mark twain humor essay

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• The 10 Wittiest Essays By...

The 10 Wittiest Essays By Mark Twain

An American author and humorist, Mark Twain is known for his witty works, which include books, essays, short stories, speeches, and more. While not every single piece of written work was infused with humor, many were, ranging from deadpan humor to laugh-out-loud funny. We’ve put together a list, in no particular order, of ten witty pieces that will give you a peek inside the wittiness of this celebrated author.

The Awful German Language

As anyone who has ever learned or attempted to learn a second language knows, it is difficult and can be very frustrating at times. Twain explores this in the witty essay ‘ The Awful German Language ,’ which was first published in Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. He describes the language as ‘perplexing’ with its ten different parts of speech, one sound meaning several different things, super long words, which he believes have their own ‘perspective,’ and so on. After breaking down the language, Twain goes on to describe how he would ‘reform it.’ When it comes to these long compound words, for example, he would ‘require the speaker to deliver them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments.’

How to Tell a Story

In ‘How to Tell a Story ,’ Twain discusses the humorous story, which he says is the ‘one difficult kind’ and purely American. The humorous story, as Twain points out, ‘is told gravely’ and takes time to tell, whereas comic and witty stories, which are English and French respectively, are short and get right to the point. Twain also states that when is comes to comic storytellers, they will often repeat the punch line while looking back and forth at each person’s face to see reactions. Twain describes this ‘a pathetic thing to see.’ He goes on to give readers a couple of examples: ‘The Wounded Soldier’ (comic) and ‘The Golden Arm’ (humorous).

Advice To Youth

‘Always obey your parents…,’ is first piece of ‘advice’ Twain gives in his satirical essay ‘ Advice To Youth ,’ written in 1882; however, he immediately follows it with ‘…when they are present.’ He also discusses respecting superiors, but if they offend in any way, then the youth may ‘simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.’ Other pieces of ‘advice’ from Twain include ‘be very careful about lying’ and ‘never handle firearms carelessly.’ He writes of books and how ‘Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saints’ Rest… ‘ are some of the books that the youth should read ‘exclusively.’ Twain was making a social commentary about the people of his time, but it is a fun read.

Taming the Bicycle

‘ Taming the Bicycle ‘ is a funny account of Twain learning to ride an old high wheel bike. This piece, while never published during his lifetime as he was never happy with it, is laugh-out-loud funny. Taking lessons from ‘the Expert,’ Twain has much difficulty learning to stay on the bike. Indeed, ‘He [the Expert] said that dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn… But he was in error there.’ Hilarity ensues as Twain falls, repeatedly, on his teacher as he has trouble staying the bike for any amount of time. Eventually, Twain does learn how to get on the bike and dismount properly; he even writes ‘Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.’

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences

Professionals once described Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder as ‘artistic creations’ and Cooper himself as ‘the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fictions.’ In ‘ Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences ,’ Mark Twain clearly thought otherwise. In this critical essay, Twain states that Cooper violated 18 of the ‘rules governing literary art’ and proceeds to explain each one. Some of the funnier moments or rules broken include ‘1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air’ and ’12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.’ This piece is biting and funny at the same time.

At the Funeral

While funerals are serious, Mark Twain manages to make the subject funny in ‘ At the Funeral ,’ a short essay in which the humorous writer gives his take on proper etiquette when attending such an event. For example, the attendee must not ‘criticise the person in whose honor the entertainment is given’ and definitely ‘make no remarks about his equipment.’ Also, the attendee should only ‘be moved…according to the degree of your intimacy’ with the people hosting the funeral or the deceased. And lastly, as only Twain would point out, ‘Do not bring your dog.’

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On Theft and Conscience

‘On Theft and Conscience’ is an except taken from a speech Twain gave in 1902 and is printed in Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race . He recalled the first time he ‘removed’ (stole) a watermelon from a wagon; once he looked at it, he realized it was not yet ripe. He had a bit of remorse, so he returned the watermelon to the owner. This is Mark Twain after all; therefore, he told the owner ‘to reform.’ The owner, in turn, gave Twain a ripe melon, and Twain ‘forgave’ the owner.

