Penelope Stickney

Penelope Stickney

ENG522

Professor Egan

2/20/99

Seeing Sut's Subtlery

The strength of George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood's Yarns is in his humor, which is both primitive and sophisticated. In its primitive form Harris uses expressions of cruelty and hatred to subtly attack his victims--generally those who have wronged him--while the sophisticated humor combines both the written language and a varied word structure that implicates the character's lack of education. The spelling of the words is inconsistent, reflecting an inconsistent education, but the interpretation of the words and phrases are complex. Although Sut commonly declares himself to be a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool," he is not ignorant. He is a true product of his upbringing and his country. His landscape and heritage support his images and anchor his descriptions in similes and metaphors.

In Blown Up With Soda, Sut describes Sicily Burns as "Handsome! that ar word don't kiver the case....She shows among wimen like a sunflower amung dorg fennil, ur a hollyhawk in a patch ove smartweed....Her har's es black es a crow's wing et midnite, ur a nigger hanlin charcoal when he's hed no brekfus'" (Harris 69). Here the word combinations create images that relate to Sicily's beauty. First, he draws from the flowers he knows--the sunny, bright sunflower and the fragrant licorice-scented fennel and the tall, hardy, colorful blooms of the hollyhock growing amidst the spindly smartweed of the buckwheat family. But on second look there is a humorous twist in the juxtaposition of these images: the "...mung dorg fennil" becomes an image that mucks its way into a disreputable dog-like description of this otherwise beautiful woman, and the "hawk" of the "hollyhawk," is a slang term that is only released when coughed up and

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spit. This coarse description continues as Sut describes her hair which can not become any darker than a crow's wing at midnight (symbolic of witchcraft), unless, of course, it is a black man handling charcoal. Nothing could appear to be darker than these two images except a poor, hungry "nigger" working before breakfast. This image, offered without commentary, suggests no effort to implicate or understand the control and deprivation of slavery.

In another humorous sequence, Harris strings together a list of adjectives to describe the main character from Bart Davis' Dance: "Everybody knows Bart is a durned no-count, jug-carryin, slow-thinkin, flea-hurtin, herring-eatin North Carolinian--plays a three-string fiddle with a grasshopper jerk while his wife totes the wood" (144). In this passage the character's "no-count" spirals downward. He drinks, so he's slow, so he's ignorant of others--he would hurt a flea--and besides, he's not a local, he's from North Carolina, and even his musical contribution is played on a sick instrument with a sexual body part from a grasshopper (the derogatory term comes from "jerk off"--masturbate). Certainly this suggests there is nothing redeemable about Bart, so no wonder his wife totes the wood! What more can Sut offer to this description? Except that perhaps the wood his wife totes is really a shortened term for "peckerwood" and relates to some other poor, Southern white man she sleeps with because her husband is too drunk and ignorant to know what she is doing.

Probably the closest that modern American humor parallels this account is in the "Pet Detective" character of Jim Carrey. While in the police station, an antagonistic officer deliberately steps on a cockroach and tauntingly suggests to Carrey that he solve that murder. The Pet Detective quickly responds that the murder arose from jealousy. The murderer "saw the size of the insect's dick and became extremely jealous!" Currently social standards have moved from obvious ethnic taunts, and "colored" raillery, blatant,

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sexual humor continues to set a standard. But, humor I find available in existing trends cannot compare to Harris' brilliance in word choice and comic development.

Another episode of Harris' that links Jim Carrey is in Parson John Bullen's Lizards. In The missing link?, Time gave this brief quotation from psychology professor Stuart

Fischoff on Jim Carrey's humor: "It..is the kind of humor you...find in chimps. It cuts right into the lizard part of our brains" (June 24, 1996). A quotation originally indebted to USA Today, it sounds like it might be worthy to explore in this context of backwoods humor. In the 1920's the word changed into the term "lounge lizard," indicating a "ladies man" and "the notion that such a man lounges, frequents ladies lounges and is as colorful, indolent, and reptilian as a lizard in the sun" (Chapman 272). Perhaps it is the lizard of sexual desire that controls the brain and wiggles into the other parts of the body. When Sut recalls Parson Bullen's sermon to his congregation, he recounts:

