Jennifer A. Greenhill’s Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers most everything one could wish from a scholarly monograph: discerning judgment, telling anecdotes, historical insights grounded in close visual and intertextual analysis. In describing ways in which late nineteenth-century artists as different as Winslow Homer, Enoch Wood Perry, William Holbrook Beard, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Haberle managed to produce serious art while catering to a “growing public appetite for humor” (2), Greenhill herself strikes an equivalent balance. Consistently erudite, frequently entertaining, benefitting from the wisdom of her choice to focus at length on a relatively few case studies—to “canvass developments rather than provide a teleological map of them”—she tells (and frequently complicates) a revealing story of what it meant for various artists to “play it straight” by “walking the line between levity and gravity” (4).

In her introduction, Greenhill carefully lays out the case made by public intellectuals and critics following the Civil War for “a higher sort of humor” designed to move beyond the broad caricature popular at midcentury. She presents the range of “humorous tropes and techniques” fashionable in the postwar period with which artists engaged, from an outmoded sentimental gentility to a “more raucous and often vulgar jocularity” (5) associated with the Western frontier; from dialect humor to calculated nonsense to the mass-produced, two-line jokes that came to dominate the market by the turn of the century. These techniques included such subtler modes as deadpan, which declined to acknowledge its effects, and burlesque, which adopted the very conventions it ridiculed—both temptations to ambitious artists with a taste for humor and who preferred to play it straight. Greenhill never defines humor abstractly or in an elemental sense, preferring to address particular instances. In so doing, she broadens rather than constrains our appreciation of its breadth of nineteenth-century American operations.

Greenhill begins her account proper with an extended close reading of Winslow Homer’s Playing Old Soldier (1863), among his first experiments with oil painting, having established his reputation through graphic art, notably for Harper’s Weekly, that “relied heavily on caricature, racial stereotype, punning, and slapstick” (18). Here, she argues, in representing a young Union soldier pretending to be sick (or so the title tells us), sticking out his tongue for inspection by an army doctor, attentive equally to the “comical” and “coffinly” circumstances of the war, Homer carefully “withholds the wink and nudge,” pretending to a documentary intent. The set-up’s punch line, the extended tongue, because “inscrutable” and, in fact, hard to read, in transcending the gag, invites a “deeper consideration” (29). Such “inscrutable or incomprehensible” punch lines were dependent on hints offered by titles and certain “well-inscribed visual tropes,” period conventions Greenhill carefully unpacks. The turn to deadpan, she argues, constituted on Homer’s part a calculated response to the call for “a higher sort of humor.” The painting’s semblance of decorum authorized a certain “raising of the stakes” thematically, a play for respectability, she suggests, designed to win over the New York art world, the absence of narrative closure or understatement calling attention to Homer’s own artistry. Playing Old Soldier is indeed in some ways a self-portrait, introducing humor at a whole other level. As Greenhill points out, artist and malingerer are equally responsible for painting and for sticking out that tongue; each faces the judgment of the establishment regarding his expression. The move from more obvious to subtler humor would color Homer’s art (and that of many of his contemporaries) for decades to come.

Greenhill next turns her attention to the role of humor “in promoting national consensus” following the war. In an economic climate marked by ever-widening social inequity, period writers saw laughter as a helpful social lubricant, a means of “obliterating difference” (51), of inducing what one period commentator, Congressman Samuel S. Cox, Democratic from New York, termed (in Greenhill’s paraphrase) “a willful amnesia about disparities of class and ethnicity” (62). The broad popularity of John George Brown’s sentimental, upbeat celebrations of the shared amusements of the children of the urban poor offers clear evidence of this effect. Meanwhile, elite cultural institutions like libraries and museums then emerging into prominence worked more soberly to unify public taste while reinforcing the prevailing social hierarchy in similar fashion. Following a careful analysis of the ways such ostensible celebrations of diversity as Thomas Waterman Wood’s American Citizens (To the Polls) (1867) and Horace Bonham’s Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit (1879) nonetheless visually decompose along the lines of race or class, Greenhill focuses at length on a remarkable chromolithograph after a design by Enoch Wood Perry, The True American (The Bummers) (1875), which overtly satirized the harmonious effects on which images more typical of the genre unironically relied. Every one of the five figures Perry represents across the length of a hotel porch, lounging side-by-side, as if by chance, has suffered a decapitation, their heads amusingly cut off by shutters, newspapers, or the edge of the picture itself. We see their asses instead. In response to an increasingly anxious sacralization of high culture, Greenhill argues, Perry employed this edgy humor to comment on the violence of assimilation and to ridicule the prevailing nationalist rhetoric, the self-serving fiction of a seamlessly unified body politic. Like Homer, he too called attention to the otherwise conventionally naturalized “operations” of the art he practiced. In addition, Greenhill points out his use of chromolithography, which involved coordinated registrations of numerous individual colored blocks into an illusion of harmonious unity. By “disarticulating” social identity, she writes, The True American succeeds in disrupting the “realist idiom” of an image “to draw attention to its construction”—in deconstructing “the mechanics of assimilation” (75), humor here has an intentional rhetorical effect.