The Jumping Frog

In 1865, Mark Twain wrote ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,’ a witty short story about a gambler named Jim Smiley as told by the bartender, Sam Wheeler. A French writer, while liking the story and thinking it was funny, didn’t understand why it would cause anyone to laugh and translated the story into French in order prove his point. Twain caught wind of it and translated it back into English but using the grammatical structure and syntax of the French language. As he points out, ‘the Frenchman has riddled the grammar. I think it is the worst I ever saw…’ He published everything as ‘ The Jumping Frog : In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More By Patient, Unremunerated Toil.’

A Presidential Candidate

A satirical essay written in 1879, ‘A Presidential Candidate’ makes fun of the campaign process and explores the ideal candidate or in Twain’s words ‘a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history…’ If the candidate did, indeed, expose all his ‘wickedness’ then his opponents could not use his past against him. A truly witty piece, some of the secrets revealed include the candidate burying his deceased aunt under his grapevines because ‘the vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose’ and his dislike for ‘the poor man.’

Advice to Little Girls

While it is a funny short story, ‘ Advice to Little Girls ‘ also has deeper meaning: girls should think for themselves. For example, one piece of ‘advice’ Twain shares is ‘If you mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won’t.’ He writes that little girls should act as they will do what they’re told but that ‘afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.’ This piece also has recommendations on how take chewing gum from little brothers, how to treat friends who have better toys, plus several more little gems.

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Mark Twain's Humor

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Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career. The essays determine how the humor takes on meaning and importance and how the humor works in a number of ways in the literary canon and even in the persona of Mark Twain.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction, part | 132  pages, the early writings of mark twain: the growth of the comedian, chapter | 28  pages, “my voice is still for setchell”: a background study of “jim smiley and his jumping frog”, chapter | 20  pages, burlesque travel literature and mark twain’s roughing it, chapter | 34  pages, from the old southwest, chapter | 24  pages, “a curious republican”, toward the novel, part | 256  pages, the middle career of mark twain from tom sawyer to pudd’nhead wilson: the comedian as major author, chapter | 2  pages, novels of the week: the adventures of tom sawyer, chapter | 18  pages, on the structure of tom sawyer, chapter | 10  pages, chapter | 12  pages, trowbridge and clemens, musings without method, chapter | 4  pages, mark twain and the old time subscription book, mark twain on the lecture platform, life reviews huckleberry finn, huckleberry finn: the book we love to hate, chapter | 30  pages, a sound heart and a deformed conscience, chapter | 6  pages, a connecticut yankee anticipated: max adder’s fortunate island, yankee slang, “i kind of love small game”: mark twain’s library of literary hogwash, the american claimant: reclamation of a farce, mark twain—an intimate memory, the book hunter, chapter | 8  pages, in re “pudd’nhead wilson”, “the tales he couldn’t tell”: mark twain, race and culture at the century’s end: a social context for pudd’nhead wilson 1, part | 204  pages, the later career of mark twain: the comedian as a cultural representative, mark twain: an inquiry, chapter | 14  pages, the international fame of mark twain, chapter | 16  pages, an inspired critic, the anecdotal side of mark twain, “3.—mark twain”, review of tom sawyer abroad, “hadleyburg”: mark twain’s dual attack on banal theology and banal literature, is the philippine policy of the administration just, chapter | 36  pages, reconstructing the “imagination-mill”: the mystery of mark twain’s late works, coming back to humor: the comic voice in mark twain’s autobiography, chapter | 22  pages, “the mysterious stranger”: absence of the female in mark twain biography.

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Home > Arts & Sciences > ENGLISH > ENGLISH-BOOKS > 10

