MARK TWAIN TALKS MOSTLY ABOUT
HUMOR AND HUMORISTS

Louis J. Budd

When a prolific and even garrulous career was over, Samuel Langhorne Clemens had said surprisingly little about humor, comedy, and wit—and practically nothing about irony or satire. James M. Cox is comparatively right in observing that the often quoted passage near the end of A. B. Paine's version of "The Mysterious Stranger" contains "almost Mark Twain's only direct definition of the sense of humor."¹ As a definition even this passage is indirect though it does issue a ringing call to action or practice. Of course Clemens dropped other comments of varying abstraction during his more than fifty years of productivity, comments whose casualness is usually genuine though it is risky to gauge the depth of his intentions from his surface tone.² In such a scarcity of competing texts, his beguiling "How to Tell a Story" has emerged as his most systematic statement on humor. Yet this short essay, he reminds us, centers on oral delivery or technique on the platform. Furthermore, as Jesse Bier points out, it is "partial" in two ways: it blithely ignores contrary evidence, and (like Poe's rules for the short story) it erects into frozen principle what he had learned to make work for himself.³ Still "How to Tell a Story" does add some subtleties to our grasp of his ideas about humor, especially because it was published in 1895; in turn, putting it into the context of three of the newspaper interviews that he underwent in 1895 helps to understand and evaluate it. When taken together the interviews themselves may form the richest body of his commentary on humor.

The obvious questions are why did he suddenly have much more to say about humor and why did he manage to push his thinking at least a little beyond the conventional wisdom that had satisfied him so far? Now that the shouting has long since died to almost a whisper we underestimate the vigor of the continuing intellectual dialogue between England and the United States after the Civil War. Fortunately it had learned to engage more manageable subjects such as the relative stature of British and American fiction and the intrinsic worth of the new American humorists. As Clarence Gohdes has shown, British critics discussed these writers copiously after 1870 while moving toward a consensus that they were as much unique as pre-eminent. One British lecturer proclaimed in 1895 that our humor was "distinctly a thing sui generis" though the "only intellectual province in which the people of the United States have achieved originality."⁴ Fed so generously, Clemens' pride in his own gift outweighed any fitful impulses to defend American writers or intellectuals

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en masse. A reporter for the Detroit Post had him declaring in 1884:

"Humor is always popular, and especially so with Americans. It is born in every American, and he can't help liking it."⁵ Playing a specialized variation on manifest destiny he welcomed the Briton's "immense liking" for our humor: "It wakens the people to a new life, and is supplanting the dry wit which formerly passed for humor. American humor wins its own way, and does not need to be cultivated. The English come to like it naturally." The "paragraphing" of our "newspaper humorists," he grandly concluded, was "one of the achievements of the age." Sometimes, most often during the years he warmed himself up to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), he pondered about the goals of "irreverence"; about the iconoclastic, progress-oriented thrust of disrespect for tradition, classed society, authoritarian thinking, or Victorian gentility; about sharpening humor into a rationalistic, socio-political weapon. Many of his admirers insist that he increasingly achieved these goals. But except for his praises of irreverence his thinking about humor stayed oddly inert, as if stultified or lulled by the homage to American uniqueness and vibrancy. Even "How to Tell a Story" started with a simplistic thesis: "The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French."

Meager as the essay is in theoretical insights, Clemens probably could not have set it down much before 1894.⁶ His resumption of travel and travel writing had rehoned his interest in differences of national character—then much more than now an inescapable facet of critiques of humor. As he faced up to his looming bankruptcy in April, 1894, and what he nervously foresaw as lean days, he began turning back toward authorship as a surer road to success; besides, his need for royalties dictated the wisdom of enhancing his literary eminence. In recalculating his course he must have felt a quickened puzzlement about the gearings of humor, about how he could still manage to make others laugh in his dejected frame of mind and how anybody could laugh in such a treacherous world. More specifically, he must have felt anxiety about whether, at age sixty, he could still barnstorm as an entertaining lecturer with an almost infallible sense of the audience.⁷ In fact, his tour around the world was planned to tap fresh audiences in the Northwest, western Canada, a Hawaii mush changed from the 1860s, Australia and New Zealand, India, and South Africa—confronting him with a new gamut of tastes and taboos. For a while he was especially edgy about parading into Australia.⁸ Hungrier than ever to go over big, he surely tried to foresee the traps and to plan the right adjustments of subject and tone.

Finally he was pushed into further judgments about humor simply because the many interviewers posed many of the same questions.⁹

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Besides being hounded for his opinion of the local community, his solution for world problems, his preference among his own books and his favorite authors, and the secrets of his methods of work, he was often asked about the reactions of the audiences along his tour—which led to the subject of who finds what to be funny. Also the subject came up so regularly in Australia because the white settlers were intrigued by whether their national character was shifting. One interviewer put that question clearly: "Considered as a British off-shoot, would you regard the people of Australia as developing traits of character and manner differing from those of the insular English, and approximating more closely to those that obtain among the citizens of the States?"¹⁰ But, above all, Clemens was directly implored to explain the mysteries of humor because he was its greatest living practitioner.

