A First Second Thought: Bring on the Irony

Abstract

Editors:A reporter once asked Bob Dylan what his songs meant. His response: “I'm the first to put it to you and the last to explain it to you.” Humor works kind of like that; you either get the punch line to “Where was Moses when the candle went out?” or you don't. You are in the dark if laughter doesn't emerge—unless, of course, you've been trained like the Navajo children that Jennifer Hughes mentions. Like Dylan (pretty funny fellow himself), writers of humor (or if you prefer “humorists,” Mr. Wuster, or “satirists,” Mr. Caron) often fail to supply a satisfactory explanation either. Still, it never stops us scholars from trying to shed light on what these writers of humor produce—that inexplicable thing called humor, all in the hopes of not producing the inevitable “dead frog” that E. B. White warned us of. (Note: to my mind, no one produced a lifeless amphibian in this issue.) Yet, as long as we have literature that produces laughter, we'll have those who want to explain how it works or what it does. And that's OK. The folks writing in the issue of StAH 4.2 titled “The Assault of Laughter” (all of whom I know and admire—well, maybe not Wuster and Caron) know their stuff. But their arguments hinge on terminology, free-floating signifiers, (a deconstructionist's dream), so I offer a “second thought” about the “terminological chaos” to which Judith Yaross Lee refers.Just as Bruce Michelson makes a bid to recover and reconsider “wit” as a neglected, and possibly stable, term, I'd like to get in a word for irony as more than a rhetorical trope or a technical device such as parody, travesty, burlesque, lampoon, caricature, epigram, fable, and mock-epic used only in service to satire. If Caron can supplement Wuster's valorizing of Twain as “mere humorist” by elevating Twain as satirist, I'd like to invoke Twain as ironist. In his book Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor (2015), Harold H. Kolb Jr. divides Twain's humor into three periods: the comic (early career), the satiric (middle), and the ironic (late), with much bleeding over from one period to another.These phases of humor (comic, satiric, and ironic) have clear corollaries with Aristotle's types of humans as they relate to the emotions and moral qualities that correspond to our various ages. The young have strong passions and gratify themselves indiscriminately, with hot tempers and hopeful dispositions. Fond of fun, they are therefore witty.So what do we do with that laughter that comes from places of discomfort and agitation, yet has no clear satiric end in sight, no ridicule to reform? First, we assent to Holger Kersten's claim that humor isn't the social corrective that we'd like to think it is. The assault of laughter doesn't change political views, religious beliefs, or social injustices. Second, once we realize that it can't make change, we recognize the irony that we thought it could. Now that's something the “mere humorist” Twain understood. Twain as satirist doesn't help us as much as Twain as ironist does in works such as “Extracts from Adam's Diary,” “Eve's Diary,” “Little Bessie,” or The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. And please tell me I'm not the only one who finds humor (and laughter) in these pieces.As the late, great David Rakoff wrote, “Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”3 And you don't need to know all the shades of terminology to not be a bad person. So for humor's sake, let's stick with humor as our umbrella term and keep finding all the ways that Twain is a “mere humorist.” We scholars of humor get the irony of that term and will keep writing until everyone else catches up. For it is, as Jeffery Melton argues, channeling his inner Dylan, all in the audience. Humorists are the first to put it to us but the last to explain it to us. Thus, we scholars beat on, hi-ho. To close this second thought: thank you to this group of smart folks for producing in this Mark Twain special issue if not a celebrated jumping frog of humor scholarship at least a limping and alive one.Sincerely (but also ironically),Ben ClickProfessor of English, St. Mary's College of MarylandEditor, Mark Twain Annual