On Humor: The Best from American Literature

by University of Delaware. University Gallery

Tandy's anthology takes a different curatorial approach than Cady's, organizing American humor chronologically from colonial times through the early 20th century, which lets you see how comedic sensibilities shifted alongside historical events. Where Cady focuses on critical essays about humor, Tandy gives you the actual texts—the jokes, sketches, and comic pieces themselves—so you'll experience the evolution rather than just read about it.

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

This 1932 novel is a masterclass in how humor functions as a narrative tool—Nabokov uses comedy to make readers complicit in a deeply uncomfortable story, which is the opposite of what most humor does. If you appreciated Cady's exploration of how American critics have analyzed humor's mechanics, you'll find Nabokov here demonstrating those mechanics in action, weaponizing comedy to create moral vertigo.

by Herman Melville

Published in 1857, this novel predates your source book by over a century and represents American literature's earlier experiments with satire and con-artist humor. It's a surprise pick because it's Melville's least-read work, but it's essentially a novel-length exploration of how humor operates through deception and social performance—themes that would fascinate the critics Cady anthologizes.

by Stephen Burn

Wallace's 1996 meganovel treats comedy and entertainment with the same scholarly intensity that Cady's critical essays bring to humor analysis—characters debate the nature of jokes, a film is literally so funny it kills people, and the entire narrative structure plays with reader expectations about what's supposed to be amusing. It's a novel that reads like it was written by someone who'd read every essay in your anthology and decided to dramatize their arguments.

by Albert O. Hirschman

This 1991 work sits just outside traditional literary criticism but analyzes how humor and rhetorical patterns function in political discourse—it's the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that modern American literature scholars engage with. If you found yourself curious about *why* certain arguments about American humor matter, Hirschman offers a framework for understanding how language itself operates as persuasion, which is what comedy ultimately does.