ABSTRACT
Oxford's volume of American humour has as its cover a picture of the map of the US with a cigar protruding from a mouth drawn across the country. Anthropologist Mahadev L. Apte proposes that 'humour is culture based in the sense that individual cultural systems significantly influence the mechanism that triggers the humour experience. Familiarity with a cultural code is a prerequisite for the spontaneous mental restructuring of elements that results in amusement and laughter'. Women laugh at the systematic appropriation and misuse of power by those who have no right to rule; they do not laugh at a victim, a scapegoat. American women's humour has an underground tradition of making trouble, even for those critics who would seek to classify it under broader headings. Novelist Edith Wharton, whose House of Mirth is indisputably an American classic, laces her prose with a venomous and pointed humour that makes her both 'unladylike' and emblematic of the woman writer.