[Parson Bullen] tol 'em how the ole Hell-sarpints wud sarve em if they didn't repent; how cold they'd crawl over thar nakid bodys, 'an how like ontu pitch they'd stick tu 'em as they crawled; how they'd rap thar tails roun' thar naiks chokin clost, poke thar tungs up thar noses, an hiss into thar years. This wer the was they wer tu sarve men folks. Then he turned ontu the wimmen: tole 'em how they wud crawl down onder thar frock-strings, no odds how tite they tied 'em, 'an how sum ove the oldes' an wus ones wud crawl up thar laigs, 'an travil onder thar garters, no odds how tight they tied them, 'an when the two armies of Hell-sarpints met,... (Harris 54)

In this episode the Parson's description pays tribute to each orafice that indulged in sexual pleasure. As the men are naked, these lizards of sin cling to them, wrap around their sensitive necks, penetrate their noses (a source to the brain), and succulently tickle their ears with their tongues. It is interesting to note here, that for the men the lizards are on

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them "to serve;" although they are degenerative, they are not necessarily meant to be repulsed. The women, on the other hand, are threatened with the visual terror of having the lizards crawl into their underwear, both at their bosom and below their waist, and that the more experienced lizards--the oldest and wisest--will enter into their vaginas. The image does not end there, however, as Bullen's language intends to raise the sexual response of the people even higher as "the two armies of Hell-sarpints met" somewhere, perhaps, in the interior of the woman. Neither the message nor its visual meditation is completed, as Sut rises to this occasion and lets his own lizards loose up in the pant's leg of Parson John Bullen, who immediately tears off his clothes and runs naked out of the church. Suddenly the sermon's figurative image of the lizard becomes the very emblem that defrocks the parson and reveals his sins of pleasure to his congregation. As he pulls off his clothes, out of his pockets fly "a boiled chicken, wif hits laigs crossed,...lots ove broken glass, a cork, ...a squirt..." (55). Other items appeared as well, but these suggest the most deviate of images as items for sexual desire and fulfillment, the greatest image nestled in the last, the squirt. This term became popular in the middle 1800s and refers to a "short or small person, especially an insignificant, contemptible little male" (Chapman 422).

Sut's prank in this episode is retaliation to Bullen's finding him in the bushes with a girl, being hit on the head by the Parson with a stick, and lied to regarding telling the girl's mother that she had been with Sut. Perhaps Sut's greatest wrong is not in sharing the same sexual preference as Bullen. This is one of several occasions when Sut's cruelty becomes justified, and he experiences success by basking in the story's form and content. The prank makes a grand story for any storyteller, and in the comic sense it brings pain and repeated humiliation to the victim who remains the victimized butt of this humorous tale with each retelling.

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Sut's dark humor is further developed through his sophisticated observation of minute, absurd details of a single incident. In Daddy, Acting Horse Sut uses this technique to

implement the exaggerated description of his father after he runs into a "ball ho'nets nes'," while pretending to be a horse. "[H]e hit ontu his hans agin, and kick'd strait up onst, then he rar'd, an' fotch a squeal wus nur ara stud hoss in the State, an' sot in tu strait runnun away jis es natral es yu ever seed any uther skeer'd hoss du. I let go the line an' holler'd, Wo! dad, wo! but yu mout jis' es well say Woa! tu a locomotum, ur Suke cow tu a gal (Harris 36). In this account Sut calmly describes his father's response to the stinging hornets with interest but without emotion and shows no distinct significance that the ailing person is his father and not a horse! Sut's story describes the wild antics of his father, in the character of the horse responding to the pain of the wasp's sting as naturally as any other scared horse would. When he calls "Whoa" to his dad as he would a horse, he compares his feeble help offering to calling a locomotive or using terms that cows respond to when calling a girl. His father could not respond to a simple "Whoa;" he was being traumatized. A woman will not respond to a man who calls her in the same tone and phrases he uses with an animal. In this example, Sut does not enter into the event, he simply records it, and his words and tone create the humor.

