Claire Schmidt: If You Don’t Laugh You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers

If You Don't Laugh You'll Cry has lain on my shelf for a year or two now; I have read it, taught from it, plundered its works cited for new readings, but had yet to sit down and try to encompass it into a review.In part the book's great strength is also the reviewer's great challenge: it bestrides a study of humor, an occupational folklife study, and a reflection on family folklore.The two former are reflected in the subtitle, The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers, which also introduces the regional and ethnic contexts of the performances under discussion.What gives the book its great import, however, is the third, insider, familial context.Schmidt comes from a family that has worked for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections for three generations, beginning with the grandfathers on both sides.In her conclusion she hints at the book's genesis: "I think what I really intended, underneath it all, was to show off how funny and wise my grandfathers were.I wanted to introduce my family and friends to the world, so that the world could start thinking a little bit harder about what it means to work in a prison at the beginning of the twenty-first century" (p.206).This "thinking harder" requires the reader to push backor throughthe stigma associated with the profession in popular and vernacular culture, a stigma that prison workers know all too well.How does a family participate in the joyfulness of humor and laughter in a context that, as Schmidt grew to realize over time, operates within cycles of racism and white supremacy, sexism and misogyny (and arguably misandry), homophobia, and class conflict, all of which are inherently interwoven in the American industrial prison complex?Are they, as it were, bad people?Is the only appropriate response unlaughter, and everything less a personal failing?Schmidt assures us to the contrary, and over the course of the book she makes that compelling and ultimately convincing argument.The book is broken into three untitled parts, each in turn comprising three chapters.Part 1 sets the parameters of the blurry lines between occupational and family lore.Occupations and families are often intertwinedpolice, civil servants,

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