Why Do the Critics Say Theodore Dreiser is Humorless?

It seems to be a cliché of the critical writing about the work of author Theodore Dreiser that his writing is humorless (New York Times reviewer Henry Longan Stuart, for instance, taking the view as not only irrefutable but generally accepted in a since anthologized and much-cited piece). Coming to this cliché I did not give it much thought until I read Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself, in which he proved to be anything but, and still more after reading The Titan, which had me laughing out loud again and again--the book at times unintentionally funny, admittedly, funny mainly because of how it appeared in light of what Dreiser had had to say in his memoir, but most of the time it was funny because Dreiser was, in fact, being humorous, and this more important because it is as a writer of fiction that we judge Dreiser.

I can think of two possible explanations for Dreiser's reputation on this point that seem to me worth bringing up because they have to do with a lot more than the reaction of the critics to just this one writer.

1. The charge of humorlessness is a critical attack on what the critics perceive as his politics. One of the cheapest, stalest, lamest (and therefore most readily used and little challenged) counter-attacks by those who uphold the status quo against its critics is that they are lacking in humanity. These people, they say, profess all these ideals, but have no feeling for the fellow humans whose lives they say they want to improve. No love, no sense of the richness and variety of life, no soul--and no sense of humor. Thus seeing Dreiser write critically of the prevailing order and its mores they gabble on and on about his prose being newspaper copy, and fling the "no sense of humor" charge at him.

2. The critics really did fail to see the humor in his books, because if they bothered to read him at all rather than just repeat others' opinions they were just too plain stupid to get the joke (never underestimate the obtuseness of professional critics), or because the way their not necessarily-stupid-but-at-the-very-least-misaligned-brains work did not allow them to perceive his humor as humor. Critics' ability to pick up on satire has always been uneven, with the more trenchant the satire the more uncertain their recognition--and this the more in as the critics belong to that long line of Establishment litteratteurs who believe that comedy, like everything else, must punch down. When they see a writer punching up, however hilariously, they see not humor but only blasphemy which they must punish--and punish Dreiser they have, relegating him to the status of, in David Walsh's words, "a dead dog." Which, after all, is probably why you came across this blog post--because so few are bothering to discuss Dreiser at all that for lack of anywhere else to direct you the search engine and artificial intelligence algorithms led you here.