English Faculty Book Series

Mark Twain's Humor: Critical Essays

David E.E. Sloane , University of New Haven Follow

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Introduction / David E.E. Sloane -- Part I. The early writings of Mark Twain : the growth of the comedian -- 'My voice is still for Setchell' : a background study of 'Jim Smiley and his jumping frog' / Edgar M. Branch -- Burlesque travel literature and Mark Twain's Roughing it / Franklin R. Rogers -- From the old Southwest / Pascal Covici, Jr. -- A curious Republican / Louis J. Budd -- Toward the novel / David E.E. Sloane -- Part II. The middle career of Mark Twain from Tom Sawyer to Pudd'nhead Wilson : the comedian as major author -- Novels of the week : The adventures of Tom Sawyer / Athenaeum -- On the structure of Tom Sawyer / Walter Blair -- Mark Twain / William Dean Howells -- Trowbridge and Clemens / Rufus A. Coleman -- Mustangs without method / Blackwood's magazine -- Mark Twain and the old time subscription book / George Ade -- Mark Twain on the lecture platform / Will M. Clemens -- Life reviews Huckleberry Finn / Durant Da Ponte -- Huckleberry Finn : the book we love to hate / Leslie A. Fiedler -- A sound heart and a deformed conscience / Henry Nash Smith -- A Connecticut Yankee anticipated : Max Adeler's Fortunate island / Edward F. Foster -- Yankee slang / James M. Cox -- I kind of love small game : Mark Twain's library of literary hogwash / Alan Gribben -- The American claimant : reclamation of a farce / Clyde Grimm -- Mark Twain -- an intimate memory / Henry Watterson -- The book hunter [review of Pudd'nhead Wilson] / The Idler -- In re 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' / Martha McCulloch Williams -- 'The tales he couldn't tell' : Mark Twain, race and culture at the century's end : a social context for Pudd'nhead Wilson / Shelley Fisher Fiskin -- Part III. The later career of Mark Twain : the comedian as a cultural representative -- Mark Twain : an inquiry / William Dean Howells -- The international fame of Mark Twain / Archibald Henderson -- An inspired critic / Edith Wyatt -- The anecdotal side of Mark Twain / Ladies' Home Journal -- 3-Mark Twain / A.C. Ward -- Review of Tom Sawyer abroad / The Academy -- 'Hadleyburg' : Mark Twain's dual attack on banal theology and banal literature / Susan K. Harris -- Is the Philippine policy of the administration just? / John Kendrick Bangs and Mark Twain -- Reconstructing the 'imagination mill' : the mystery of Mark Twain's late works / Susanne Weil -- Coming back to humor : the comic voice in Mark Twain's autobiography / Michael J. Kiskis -- 'The mysterious stranger' : absence of the female in Mark Twain biography / Laura E. Skandera-Trombley.

9781138300675

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Mark Twain, Humor

Subject: LCSH

Twain, Mark, -- 1835-1910 -- Humor, Humorous stories, American -- History and criticism

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English Language and Literature

Originally published 1993 as part of Garland studies in humor , vol. 3.; Garland reference library of the humanities , vol. 1502. Re-issued in 2017 as part of Routledge Library Editions: The Modern Novel. Find the 2017 edition in a library

Repository Citation

Sloane, David E.E., "Mark Twain's Humor: Critical Essays" (2017). English Faculty Book Series . 10. https://digitalcommons.newhaven.edu/english-books/10

Publisher Citation

Sloane, D. E. E., ed. (1993). Mark Twain's humor: Critical essays. New York: Garland Publishing.

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Mark Twain's Humor Critical Essays

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Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career. The essays determine how the humor takes on meaning and importance and how the humor works in a number of ways in the literary canon and even in the persona of Mark Twain.

Table of Contents

David E. E. Sloane

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• DOI: 10.4324/9780203733219
• Corpus ID: 160193706

Mark Twain's Humor : Critical Essays

• David E. E. Sloane
• Published 1993

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Mark Twain's Legendary Humor

Topics: Legendary Authors , Movie Tie-Ins

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain , is one of the most celebrated authors in all of American literature. Born in Florida, Missouri in 1835, Twain moved to Hannibal, the town that inspired the location for some of his most famous novels, when he was four years old. He began his career working as an apprentice printer before moving on to work as a typesetter. His brother Orion had recently purchased The Hannibal Journal,  and Twain frequently contributed articles and sketches to the publication. He later went on to realize a lifelong ambition of working on steamboat, a vocation which provided him with his pen name. “Mark twain” means the depth of the river measures twelve feet, which meant the water was safe for the steamboat. Twain worked on steamboats until the Civil War, at which point he enrolled in the Confederate Army for a period of less than a month. After the war, he moved to Nevada to be with his brother who was working there as a secretary to the governor. Twain worked briefly as a silver miner, and this experience inspired him to write his first successfully published piece of fiction. Though Twain is best known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , his first short story “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ” is more representative of his great achievements as a humorist.