During his intercontinental tour he was interviewed more steadily than during any other phase of his career. His bankruptcy had made the headlines. Furthermore, at times he cooperated to the hilt because of the free publicity for his "at homes." Three of these interviews (one from the preceding January in Paris) are worth reprinting jointly. They carry some lively bits of his humor, and they display how he was at this period managing his Mark Twain presence or image and how the press transmitted it to the public. Yet their key value lies in their adding up to his most detailed view of humor and humorists, with relevant asides on matters like Americanisms in language.

Reprinting the complete interviews, in spite of some less relevant passages, is the wisest approach. It supplies the sometimes illuminating context of the opinions ascribed to Clemens, and it helps to evaluate the reliability of the reporters. Beginning in the 1870's he was to be interviewed uncounted times. Though these interviews hold much fresh or amusing or revealing material, nobody has as yet collected them or even compiled a listing, partly because it is obvious that some are sloppy or even counterfeit. In other cases mediocre journalists tried to compete as humorists with the master or to exploit the stereotype of Mark Twain as bustling clown. In the three interviews reprinted here the anonymous writers were professional enough to lie low; also they seem intelligent, perceptive, and therefore reasonably capable of carrying away the gist of what most often was a hurriedly casual process. However, to keep sight of the problems in judging the authority of these three texts, it should be noted that a competent reporter for the Melbourne Argus, who was also on hand for the second interview, tailored a version fairly different both in what is missing and what ideas get richer detail. (Maybe he arrived a bit late or lost the thread of talk for a minute or did not take as much interest in abstract views on humor as others do.)

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I. New York Sun, 27 January 1895, (third section) p. 4.

"Mark Twain in Paris! / His Cautious Opinions Regarding French Wit and Humor! / French Wit Compared with the Wit of Tom Bailey Aldrich—Not Much Wit in Saint Simon—Talleyrand's Reputation"

Paris, Jan. 5.—Mark Twain and his family are installed for the winter in one of the most charming houses in Paris. It is in the quiet old Rue de l'Universitie, and is an ideal retreat for a man who is working every day, as Mr. Clemens says he is. THE SUN correspondent found him there the other day, and congratulated him on the quarters he had discovered. He stood in the middle of the big studio, where he had been reading, and surveyed it deliberately from under his shaggy eyebrows. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth.

"Yes," he said, with his long, peculiar drawl, "it is rather pleasant. It was built by a French artist. That's the reason for this," with a slow wave of the hand. "Studio, you see. Well," putting the pipe back and taking a long puff, "he went away. One day Mr. Pomeroy, New York artist, nice man, came along. He looked around a little, then in his quick [puff] American [puff] way [puff] he said, "I want that house!" And before the fellow knew what [puff, puff, puff he was about, Mr. Pomeroy had the lease signed for three years."

Mr. Clemens stopped wearily and walked up and down a while, smoking solemnly. His French felt slippers made no noise on the polished wood floor. Finally he resumed:

"Mr. Pomeroy had to leave Paris for the winter, so we took the house. I was obliged to be here five or six months, any way."

The distinguished humorist made these few remarks with an air of pathetic resignation which said plainly that such explanations were a weariness of the flesh.

"You read and speak French, do you not?" The question was addressed to the back of the famous crop of curls, as Mr. Clemens still wandered uneasily up and down.

"I read it. I don't speak it," he said.

"What do you think about French humor? Is there such a thing among modern French writers as humor?"

His eye brightened. He was interested. He took his pipe from his lips and punctuated his remarks with short, decisive waves.

"Ah! now you ask me something about which I dare not express an opinion. I have thought about that a hundred times, but I have never been able to arrive at a concrete opinion which I would feel I had a right to express. I have even tried to put my thoughts on paper, to see if in that

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way I could come to a more definite conclusion. But I don't know. We hear so much about ‘French wit,' as if it were a particular kind of wit, different from that of other countries. And ‘French polish,' too. Now a nation may claim to be the politest nation in the world. And that proves nothing. And it may claim to be the wittiest nation in the world. Only, by advertising the statement sufficiently, the nation makes everybody, including its own people, believe that it has told the truth.

"Now take Saint-Simon.¹¹ I read three large volumes containing, it is to be supposed, the best things he said and wrote. Well," and the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn shook his great head slowly, "to me it was a work of despair. Those three big volumes! And I did not find them witty! That's going back a good ways, to Saint-Simon, so let's come down further. There was Talleyrand.¹² There is no doubt that he said brilliant things, but I do not find that his wit differs intrinsically from the wit of other countries. Then, too, one must take into account the man. Every brilliant thing he said was repeated and recorded because Talleyrand said it. Suppose somebody else had said these same things, people would have paid no attention to them.

"‘Oh, he never originated that,' they would have said. ‘He got it from somebody else.' And so it would have been lost.

"Yes, Talleyrand said good things, but when it comes to brilliancy, why I've heard Tom Bailey Aldrich¹³ keep up a running fire of the most inimitable repartee. Talk about wit, why, Tom Bailey Aldrich has said 1,500 if not 15,000 things as brilliant as the things Talleyrand said and which are labeled ‘French wit.' And he has humor, too. He can pass from wit to humor, fusing their characteristics. Tom—Thomas Bailey Aldrich," Mr. Clemens hesitated, put his pipe in his mouth, drew a long puff, looked unutterable things through the smoke, and held his peace.

