick’s books. I still have large parts of them memorized.
December 13, 2008 at 4:02 am
Delicious Pundit
English history seems funnier to the English — there’s no American version of “Blackadder,” either. (Phoef Sutton had a show which CBS buried set at colonial Plymouth, called “Thanks”; I think he was just too early, it might work today.)
I no longer have my copy of 1066, but I believe it was claimed to have been researched in gentleman’s clubs. In some ways (like the Stephen Potter “Upmanship” books, which I love), they’re a satire on a certain hegemonic, Upper Class point of view which, I believe, is now less dominant.
There’s always “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor”?
December 12, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Dr J
Anyone who thinks there’s no humor in history hasn’t been reading my undergraduates’ final exams this week.
Then again, as one of them (really) wrote, history is hindsight and hindsight is 50-50.
Eric, add The Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” to your list.
December 13, 2008 at 3:31 am
jim
History for Sellar and Yeatman had come to a full stop partly because the controversies were no longer live. The book is not just garbled history book: most of late medieval is garbled Shakespeare. But the American equivalent would be garbled Gone with the Wind, which wouldn’t be funny.
December 13, 2008 at 5:32 am
Michael Turner
surely there are different kinds of wit corresponding to different power roles
Bingo.
When people try to pin me down on that scandalously amoral rap music, I duck and weave, rejoining nimbly with “I’m not culturally clued-in enough to tell how ironic much of it might be.”
I say that partly because I don’t want to seem uncool, partly because I don’t want to be un-PC, partly because (even though rap is hardly solidly African-American, and hasn’t been since Beastie Boys, if not earlier), I don’t want to seem “racially insensitive”.
But I say it also because my borderline-middle-age middle class eddicated white man forebrain warns me that there might actually be a lot of wit in rap that I’m just tone-deaf to; that whenever it sounds like the smug self-congratulation of ultra-violent ho-bangin rock-sellin ride-pimpin homeboy morons, it might also be poking insider fun at those very same people, while poking fun at those who stereotype those people, and so on, into as many mirror-of-mirror reflections as you might want to go with that, into a culture trapped in a maze of such mirrors, halls littered with shards of those mirrors, with so much blood on so many of the shards that if you didn’t find a grim laugh in it all, you’d go crazy (and maybe you’d go crazy anyway.)
It’s not my world, so it can’t ever be my wit. Far be it from me to say it doesn’t qualify.
December 13, 2008 at 6:50 am
john theibault
I guess people don’t read Richard Armour and his “It all started with…” and “… Lit Relit” books much these days. I loved them back in high school.
December 13, 2008 at 7:08 am
[links] Link salad for a lazy Saturday | jlake.com
[…] Does humor belong in history? — The Edge of the American West on 1066 and All That and all that. […]
December 13, 2008 at 8:02 am
Anderson
Eric, add The Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” to your list.
WAR OVER AS FRANZ FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE
‘How fares Europe?’ asks presumed-dead archduke.
Long and hideous war simple misunderstanding.
December 13, 2008 at 10:08 am
Eva Lynn
I’d say Richard Armour’s It All Started With Columbus is the closest US history version, both in spirit and style. It’s even dedicated to 1066’s authors, iirc.
December 13, 2008 at 11:20 am
Dr J
Anderson, I’m partial to a previous headline:
ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND OF AUSTRIA BOASTS: ‘NO MAN CAN STOP ME.’
(An accompanying thumb-sucker asks: Does America Suffer from a Zeppelin Gap?)
December 13, 2008 at 2:40 pm
jazzbumpa
Dr J –
Clearly the thumb-sucker was Led astray.
December 13, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Anderson
Well, as the later news proved, Franzie was right.
(And the “zeppelin gap” bit is precious for hitting upon something period-contemporary *and* phallic.)
December 14, 2008 at 5:03 am
chris y
There is the “smelly old history” series for kids, which is sadly out of print.
B, is PK au fait with Terry Deary? Similar market sector, I think, and available.
December 14, 2008 at 7:45 am
Jonathan
The history of technology oscillates between horror and hilarity.
December 15, 2008 at 10:02 am
dware
I started to give up on academic history as a profession when I went to a half-dozen conferences in a row in which the real wit was only revealed in the hotel bars after the serious sessions (most of which contained painfully pawky attempts at humor) were done with.
Things got better but I fear for the emotional health of many of my erstwhile colleagues (I’m mostly out of academics these days) and friends still within the groves who shy from apt puns, travestied orations and, worst of all, the righteous skewering of gasbags, windbags, stuffed owls, poltroons and eedjits of all persuasions, for fear of being considered non-serious scholars. Does pursuit of tenure make cowards, or at least mice, of us all?
December 21, 2008 at 7:03 am
CharleyCarp
Drip — Yep. And his losing argument in M’Cullough v. Maryland where he says, more or less, ‘when I said back during the ratification debate that this is where the thing was going to go, all the people backing it said I was a drunken fool.’
Great stuff.