FOLK LAUGHTER ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

By a Professor at the University of Texas, and drawn from contemporary source material, this is an appraisal of frontier humor, its techniques and its targets, its ideas and its idiom. Here, in a roundup of anecdotes, tales, jokes, is the art of tall lying at its tallest; its impulse, whether braggarts or backwoods belles (homely and doughty), the inelegance of manners (primarily inquisitiveness and tobacco chewing), the country and the climate, the law and the gospel, or the pleasures of ""loading"" the green-horn. The illustrations recapture all that is rowdy, natural, direct, and indigenously funny in this type of humor and the book offers both immediate pleasure as well as permanent regional value.