During the 1860s, lectures were an astoundingly popular form of entertainment, much like going to the cinema today. Twain's lectures offered humorous accounts of his trips to places like the Sandwich Islands, Paris, Egypt, and various locations along the Mediterranean. These lectures, beyond providing him with additional money to finance future travels, also brought more attention to his written works. This allowed for the publication of a collection of his travel articles on a trip to the Hold Land, The Innocents Abroad , as well as a semi-autobiographical account of his time spent in the west as a miner. This pseudo-memoir, Roughing It , is an example of the humor that eventually plays a large part in the majority of his work.  Roughing It  also served as a partial inspiration for the television series Bonanza .

Twain published his first novel in 1873. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today was written with his friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner based on a challenge issued to them by their wives. While the use of humor and satire was praised in the novel, it was not considered successful due to its lack of cohesion, and understandable problem since it was written in separate chunks by the two writers. One reviewer compared it to a poorly mixed salad dressing. The novel satirizes society and government in the post- Civil War era. Because of its topic, the novel has remained in print and is considered relevant today.

Huckleberry Finn is considered the first Great American Novel and has been studied and banned in schools since its publication in 1885. Besides being considered incredibly vulgar at the time, the humor, one of the hallmarks of the novel, was said to be unsuitable for women and children. Still, Twain's impressive use of vernacular English and colloquialisms, humor, and harsh satire of racism ensured him a place among the greats of American literature.

Though none of Twain's novels approached the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , many of them still incorporate the characteristic humor and satire for which the author is known. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court takes an engineer and transplants him to Camelot, where he overthrows Merlin as Arthur's chief adviser and subsequently destroys everything with his attempts at modernization.

Mark Twain was widely respected during his lifetime for his poignant satire, characteristic humor , and much-loved characters. His work continues to be printed, read, studied and adapted today. His much-deserved place in the literary canon is cemented just as much by his work as a humorist as it is by the serious themes and issues in his novels.

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Mark Twain and His Humor According to Critics Essay (Critical Writing)

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Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30 1835. He is a celebrated American author, critic, and humorist who first used his name Samuel Clemens in Nevada and California. He worked as a printer in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. He also became a steamboat pilot at the river ports of St. Louis and New Orleans. He and his family moved to Nook Farm in Hartford, Connecticut in the 1860s then to Fredonia, New York and Keokuk, Iowa. These localities embedded in Samuel Clemens a hybrid of cultures, commerce and traditions. At age 22, Twain became a steamboat pilot. He also became a miner in Virginia City, Nevada after traveling with his brother Orion across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Gribben).

Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in November 1865 at New York Saturday press after failing to make it in a compilation. He was then commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write travelogues. He also became a travel correspondent to the Alta California newspaper. His The Innocents Abroad is also the product of his 5-month sail with the pleasure cruiser Quaker City in 1867. The follow-up to this travel literature is Roughing It chronicling his journeys to Nevada and the American west. It lampooned western society as much as The Innocents Abroad critiqued the Middle East and Europe. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is his collaboration with neighbor Charles Dudley Warner and an attempt to writing a novel. His next important works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , called the first Great American Novel.

Twain made a great deal of money through his writing but his investments on scientific inventions and investment in publishing made him lose money faster so that in order to pay his creditors in full, he lectured around the world even if it was no longer his legal obligation to pay them (Cox, 127). The wit and humor of Mark Twain is what endeared him to his readers and set him apart from his contemporaries and most of the well-known writers before him.

Van Wyck Brooks suggested that Twain entered New England, “emasculated by the Civil War” (90) of which at that time had the male population reduced so that there was feminization of the then American culture and Twain as Cox observed, became “an invader” (Sewanee Review, 596) where, “genteel society he brought free drinking and smoking, to morality he added humor, to sentiment, burlesque, to seriousness, play” (Krauth, 368). He was chronicled to own personal copies of works by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph Field, William Tappan Thompson, George Washington Harris, Johnson Jones and Joseph Baldwin. His humor is much credited to “the Old Southwest ” which was very evident in Huckleberry Finn. According to Krauth (369), Twain’s writing became humorous because of the impact of New England culture which the writer adopted when he moved to New England in 1880s. As a correspondent for Alta California, Twain was noted to have opined about Harris’ humor as quite usual and normal in the West but as something unacceptable by the eastern people. Twain “reshapes the tradition of the Southwestern humor by writing within it as a Victorian” (Krauth, 369). He however, did not sell out to New England gentility at the cost of his art but an innate part of Mark Twain is a propriety that separated him from frontier life.

