Friday from the Archives: “The Early Humorous Tradition of the Lower Cape Fear, from the Lampoon of “Old Silenus” to the Early Work of Johnson Jones Hooper” by Richard Rankin in NCLR 2000
As 2026 approaches, America 250 is ever-present. And in literature, as in most realms of modern life, we can appreciate much about the genres, themes, and characters of that time period and how they impact and speak to our literature today. North Carolina writing from the American Revolution time period (plus or minus twenty years) still rings as North Carolina writing today.
Richard Rankin, then a history professor at Queens College, wrote “The Early Humorous Tradition of the Lower Cape Fear, from the Lampoon of “Old Silenus” to the Early Work of Johnson Jones Hooper” for our 2000 issue. Wagering that most readers today have no idea who The Musquetoe, Archibald Maclain, or Johnson Hooper were, the themes and characters these writers used are still intimately familiar: satire of the elites, antics at home, the Poor white Southern grifter. Rankin posits, “Throughout the eighteenth century and even until the earliest work, in 1830, of Wilmington native and resident Johnson Jones Hooper, local humorists relied heavily on English satire to express the meaning of certain social interaction. In his first poem, a transitional piece titled “Anthony Milan’s Launch,” Hooper began to move from older English satire to the original American humor that would make him nationally famous later….”
After examining several different types of writing from the time period, Rankin pulls from Hooper’s best known character, Captain Simon Suggs, and quotes from one of the stories. “As different as Southwestern humor was from traditional wit and humor,” Rankin writes, “it still offered literate Southerners the chance to laugh privately about disagreeable public matters. The genre belles lettres survived into the early national period because it allowed the gentry to amuse themselves away from the scrutiny and judgment of strict republicans and humorless evangelicals. Lower Cape Fear gentlemen and ladies who read The Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs could laugh unreservedly at fictional representatives of the Southern underclasses who had become such a political force in the Age of Jackson. Democracy undercut the political and cultural power of the upper class. When the respectable class laughed at Suggs and his folks, they may have been relieving anxiety and frustration they felt at the rise of the common man.”
The lineage from Hooper to Paul Green to David Joy, and countless others, shows how North Carolina writers have and continue to use the power of the written word to share the plight of the common man, bring to light the wrongs done by the powerful, and advocate for a safer, better state and country for us all. America 250 continues to show how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
Read Rankin’s entire essay on Gale Cengage. Add the 2000 issue to your collection today!
