In the following essay, Walker posits female humor writing as a challenge to the popular nineteenth-century notion of women as the frail and humorless keepers and producers of the "sentimental."

Blair is recognized as a prominent literary critic and has been identified by Hamlin Hill as "the foremost critic and analyst" of American humor writing. In this excerpt, which originally appeared in the May, 1931, issue of American Literature, Blair provides a comprehensive view of the genre as well as the argument that humor writing advanced the development of American literature.

In this excerpt, Habeggar argues that in the 1860s, "humor . . . was a club for men only," substantiating his assertion with a study of the masculine bias in several texts.

In the following excerpt from a review of several volumes of American humor writing, a commentator from The London and Westminster Review makes the claim that the United States has begun to create a literature of its own.

In this excerpt from the essay originally published in America as Americans See It, Seldes describes American humor writing before the Civil War as distinctly democratic, reflecting an emphasis on the common citizen appropriate to a young democracy that was distrustful of things European.