Transnational humor

This chapter explores the transnational workings of nineteenth-century periodical humor. The first section outlines the global expansion of the comic press in the nineteenth century and highlights the transnational exchanges and influences that helped shape the genre, as well as key factors that limited the transnational reach of comic papers. It focuses closely on Britain’s Punch and the global family of periodicals that built upon its name and format. The second section explores the transnational circulation of individual jokes, cartoons, and other comic texts that were clipped, reprinted, and translated by newspapers and magazines across the globe. It focuses particularly closely on the transnational exchange of jokes between the British and American press. While some jokes moved freely, others were legally, culturally, or technically resistant to acts of reprinting and remained constrained by linguistic or national boundaries. Among comic texts which did reach an international audience, some flashed rapidly around the world, while others meandered slowly from country to country over the course of years or even decades. Together, these case studies reveal how the production and consumption of humor in the nineteenth century was shaped by the global movements of people, texts, and ideas, while also highlighting the enduring power of local and national boundaries. Finally, on a more conceptual level, this chapter identifies four key properties which enabled or impeded the transnational circulation of periodical texts: (1) the value of a text; (2) the rate at which this value depreciates ; (3) the form of a joke; and finally (4) the language in which it was written. All four of these properties can be applied beyond the study of periodical humor and offer a framework for analyzing the broader workings of the transnational press during this period.