Through Huckleberry Finn, Krauth insists of Twain’s propriety in the following ways:

• Reshaping some of the stock situations and the characters which were predominant to the Southwestern humor such as the common Southwestern characters: the con-men Duke and the King, the camp meeting, the circus and the Royal Nonesuch
• Selected from the raw materials few certain subjects and discarding the rest
• His propriety governed his creation of characters such as Huck who has become a classic challenger of morality until today, thus, “as a Victorian, Twain reformed Southwestern humor” (Krauth, 369).

It is but normal to base most of Twain’s humor on his greatest as well as most popular novel. Here, he described the orgies of camp meetings as something that could induce “a cow laugh” (127) that nevertheless maintained the innocence of Huck as the child observer. Southwestern humor was enumerated to include hunting, fights, mock fights, animal fights, courtings, weddings, honeymoons, frolics, dances, games, horse races, contests, militia drills, legislature and the courtroom, sermons, camp meetings, religious gatherings, visitor of a humble home, country boy in the city, riverboat, rogue adventures, pranks and tricks of a joker, gambling, trades and swindles, cures, sickness and medical treatments, drunks, foreigners and dandies, and local eccentrics. Some of these themes are present in Adventures of Huckleberry, but they are mostly ridiculed and share the sense of dehumanizing men through Twain’s presenting them as bestial creatures (Krauth, 373).

Krauth keeps to an idea that despite the Southwestern description of a man as “hard, isolate(d), stoic and a killer,” (374) Twain disparages him (a man) and “reveals the pernicious traits in gentleman and commoner alike” (Krauth, 374). White adult males in Adventures of Huckleberry do possess these features, because the new Judge, the drunken Pap, and Colonel Sherburn are indeed depicted as aggressive and destructive people, but such an imminent violence is attributed to white males only (Krauth, 374). Nevertheless, sentimentality which was typical for Victorian life on the nineteenth century is still present in this novel. Huck often gives voice to his emotions being quite sentimental at this. He “dismisses emotional outpourings as “tears and flapdoodle”, “soul butter and hogwash,” “rot and slush,” (Krauth, 377) because he is a gentleman with extraordinary tenderness. As Krauth has observed, Huck’s “remark reveals […] how bound together in Huckleberry Finn humor and sentiment are” (381).

When it comes to literary intention, Robinson (358) finds Melville and Hawthorne to present conscious ideas accessible to critical scrutiny and describes Twain to be a “shakier ground […] notoriously makeshift, fragmentary, and prone to drastic contradictions” (358). The shift and blending of a black child’s voice to a white child’s was effortless and unconscious that leaves even modern critics wondering. Another, Henry Wonham who’s work Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale proposed that the humorist adopted “the rhetoric of the tall tale […] to provide a structural and thematic pattern that he would return to throughout the rest of his career” (Wonham, 12). He further observed that in balancing anecdotal quality and developmental theme, Twain sustained a “digressive, exaggerative style of humor and thematic coherence at the same time” (114).

To this, Robinson (363) concluded that Twain was unconsciously drifting and surrendering to the min’s natural flow with narrow focus on specific incidents disregarding structure and thematic concerns such that his novels took time to be finished. As Twain himself wrote to William Dean Howells, he was delighted with the “dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness” against the “darling and worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor & fuss & the other artificialities” (363). In most of his sharing with friends and fellow critics, Twain upheld those which did not seem to have a method, where there is careless progress of a story unmindful of how it ends, whether brilliant or not, or if it shall end at all as if what he wrote “write itself” (Robinson, 364). Here, restraint, expediency, policy, and diplomacy were shunned and what is presented to the reader is unencumbered authenticity which lies in penetrating a transparent disguise. Some of Twain’s books had been perceived to have lacked literary design or planning, fragmented at most, so that he advised his audience of aspiring writers in 1902 that when working on a story and a moment lags, they should set the work aside, “until some future tie, when the right way to treat the subject shall have come to you from that mill whose helpful machinery never stands idle – unconscious celebration” (Robinson, 365).

