Humorous Techniques: Mark Twain

Copyright 2009 by Gary Pullman

Mark Twain’s humor involves every technique known to humorists: absurdity, analogy, burlesque, exaggeration, eye dialect, farce, high comedy, low comedy, irony, parody, puns and wordplay, satire, slapstick, travesty, understatement, and others. His work cannot be understood without a good knowledge of the vocabulary of humor.

He remains unmatched by other humorists. A study of his work is a must for anyone who aspires to writing humor. Many of Twain’s books are travelogues or contain generous passages that involve long journeys by one or more characters. A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are some of his major literary works that are either based upon or include domestic or foreign travel.

In his actual life as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain traveled frequently, both in the United States and abroad; his characters frequently did the same. The humorists’ journeys allowed him to compare and contrast the habits and customs of the denizens of one region of the country with those of the residents of another region of the country or the habits and customs of foreigners with those of Americans.

His travels were occasions for him to expose the glaring differences between the claims of travel guidebook authors and his own actual experiences as in visiting them as an unbiased and objective observer.

His voyages also permitted Twain to lampoon local traditions, beliefs, institutions, people, languages, art, and religions as he traveled through Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The expeditions themselves unified his sketches and essays, providing a needed backbone for his pieces and allowing his tone to range from whimsical to irate, from appreciative to annoyed, from delighted to outraged.

Sometimes, the travels that Twain’s characters undertook were fanciful, as in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” and Satan’s visit to paradise in A Pen Warmed Up in Hell. These excursions were journeys of the mind through theological, philosophical, and social landscapes, constituting examples of high comedy with a more intellectual than sentimental or moral perspective and concern.

Another of Twain’s techniques was to evaluate the past through the eyes of the present. By having a character from nineteenth-century America travel into the past, visiting King Arthur’s Court, he could judge the persons, places, and things of the past, including the hypocrisies and abuses that resulted from and were maintained by the class distinctions between the nobility and the peasantry and the sanctimony and fraudulence of a greedy and politically entrenched clergy. At the same time, he could contrast modern Yankee ingenuity with medieval technology and hardheaded rationalism and realism against superstitious beliefs and the Middle Ages’ aristocracy’s and clergy’s fondness for fantasy.

Much of Twain’s humor also resulted in mistaken identities or masquerades. When a prince and a pauper trade places, each learns how the other lives and, at the same time, Twain provides himself with the opportunity of criticizing both the abuses of power and the conditions that sustain poverty and misery among the peasantry (a stand-in, perhaps, for the lower classes of his own day and ours). 

Likewise, when Huckleberry Finn poses as a girl whose true gender is surmised by the old lady whom he tries to deceive, Twain suggests that much of one’s identity, including his or her gender, is affected, consisting of mere convention, tradition, and habit which are learned rather than innate. The true self is the will, Twain suggests, as it is exercised in moral deliberation, for it is at the climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that the protagonist is faced with the decision to do the right thing, as both church and state dictate, and report Jim’s whereabouts to a mercenary posse or to remain loyal to his friend. This revelation of the true self would not be possible in the novel had Twain’s humor not first established both the goodness of Huck (and Jim) and the wickedness of the society in which he lives and the corruption of the callous institutions that are supported by this society. Next: A Glossary of Terms