Greenhill pursues this line of dark humor in the most ambitious of her analyses, a discussion of the work of William Holbrook Beard, best known for his bawdy paintings of animals “behaving badly” (77). Yet Beard’s “grand stroke”—an unexecuted design for a subterranean passage under Central Park, leading to a major municipal museum, populated by larger-than-life “monstrous” sculptures of both misbehaving and behaving animals—was meant to “demonstrate his seriousness” (78). Worked out between 1869 and 1871, Holbrook’s plans took the low status of his own comic paintings that, in the words of New York art critic Clarence Cook, defiled the very walls they were exhibited upon and literalized it. Beard, however, had his sights set on the excessive self-importance of the New York art world’s cultural elite busy snatching up a glut of inexpensive “masterpieces” flooding the market due to the Franco-Prussian War, for whom the “grand scale” seemed an end in itself. But he was ambivalent in his critique, desiring admission to that world; his project to undermine its pretensions took the form not of satire but of burlesque, a far gentler response, his goal less to destroy than to distort (86). Beard’s ideas were in fact in many respects consonant with those of his more “serious” contemporaries promoting less subversive designs. They too typically imagined entering the museum as a passage to enlightenment, a cultural ascent. And surviving studies suggest that Beard imbued his animal designs for the project with a certain odd heroic grandeur and decorum. In steering a path between low and high, in burlesquing the museum, Beard drew on a rich tradition. Greenhill offers as examples close readings of texts and images by Mark Twain and David Gilmour Blythe. The stakes were high. Beard’s humorous yet deeply serious proposal, widely discussed in the press, called into question, she writes, both “aesthetic and institutional progress,” “a grandiloquent and grotesque vision of progress gone awry” (103). If the gesture achieved only a “symbolic victory” (107) it was one with broad resonance in period debates concerning art’s proper place in society.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan (1883–86), an imposing bronze portrait of Deacon Samuel Chapin on a base designed by Stanford White, intended for public display in Springfield, Massachusetts, offered in Greenhill’s view a similarly wry humorous response to the terms of its commission. By “overemphasizing his exclusionary righteousness” (112), Saint-Gaudens subtly cast a certain doubt upon Chapin’s character, a mode of satire playing on inside jokes (“in-jokes” Greenhill calls them): the hugeness of the Bible he carries; the too-generous sweep of his cloak; even the small tinkling fountain towards which he strides. This cumulative suggestion undermines the decorum on which the work’s tribute to sobriety relies. Its ambiguities express ambivalence to a seriousness Saint-Gaudens characterizes in The Puritan as disapproving sanctimonious hostility to pleasure (118). A descendant of Irish-French laboring class immigrants, an intellectual and libertine who quite delighted in pleasure, Saint-Gaudens managed to devise a language of monumental public representation occasionally “lightened” (127), Greenhill argues, by suggestive humor. His Diana (1892–94), an elegant gilded copper nude of the goddess of the chase designed to surmount the tower of the new Stanford White-designed Madison Square Garden, must have seemed to the members of their circle “a monument to [their own] sensual pleasure,” “a colossal in-joke” (135)—in other words, a sort of balancing act. Saint-Gaudens’s sense of humor, Greenhill argues, was “substantial” (136), its frivolity dignified by its uncompromised expressions of creative freedom and cosmopolitan detachment.