Twain indulged on the unconscious creativity although he acknowledged to have methods, as if what he wrote were passed on to him, the mind, like a machine of which one cannot dictate on it, “unless it suits its humour” and that all ideas came from the outside, second-hand and drawn from a lot of external sources (Robinson, 366).

Wonham (12) further noted Twain tall tale rhetoric “as a strategy for drawing his disparate comic material into extended and coherent narratives’ ‘ (12). Wonham believes that Twain tried to include the naïve reader or audience to his narrative through “his drawing speech and affected seriousness” (147). Wonham further suggests that Twain was fully conscious, a spinner of tall tales and as such, Twain considered a multiple audience, his words with multiple meanings all at once so that the words may mean different to each audience (31). Robinson (364) joined that this meant there are both outsiders and insiders to the joke, and one of them is the butt of the ridicule.

This however, is not the case in all of his works. There is much criticism especially on Pudd’nhead Wilson of which Twain was seen to have the most inconsistent narration thereby, readers are cautioned by critics to beware (Robinson, 370). It was considered a merging of bits and pieces, of characters that appear from nowhere without purpose but for completion and for profit, seen as Twain’s way to address his dwindling resources at that period of his as publisher.

Further, Robinson noted on previous view about Twain as a well-suited travel writer as the humorist is freed to examine diversity of the world instead of consistency and transitions. Again, Twain’s structure was seen as weak, linking it to twain’s perception of worldly order as tantalizingly elusive. In the later chapters of Roughing It, Mark Twain obviously becomes disenchanted with the Far West. The deception of tall tales become cruel and painful with consequences which the humorist could not ignore as he narrated about a practical joke played on him, and its impact on his new-found attitude of shunning practical jokes, or even practicing them (Robinson, 375). Robinson attacked Woman’s interpretation of Tom Sawyer as “a carefully planned and elaborated rhetorical contest between the narrator, who is improbably characterized as an inflated sentimentalist, and Tom, whose tall tales are subtly contrived” in order to affirm community values.

For Wonham, all these tall tales affirm the community’s commitment to common sense, that inspire sappy women to petition the governor for a after-death pardon of Injun Joe. For Robinson, on the contrary, there is irrationality everywhere in Tom Sawyer which he contends to have un-designed penetration to “complex social dynamics, conscious and unconscious, racial and sexual, of village life” and as Twain wrote, his intent for Tom Sawyer was for the entertainment of boys and girls. As such, Robinson (380) proposed that the question of intention when it comes to Mark Twain is quite questionable and delicate. Those readers should be conscious of what the humorist wrote and what he actually meant. Twain for Robinson is not a highly conscious writer humorist but “an artist of decidedly inchoate intentions whose work invites, and even demands, close attention to unconscious motives” (380).

Budd (233) also considered much about the perception of critics and readers of Desperate Encounter with an Interviewer as classically humorous. It was a play at the absurdity of interviewing, fame, of death and living, of absurdity and it being a classic Mark Twain the humorist (233). Written in 1874, the short anecdotal went into its conclusion:

“A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful mystery has cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark, a large mole on the back of the left hand,–that was me. That child was the one that was drowned.

Q. Very well, then, I dont see that there is any mystery about it, after all.

A. You dont? Well, I do. Anyway I dont see how they could ever have been such a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child. But, sh!–dont mention it where the family can hear of it. Heaven knows they have heart-breaking troubles enough without adding this.

Q. Well, I believe I have got material enough for the present, and I am very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken. But I was a good deal interested in that account of Aaron Burrs funeral. Would you mind telling me what particular circumstance it was that made you think Burr was such a remarkable man?

A. O, it was a mere trifle! Not one man in fifty would have noticed it at all. When the sermon was over, and the procession all ready to start for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in the hearse, he said he wanted to take a last look at the scenery, and so he got up and rode with the driver.

Then the young man reverently withdrew. He was very pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go” (Twain).