"How about the modern French writers? Do any of them pose as humorists?"

"I believe there are one or two who do, but I don't remember their names."

"And evidently you do not know their work?"

‘‘No.''

"Are your books translated into French?"

"‘Tom Sawyer' and ‘Huckleberry Finn' have been translated, but I think that is all."

"Do you know whether French people find your books amusing?"

"I don't think they do," said Mr. Clemens, at last sitting down and treating himself and his visitor to a quizzical smile. "A friend of mine told me of a little conversation he had with a Frenchman, and I feel pretty sure, since then, of the way I strike the French mind. This Frenchman is a

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great critic and is an authority on all literary matters. I don't remember his name, because I never remember names, but he is an authority. That is what makes it so hopeless.

‘I myself,' he said, ‘have read a great many American books, and I have heard the opinions of others who are familiar with your literature. This being the case, and knowing the French mind as I do, I think I may claim to speak for the nation itself in what I say. In the first place, then, we regard Edgar Allan Poe as your greatest poet. The French who know his writings look upon him as a great genius. Bret Harte we think your greatest novelist.¹⁴ He is an artist, a great artist. Emerson—well.' Mr. Clemens supplied a beautiful French shrug and lifted his heavy eyebrows, ‘we don't understand what you can find in Emerson to admire. I believe you Americans think him great, but we cannot understand why. And lastly, there is Mark Twain, but when it comes to him we are in despair, because no intelligent Frenchman can make out your reasons for thinking Mark Twain funny!'"

The pipe had gone out in the course of this recital, and Mr. Clemens tapped it regretfully and laid it down as he got up to resume his pacing back and forth.

"Perhaps we lose the quality of the French humor as completely as they lose the quality of yours."

"Oh, unquestionably!" interrupted Mr. Clemens as he lighted his cigar. "That is the reason why I say I am not competent to express an opinion on the subject. A man may study a language for years and years and yet he is never inside of the holy of holies. He must get into the man himself, the man of another country, and he cannot do that.

"But as for French wit being different from any other wit, I do know about it. To decide a point like that a man would have to gather hundreds of instances and compare them as a naturalist compares his specimens. He would be obliged to sift them, assay them, and find out the real essence of each. Then, if he could say, ‘I have among the specimens from this country 500 where the wit turns upon a certain point, while I find no more .than fifty similar examples from the specimens from any other country, and those I regard as accidental,' he would be justified in describing that particular form of wit as specially belonging to that one country. But no one has done that to prove that ‘French wit' is a unique product of the French brain.

"As for humor, well," wheeling round suddenly, "I don't think any nation that has a sense of humor would go around snivelling over that great Russian bear the way France has been doing.¹⁵ If they could see themselves—but it is like a drunkard. Everybody knows that if a man who gets drunk could once see himself when he is drunk he'd never do it again.

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The French are simply drunk; that's all. In the other case the man does it with whiskey, and in this case it is an intoxication of vanity and enthusiasm; that's all. Of course every Frenchman can see his fellow countrymen, and you would think that he would realize how ridiculous it is. But they are all drunk together, and you know one drunkard doesn't see that he is walking just as crookedly as the other fellow, or even that there is anything wrong with the other fellow. You wouldn't find America playing the ridiculous part that France has in this Russian craze, and it is for such reasons that I think Americans have a better sense of humor than Frenchman."

"Do you find American tourists over here any different from what they were the first time you came to Europe?"

"Well, now, you've asked me something I don't like to answer," was the reply, and Mr. Clemens relapsed into his most pronounced drawl. "If I said anything it might be misinterpreted as applying to the American colony at Paris, and I'd rather blaspheme something of—er—even more holy, you know, than accept people's hospitality and then criticize them.

"The man who built and furnished this house had a sort of East Indian fever," said Mr. Clemens as he led the way down the tapestried hall and paused under the shadow of an Oriental god. "It's a way artists have. But it makes a good place to work in."

This is good news to Mark Twain's admirers.

II. Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, 17 September 1895, pp. 5-6.¹⁶

"Visit of Mark Twain/Wit and Humour"

When you sit down to "interview" Mark Twain he makes a remark that recalls the stock observation of the member of Parliament who is about to inflict himself disastrously on time and space. "I have very little to say, he begins. But this is where the simile—which no doubt is as unsatisfactory as similes generally are—begins and ends. Whereas it is found that the "little" of the politician is mostly less than nothing, the case is exactly opposite with Mark Twain. It is his modest way of putting it. As Bacon quaintly puts it, he is full of "fruit," and the longer you talk to him the more do you realize the fund of original matter that lies at the base of the composition of the man who has made so many continents laugh. With his cautious American accent, that seems to give the expression of weighing every sentence as it is put forth, Mark Twain is really a brilliant conversationalist, and when you touch a point beneath the good-humouredly satirical armor of reserve that he wears, quick to reveal the more serious side of his nature. The great difficulty is to gather up his

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