“Humor, in the end, seems to be one of those ‘idiomatic imponderables’ (in Edgar Thompson’s phrase) that continue to set the South apart from the rest of the country.”

This is Southern Cultures‘s first “special issue”—that is, its first devoted to a single topic. The topic is southern humor, and the articles come from a symposium on the subject at Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of 1993.