Unlike Saint-Gaudens’ highbrow sculpture, Haberle’s trompe l’oeil still lifes were funny by definition, and Greenhill demonstrates how he took a low medium and turned its lowness into social critique. Haberle, as she shows, was in fact a comic writer as well as a painter, an amateur in the business of mass-producing two-liners. While both genres of production—trompe l’oeil still life and commodity humor—typically functioned through erasure of the presence of the artist responsible, traces of Haberle in his paintings were everywhere visible: in multiple signatures, embedded self-portraits, and newspaper clippings making mention of his work. This strategy of personalized humor, Greenhill argues, had the practical effect of making Haberle’s work stand out in a crowded marketplace, while the “authorial self” that he created to this end—its self-deprecation closely aligned with the marginal status of still life itself (144)—“as a fugitive sign” laid claim to a higher purpose. In images like The Slate (ca. 1895), such “fluctuations of identity” provided Haberle his “governing theme” (151).

These brief synopses should suggest the cogency of Greenhill’s vision. What they fail to capture is the richness of her cultural insight, her breadth of reference and keen eye for acute corroborative detail. While the choice of color plates seems particularly apt, and the images themselves beautifully reproduced, the weight of analysis relies upon an equally well-managed array of collateral images and examples drawn from the histories of American humor, popular culture, literature, and politics on the one hand and from works of critical theory, cultural studies, and art history on the other. Through the dexterous combination of these materials, she establishes historical context and develops a critical vocabulary necessary to her purpose, that of heightening her reader’s appreciation for the value of introducing humor into mainstream American art history. Not incidentally, in so doing she delights as well as instructs that reader’s pictorial imagination.

In “Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan,” for instance, discussion of Abraham Lincoln’s reliance on humor as a psychological release helps to explain the contemporaneity of what we see in Playing Old Soldier, just as an unexpected comparison with Édouard Manet’s exactly contemporary Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) helps to dramatize the rhetorical self-consciousness of Homer’s image. In “Laughing with J. G. Brown, E. W. Perry, and Thomas Nast,” close readings of contemporary images (including Brown’s The Passing Show (1877), an upbeat depiction of “street urchins” chosen for the book jacket) and a revisionist discussion of the vestiges of consensus politics in Nast’s satirical cartoons offer a helpful foil to Perry’s ultimately more cynical The True American. Greenhill invokes in passing the respectful silence newly enforced in art galleries and highbrow sanitizing of contemporary Shakespearean performance as evidence of the wide ramifications of calls for seriousness in the cultural sphere. “William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum” benefits similarly from pocket histories of the American museum movement and descriptions of the oscillation in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) between “comic irreverence and conventional piety,” of “spatial nonsense” in Lewis Carroll, “bestial intimacy” in the Crockett almanacs, and the contemporary visit to New York by the burlesque troupe British Blondes. “Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James” (as its title suggests) begins and ends with a literary text, a passage from The American (1877) in which a humorous work of sculpture comes to exemplify “a contest between two ways of seeing” (109). An equally enlightening comparison of The Puritan with Saint-Gaudens’s public sculpture The Standing Lincoln (1884–87), framed by insightful discussions of related works by Matthew Arnold, Hiram Powers, and William Wetmore Story, serves to broaden the scope of Greenhill’s analysis appreciably. In “Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle,” the book’s final chapter, she usefully relates the artist’s signature wordplay to that of Artemus Ward and other dialect humorists and considers in passing both the contribution of impersonal jokes to the financial survival of period newspapers and the relevance to their interpretation of the contemporary psychological theories of William James.

In this important, brilliantly successful tour de force of visual and cultural analysis, Greenhill expands our understanding of the role of often subtle humor in late nineteenth-century American art in charting an ambitious middle ground between “levity and gravity, jocularity and something more serious” (9). Revisionist in spirit yet impressively grounded, fresh and original, Playing It Straight might be read with both profit and pleasure by art historians across the discipline.