“’Sheart, man, pass o’er the history and commence thy fabrication!”: The Two Sot-Weed Factors; Their Nation, Its Humor, History, and Identity

Recent trends in the disciplines of history and American literature have marked a departure from certainty and a move toward uncertainty about America’s place in the world, something which had been previously affirmed by exceptionalist historical narratives supporting idealized notions of an inherently American identity. I examine the connection between this increased historical doubt, American identity and nationalism, and John Barth’s novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a retelling of the seventeenth-century poet Ebenezer Cooke’s satire of the same name. Both texts criticize the ways in which history can be whitewashed and expose the reality of colonial America’s vice through their use of humor; therefore, throughout this essay, I use the lens of humor studies to investigate the ways that the aforementioned criticism emerges from a close reading of both the novel and its poetic source material. Satire, in particular, is an extension of the humor of aggression, one of the oldest humorous modes, and has been deployed as a corrective by everyone from the Greeks and Romans to our Puritan ancestors. In the case of Barth and Cooke, their humor-as-corrective is directed against their protagonists, both of whom come to symbolize the salient issues of their times.