The Funny Bone

The Funny Bone is a humorous book by Henry Martyn Kieffer, the American Reformed clergyman and writer who lived from 1845 to 1930. Kieffer served as a pastor in various Reformed Church and Reformed Episcopal congregations across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and produced substantial writing alongside his pastoral work, including memoir, occasional poetry, and the kind of light popular work that the title suggests.

Kieffer’s most substantial book was The Recollections of a Drummer Boy, his memoir of his service as a young Union Army drummer during the American Civil War, originally published in 1883. The book was widely read in the substantial market for Civil War memoir literature that the post war decades produced and remained in print across several generations, becoming one of the better known American Civil War memoirs from the perspective of a very young participant. Kieffer had been only fifteen when he enlisted as a drummer boy in 1862, and the memoir gives a substantial account of the war years from the unusual perspective of a young teenager attached to a Union regiment.

The Funny Bone belongs to Kieffer’s lighter literary output, with the title suggesting a collection of humorous anecdotes, sketches, jokes, or similar comic material. The genre had substantial commercial popularity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American publishing, with various clergymen and other respectable figures producing collections of clean humor that the substantial American Protestant audience could read without violating the various standards of decorum that the period’s Protestant publishing market required.

Kieffer’s particular position as a Reformed clergyman gave him a respectable platform from which the humorous material could be presented to the substantial American Protestant audience. The humor in such collections typically combined the various traditional categories including domestic humor, anecdotes about clerical and ecclesiastical life, observations on the foibles and characters of various small town American types, jokes drawn from the broader American oral comic tradition, and the kind of gentle wordplay and verbal humor that the late nineteenth century American comic literature favoured.

The book is of interest now to historians of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American humor literature and to readers interested in the broader respectable clerical and middle class American comic tradition of the period. It pairs naturally with the Recollections of a Drummer Boy and with the broader American humor anthology tradition of the period.