American Humorist Research Articles

Mark Twain, American Humorist

Mark Twain, American Humorist

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Make 'em laugh!: American humorists of the 20th and 21st centuries

Make 'em laugh!: American humorists of the 20th and 21st centuries

Book Review: Make ’em Laugh!: American Humorists of the 20th and 21st Centuries

While books about comedy often strip all the life out of it, good books about comedy are a useful resource for learning about key performers, for analysis of comedy trends, and for discovery of little-known works one may have missed. Unfortunately, Make ’em Laugh!: American Humorists of the 20th and 21st Centuries is not one of those good books about comedy.

“There's Millions in It!”: The Gilded Age and the Economy of Satire

“There's Millions in It!”: <i>The Gilded Age</i> and the Economy of Satire

Rediscovering Twain: Beyond Huck Finn and the Tall Tale

I was not a “Twainiac,” as many of my cohorts came to call themselves, during the summer of 2011. Yet I understood and valued Twain’s contribution to the American literary canon and had looked forward to attending the NEH Summer Institute “Twain and the Culture of Progress” with the hope that I would gain a fresh perspective. Facilitated by Kerry Driscoll and the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, the institute was a three-week-long intensive study of Twain’s formative experiences in Virginia City, Nevada, as well as in Hartford, Connecticut. We spent time in Virginia City tracing Clemens’s emergence as a writer capable of rendering the nuances of regionalism and humor during westward expansion, and then we studied at the Twain House in Hartford where Samuel Clemens lived the life of Mark Twain. I began my career as a public high school English teacher, so my e xperiences with Mark Twain had been limited to the requisite teaching of the c anonical titles and tales, and in many ways, I had grown tired of it. It had become harder for me to make the text relevant for my students—I had read and taught it so many times that I could anticipate almost all of my students’ questions and responses. I was tired of reading (and trying to explain to sixteen-year-olds) the “duke and the dauphin” chapters and I just needed a break. When I began teaching at the Community School of Naples a few years ago, I vowed, “Never again.” I said to anyone who would listen that I would no longer teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my classroom. Ever. For the last several years, I have adhered to this admonition. However, after spending those few weeks participating in the institute I was ready to invite Sam (I became more intrigued with the man than the myth) and some of his lesser-known characters into my classroom. And while I don’t know if I will ever invite Huck back, I have shifted into using Twain primarily to teach the technicalities of style, satire, and humor in my classes. Certainly Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a place in the American literary tradition because it is a rich text full of all of the literary devices and tropes of American realism. Yet, too often, teachers are limited—either by their departments or districts or by themselves—in their teaching of this text. They gloss over the moral wrangling that Huck goes through and often work to make everything “come out alright” in the end, but in doing so I think they ultimately do a disservice to their students and the text. Huck’s pivotal decision to face damnation for the man who has now become his friend is complex, and many

The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem (review)

Reviewed by: The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem Corey Dethier The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. By Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. 170 pages, $35.00. The Jester and the Sages relates Mark Twain to three other influential nineteenth-century men: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. The point of this exercise, as Forrest G. Robinson—one of the book’s three authors along with Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Catherine Carlstroem—wastes no time in explaining, is “to highlight the many significant ways in which the American humorist’s leading questions, ideas, and assumptions overlap with those of his much more solemn and systematic continental contemporaries” (2). As he recognizes from the outset, the primary question is “why?” What is special about these three sages, or what is it that they reveal about Twain; why should we take the time to compare the American novelist to these three Europeans in particular? To its credit, The Jester and the Sages is revealing in regards to Twain. Through a comparison with Freud, Robinson draws out how “Twain’s central preoccupation with guilt, and most especially with guilt about race-slavery, is obliquely inflected with repressed memories of formative sexual experience” (60). While the intersection of guilt, sex, and race [End Page 356] continues to show itself throughout the essay, however, it fails to become a central theme, leaving any assessment of its relevancy up to the reader. The same problem occurs later, when Robinson and Carlstroem use A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to demonstrate how Twain was concerned with the same issues of modernization and the improvement of the human condition that troubled Marx. The two contrast sharply in their vision of progress, however, as for Twain the problems of the sixth century cannot be alleviated by the advances of the nineteenth (129). This insight ends the second chapter, and questions such as how it might influence our understanding of history in Twain’s other novels, or how Twain’s response to the “durability” of social structures compares with Marx’s followers remain unanswered. Both of these moments left me wondering if it would have been more revealing to build on previous Marxist or Freudian readings of Twain or to engage in an extended comparison of form with Nietzsche, who like Twain was neither “solemn” nor “systematic.” The best moments of the book take place when the authors move away from biographical comparisons and offer textual analysis, but not enough time is spent on the latter. This has the effect of obscuring the overarching themes that The Jester and the Sages attempts to bring out; while the book is filled with interesting tidbits and details, all of which I’m sure would be useful for future Twain scholars, it still cannot answer the question of “why?” I’m left at the end still asking why should we care about these brief similarities? What do these three sages reveal about Twain? Corey Dethier Tufts University Copyright © 2013 Western Literature Association

