ABSTRACT
An aspiring doctor is told by his superior to cup a large African-American woman’s sternum to alleviate her symptoms. Because he has only reached the letter C in his anatomy guide, the apprentice doctor is befuddled, and he mistakenly believes that the sternum is located on the woman’s posterior, as if the human body were laid out like a naval vessel. Though both the young doctor and especially the woman are uncomfortable, he presses on and does his duty. This scenario seems ripped from an episode of South Park or Family Guy because it is so inappropriate and absurd. However, it is actually a scene from Henry Clay Lewis’s short story “Cupping on a Sternum,” published in popular sportsman and hunting magazine The Spirit of the Times in 1845. The scene illustrates the tendency to rely on ironic misunderstanding and grotesque humor in American humor and serves as one of the many similarities shared between the antebellum Southwest humor and the humor of animated television.