It was said that when Twain wrote this, he had been siding with the “would-be elite who warned that the circulation-hungry newspapers were pandering to shallow tastes while lowering the standard for public discourse” (Budd, 234). It was sneered upon as a collaboration of a humbug politician with an equally humbug newspaper reporter. However, Twain at that time was not yet trailed upon or interviewed by reporters. In fact, he has known to have encouraged interest of the press. It was also viewed as an attack on the New York Sun which sensationalizes (p 235). The anecdote is also an attack on the common sense. Rationality is mocked as mass media is saturating the world with information both useless, and mostly senseless. It asks the interviewer to spell “interview” as well as directly states that reporters go after those who are “notorious” and not emulation-worthy individuals. Here, Twain shows how disappointed he is with the media. As Budd has noted, Twain “teased, baited, and insulted (and sometimes offended) his audiences” (236); he was irreverent, but ascertained equality between himself, his audience, and his host. And he admitted that it took a heap of sense to produce a good nonsense (Budd, 238).

Mark Twain is a man of talent. It cannot be said that he sustained a consistent writing ability as a humorist, a critic and a great novelist, but it was enough that two or three made it to the consciousness of millions. It is not, however, the form or intent of Twain that has endeared him to his readers but his humor, off-sided, unconscious, flowing and natural in self-deprecation manner, from his travelogues to his opus — Huckleberry Finn, and maintained even in his lesser-known writings.

Twain is a man of mistakes and a man who made bad financial moves and choices. This is quite often shown in his works. However, his sentimentality cannot be ignored; he tried to express this sentimentality through his leading characters. He was able to present this to his readers by making them laugh about the sublime subtleties of “other centeredness” most apparent again in his opus, his unforgettable Huck Finn. Namely this character was used by Twain to depict Victorian life and to present the image of a man of Victorian times.

In sum, critics have different ideas about the humor which is present in some works of Mark Twain. At this, most of them agree that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the novel on which Twain’s humor is based. This novel presents different images of men in Victorian times mixed with Twain’s own ideas about the features which a real gentleman should possess. Today, as more readers discover Huck or Tom, they are reminded of true values that are not dictated upon by what is acceptable or popular but what one truly feels as which he should do, right or wrong. By providing his readers a character that is Huck, Twain has forever given joy and humor as well as sense of direction not about his method or work style, but to humanity as a whole. It is not so much about who was the better humorist or greatest novelist, but who has given his readers an insight to what shall remain wrong and what shall remain forever as right. And with the bonus to laugh it all out, that is the essence that is Mark Twain and his humor.

Works Cited

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain , rev ed. New York, Dutton. 1970. Web.

Budd, Louis J. “Mark Twain’s “An Encounter with an Interviewer”: The Height (or Depth) of Nonsense. Nineteenth-Century Literature , Vol. 55, No. 2, 2000, pp. 226-243. Web.

Cox, James M. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor . Princeton University Press, 1966.

Gribben, Allan. 2004. “Mark Twain, 1835-1910.” The University of North Carolina. Web.

Krauth, Leland. “Mark Twain: The Victorian of Southwestern Humor.” American Literature, Vol. 54, No. 3., 1982, pp. 368-384. Web.

Robinson, Forrest G. An “Unconscious and Profitable Cerebration”: Mark Twain and Literary Intentionality Nineteenth-Century Literature , Vol. 50, No. 3, 1995, pp. 357-380. Web.

Sewanee Review . “Humor and America: The Southwest Bear Hunt,” 83. 1975.

Twain, Mark. “An Encounter with an Interviewer.” 1874. Cyber Studios, Inc . Web.

Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale . New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. Web.