Mark Twain's "Remarkable Achievement": Effacing the South for Northern Audiences

onstage and Twain's ability to arouse a roar of laughter through his portrayal of Jim, slave character in Huck Finn. In this paper, I will examine role of each author—Twain as funny twin and Cable as serious one—and argue that this pairing effaced Twain's connection to south. lecture tour's intentionally ironic name, Twins of Genius, did not merely highlight men's distinctions, but exaggerated those distinctions to extent that Twain and Cable were cast as each other's antithesis. Therefore, anything associated with Cable— Creole culture, Jim Crow laws in south, and Confederate army—seemed contrary to Twain's onstage persona. Furthermore, I contend that Twins of Genius tour was instrumental in establishing Twain's reputation as an American humorist by distinguishing him from Cable, his southern sidekick. It was this tour that shaped Twain's reputation, not as a local color novelist, but rather as a great American writer whose reputation H.L. Mencken best characterized as the most noble figure America has ever given to English literature (157). Cable's essay, The Freedman's Case in Equity, was published during tour and further emphasized distinction between Twain as an American author and Cable as a regional personality. In essay, Cable, a Louisiana native, incited controversy with his call to do away with purely arbitrary superiority of all whites over blacks (412). Letters to editors began pouring into southern

Detailed Questions Hit the Cloud

American humorist Mark Twain is credited with observing that “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” More than a century after his death, Twain's aphorism might indeed hold true about the latest technological wave to hit computing - the cloud. For the concept of the cloud to work, of course, the prevailing principle of any-to-any, end-to-end interoperability must be extended from the principles of the Internet's architecture, and even communications networks that predated packet-based exchange, according to cloud veteran David Bernstein.

Humor in cold dead type: performing Artemus Ward's London panorama lecture in print

This essay explores the Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869. The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material. Excessive in its contrivances, the book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page. It signifies, I argue, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.

“The Great American Humorists: Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and American Humour in England”

“The Great American Humorists: Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and American Humour in England”

“The Great American Humorists: Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and American Humour in England”

“The Great American Humorists: Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and American Humour in England”

The Stuff Theory of Medical Librarianship

The writer postulates a unified theory of medical librarianship based on the writings of George Carlin, an American humorist.

Lessons from practice in the assessment and remediation of contaminated ground water

The famous American humorist Mark Twain once wrote “don’t let school interfere with your education”. This paper builds on this theme by examining important lessons that come from work on practical problems of ground-water contamination and remediation in Canada and the United States. We draw lessons from the interesting features of the studies, and mistakes in execution, which have had important consequences. The first case study from Edmonton, Alberta Canada examines a problem of ground-water contamination due to leakage of water contaminated by 2,4-D and other contaminants from a small storage pond. This study highlights the problems related to an inadequate geologic understanding of a site, misunderstandings concerning the advantages and limitations of key tools for site investigation, and how projects can benefit from early and ongoing peer reviews. The second case study examines a problem of sewage contamination related to a deep tunnel system in Milwaukee Wisconsin. This system is designed to store surface-water overflows from an old, combined sewer system. This case study highlights the difficulties in working on unique problems without an effective conceptual hydrogeologic model, the need to always be concerned about the quality of chemical data, and the necessity of being alert to behaviors beyond typical experience. The lessons coming from these case studies have important implications for remedial work being undertaken in Korea and regulatory agencies with oversight of the projects.