Another example of Sut working as the recorder is Well! Dad's Dead. Sut begins by summing up the event this way: "Thar never wer a man yet, so mean, but what some time, or other, done at least one good thing. Now, my Dad put off doin his good thing for an awful long time, but at last he did hit, like a white man. He died, by golly! Perfeckly squar--strait out, an' for keep. Ain't you glad?...Mam...grumbles that he dident ketch the idear twenty years sooner..."(321). These sentences immortalize Sut's father as one who never did a good thing in his life except come to this point of death, and as the day of the

funeral progresses, and Sut becomes actively involved in the events, emotionally he

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maintains the distance he always held towards his dad. Whether Sut's observations keep

him above this event and free of its trauma, or if he uses his aloof observations to try to control it, his response reflects the ancient desire to escape death's pain and his personal distance from the traumas of the living.

Good people, an' passuns, make a heap ove fuss over what they call the

onnatralness ove folks towards the sick. Now, hits all a dad-rabbitted lie, for the

neighbors acted jist as natral to dad as could be. Nara durn'd one ove 'em ever

come a nigh the old cuss, to fool 'im into believen' that he stood a chance to live, or even that they wanted him to stay a minit longer than he wer obleeged to, by givin him sups of water, fannin' off the flies--axin him if he wer hongry, or any other meddlesome interfarances with natur..."(321)

Some of the humor in this passage is built through the absurd succession of possible ways one will render help to another when that help can still be received, and rather than coming to terms with his father's death in a practical way, he watches to see if anyone will approach the corpse with food or drink. Of course, no one does, so as the oldest son he takes on the task of burying the dead. As soon as the corpse becomes "cool, an' stiff enuff to handle, we cudent raise ara coffin, without diggin' one up" (322). Here the humor embeds in the obvious truth that a coffin can be available if it's dug from the ground--a choice of simple logic. It is one place where Sut knows he can find one. But the humor lies in the illogical and Sut's eminent decision to wrap his dad in a cloth and bury him as "a regular mummy....Who knows, boys, but what he'l git dug up, some three thousan' years aeter this, an' be sot in a glass case, for a King Pharoo, an' a devil ove a fuss raised, about the bed spraid bein' a royal mantle?" (322). Here the metaphor embellishes the imagination as Sut's dad finishes his eternity behind a glass case in a museum, enthroned with kingly dignity, and the reader is enabled the unnatural humor of death. It

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is absurd to equate someone who came from nothing and will not be missed with another who suggests culture, history, and mystery. Or perhaps it is here, in the mystery of death, where the comedy is developed: it is a fact of history that bodies have been switched both in life and in death, and when one can again be replaced for another, dignity can be restored.

Humor has acquired only subtle differences in these centuries, and our forefathers laughed at much of the same things that we find laughable today: exaggeration of an incident that grants freedom to the storyteller to spin the yarn with a good twist on words and to poke good humor at someone who appears to be lesser in stature or in want of life's gifts. A good joke gives superiority to the teller and bawdy laughter follows even the most primitive humor. Too often in modern society it is the primitive humor that dominates; some sophistication has been lost due to a change in language use and appreciation of the depths of vocabulary. Yet, modern America has its remnant of good comics and humor masters who will sustain this contemporary culture for a later analysis. But it is also modern humor that needs to find its roots. Studying the dialectical humor of the early Southwestern writers such as George Washington Harris among others will enable an appreciation of the language and humor, and some of the lusty and raucous heritage that has been left behind may be reclaimed.

Works Cited

Chapman, Robert L. American Slang. Grand Rapids: Harper & Row Publishers. 1987.

Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood's Yarns. New Haven, Conn: College &

University Press. 1966.

The missing link. Time. June 24, 1996 v147 n26 p21(1). 15Feb1999. Available: Infotrack

Searchbank.