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• Lesson Plans
• Teacher's Guides
• Media Resources

American Literary Humor: Mark Twain, George Harris, and Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Library of Congress

In this three-part curriculum unit, students examine structure and characterization in several short stories and consider the significance of humor through a study of several American writers. One or all lessons can be taught individually or linked together as a unit on 19th-century American humor. In Lesson One: Mark Twain and American Humor, through skits and storytelling, students first examine the structure of Twain's story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and the role he creates for his tall-tale storyteller, Simon Wheeler. They then investigate Twain's use of dialect by continuing a story that Wheeler starts to tell, imitating his comic style. In Lesson Two: Southwest Humorists and George Washington Harris, students compare Twain's story with one of the Sut Lovingood stories by Harris, again examining the story's structure by performing it as a skit. After considering how this structure "frames" the trickster Sut Lovingood, as compared to the frame Twain creates for his trickster, Jim Smiley, students produce a character sketch of Harris' comic protagonist and a sample of his humorous dialect. Finally, in Lesson Three: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Literary Humor, students read a humorous story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to gain perspective on various brands of humor and their significance within the context of American literary tradition. After debating the merits of "moral" humor like Hawthorne's as compared with the "folk" humor of Harris and Twain, students test the possibilities of blending these traditions by recasting a paragraph of Hawthorne's story in dialect style.

Guiding Questions

What is the history of American literary humor in the 19th century?

What are some conventions of American literary humor?

Learning Objectives

Analyze the use of literary conventions and devices to develop character and point of view in the short story

Discuss the purposes and significance of literary humor

Examine Mark Twain's storytelling style in relation to that of other American humorists, such as George Washington Harris and Nathaniel Hawthorne

Curriculum Details

Mark Steadman, in his " Humor in Literature " entry from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (published 1989) available at the EDSITEment-reviewed Documents of the American South, describes four general periods of humor in American Southern literature, the first two of which are relevant to the unit: 1830 to 1860 and 1860 to 1925 (the remaining two comprise the range of dates remaining before and after the second World War). These two early periods are detailed in the first four paragraphs of the article, with specific mention of Mark Twain (1835-1910) and his predecessor George Washington Harris (1814-1869), and prove useful as a general introduction to the subject. The influence of writers like Harris and his peers is evident in Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," most notably in the structure and narration of the story. As Steadman argues, "Generally these writers carefully separated themselves from the disreputable characters of their sketches by using an "envelope" structure, in which a literate narrator introduced the illiterate character who told the story." This, of course, describes the frame structure of "Jumping Frog" exactly, exhibiting Mark Twain's careful use of his predecessors' strategies.

The final lesson in this unit presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's New England sensibility as a contrast to the southern vernacular presented in the two other stories. Published in 1837 in Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales , " Dr. Heidegger's Experiment " presents a sharper satire, with a more refined narrative style. Students discuss the narrative style of the story and compare the story's themes and humor to that of the others presented in this curriculum unit.

For information about the authors covered in this lesson, the biographies of Harris and Twain are both available at Documents of the American South. A biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne is available at the EDSITEment-reviewed Hawthorne in Salem.

• Biography of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
• Biography of George Washington Harris
• Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the interactive Timeline (choose Life & Literary Career)

Each lesson also contains background information relevant specifically to the writer and stories presented there, and should be reviewed during lesson preparation.

• Review the lesson plan and the websites used throughout. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
• Students can access the primary source materials and some of the activity materials via the EDSITEment LaunchPad .
• " The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County " via Mark Twain in His Times
• " Mrs. Yardley's Quilting Party ," the most frequently anthologized Sut Lovingood yarn, is available via Mark Twain in His Times website
• " Dr. Heidegger's Experiment " via the EDSITEment-reviewed Nathaniel Hawthorne website

Lesson Plans in Curriculum

Lesson 1: mark twain and american humor.

Uncover the sources of Twain's comic genius in American traditions of dialect humor and literary satire.

Lesson 2: "Old Southwest" Humorists and George Washington Harris

George Washington Harris was an authentic comic genius whose work influenced later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner. In this lesson, students read a Sut Lovingood story by George Washington Harris and examine the story's structure.

Lesson 3: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Literary Humor

Nathaniel Hawthorne' stories are more often associated with dark examinations of complex systems of morality than any sense of conventional comic humor; and yet Hawthorne's subtle satiric wit oftentimes offered equally piercing insights into the human psyche. In this lesson, students read and examine a humorous story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and compare it to other American literary humorists.

Related on EDSITEment

Faulkner's as i lay dying : form of a funeral, melville’s moby dick : shifts in narrative voice and literary genres, edgar allan poe, ambrose bierce, and the unreliable biographers, the letters and poems of emily dickinson.