Will Rogers’s Indian Humor

By the time of his death in 1935, political humorist Will Rogers had become one of the most famous personalities in the United States. Through his syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, films, and radio broadcasts, Rogers reached an estimated audience of forty million. Because of his deft use of the venues of mass enter tainment?from the vaudeville stage to Hollywood?and the con sequent mainstreaming of his act, it may be easy to pass over the side of Rogers that was not so mainstream: born in 1879 in Indian Territory, Rogers was a member of the Cherokee Nation for the first twenty years of his life. He became a naturalized American citizen after the 1898 Curtis Act brought the disbanding of tribal govern ment and the allotment of land in severalty to the Five Tribes. Billed as a cowboy from Oklahoma and as a self-made diplomat to the president, nominated for the presidency because of the broad appeal of his home-spun humor and common Rogers's commercially crafted all-American public identity is a simplification of a complex personal and national history. Rogers's humor has been discussed as the American-grown cracker-barrel humor originating with Benjamin Franklins Poor Richard. Horse sense, as Walter Blair wrote in 1942, is that good, sound, practical that Will Rogers shares with Franklin, Josh Billings, Davy Crockett, and an assortment of other American humorists (vi). While Blair sees horse sense as peculiar to North America, he does not attribute any part of Rogers s humor to the part-Cherokee identity Rogers claimed as his own. This failure to

Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture 2005

The Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture made its Toronto debut 27–30 October 2005. This project of the Canadian Abilities Foundation involved four days of multidisciplinary work by artists and performers from around the world. In addition to the gala performances, art exhibitions and concerts, the event included a series of panel discussions and workshops, which covered such broad-ranging topics as storytelling for children, broadcast journalism and career advice for artists with disabilities. Artistic director and producer Sharon Wolfe explains that the interaction made possible by the festival fosters a climate of inclusivity and understanding, as the participants build “bridges that will lead to inclusion. Bridges that will reduce attitudinal barriers and negative perceptions about people with disabilities, bridges that will lead us all to an enriched appreciation for the full spectrum of creative talent that exists here and beyond” (1). These points of contact were directly enabled by the liveness of the festival. Theatre with a Difference, the gala evening held at the Glenn Gould Studio, showcased bold pieces by Chaika, a dance—mime troupe from Moscow; Max Fomitchev, a mime artist from Vancouver who was born in Russia; and American humorist David Roche. Within the live performance setting, there exist tensions, pressures and reactions that serve, in this case, to reveal buried assumptions about persons with disabilities. The festival not only promotes a thriving and creative disabled culture by example but, through its live performances, is able to draw out hidden attitudes so they can be recognized, confronted and ultimately transformed.

It's About Time:Mark Twain's “My Watch” and Relativity

Over three decades before Einstein's year of miracles, the American humorist Mark Twain published an essay titled “My Watch,”1 in which he recounts his experiences with a previously reliable pocket watch and those who tried to rehabilitate it. He begins his essay by confessing his first error: My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized messenger and forerunner of calamity. Twain then sets the watch by guess, and takes it to the “chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time.” To Twain's dismay, the jeweler insists on opening it up and adjusting the regulator inside the watch, and the watch begins to gain time. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within a week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months, it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent, bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not abide it.

Mark Twain on phrenology.

Mark Twain was a noted 19th century American writer and humorist. He often elaborated upon the personalities of his characters, and his observational skills reflected a strong interest in psychology. Similarly, he found an interest in phrenology, a pseudoscience that purported to characterize personality traits according to elevations or depressions on the head. Twain's style is clearly reflected in the interesting essay he wrote regarding his personal experience with phrenology.

In Commemoration of Ellis: The Iowa Beginnings of a Great American Humorist

In Commemoration of Ellis: The Iowa Beginnings of a Great American Humorist

Boys will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment

Theoretical models predict that overconedent investors trade excessively. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender. Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as enance, men are more overconedent than women. Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more excessively than women. Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997. We document that men trade 45 percent more than women. Trading reduces men’s net returns by 2.65 percentage points a year as opposed to 1.72 percentage points for women. It’s not what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so. Josh Billings, nineteenth century American humorist It is difecult to reconcile the volume of trading observed in equity markets with the trading needs of rational investors. Rational investors make periodic contributions and withdrawals from their investment portfolios, rebalance their portfolios, and trade to minimize their taxes. Those possessed of superior information may trade speculatively, although rational speculative traders will generally not choose to trade with each other. It is unlikely that rational trading needs account for a turnover rate of