Establishing and Structuring Humorous Novels

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

For me, Mark Twain is the most humorous humorist that ever wrote humor.

I think part of the reason that he's humorous is that he constructs a plot that provides a sense of progress and a series of burlesques unified through character, setting, and situation. Often, the titles of his books themselves identify or suggest the conceit: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad.

For example, the idea for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (traveling back in time to set up a continuous contrast between the medieval and the modern) establishes the basis for sustained, continuous humor, satire, parody, and burlesque.

In addition (Twain usually progresses from general to specific), the chapters themselves of his novels suggest the same structure and the same elements: “Camelot,” “King Arthur's Court,” “Knights of the Round Table” . . . “The Eclipse,” “Merlin's Tower,” . . . “The Tournament” . . . .

Internally, each chapter is also structured:

Chapter I (Camelot): the countryside is described; a girl appears; the protagonist approaches the town; a detailed description of the town and several of its residents is presented; Chapter II (King Arthur's Court): The protagonist exchanges dialogue with an old man; the protagonist exchanges dialogue with a page; the protagonist and the page arrive at Sir Kay's castle; the narrator presents a philosophical conclusion (i. e., one of the novel's themes).

This threefold structure indicates, with increasing specificity, the sense of progress, which unifies the story while introducing topics for humor. By the time readers finish the story, the foibles of the novel's characters and the folly of their times (and their view of the world) will have been thoroughly examined, criticized, and lampooned.

In the actual paragraphs of the story, Twain uses many devices to spoof the targets of his humor, including mistaking Camelot for an “asylum”; similes (“as lonesome as Sundays,” “made him look like a forked carrot”); incongruous diction (“”her own merits in . . . respect” to being “a spectacle”); derisive adjectives (“windowless,” “wilderness of thatched cabins,” “crooked alleys,” “unpaved,” “troops of dogs and nude children,” “reeking wallow”); contrast (“a noble cavalcade . . . glorious” vs. “the muck and swine and naked brats”); evaluation (the old man's use of Middle English confirms his status, in the protagonist's eyes, as an inmate of the 'asylum”); personification (“comfort his very liver,” “let that shudder its way home”); metaphor (“he was pretty enough to frame”); incongruous description (“shrimp-colored tights”); and a play on words (“”he informed me he was a page,” but, the narrator says, “you ain't more than a paragraph”).

Twain's technique could be used to set up a variety of other opportunities for humor through such contrasts and conflicts between opposing types of characters:

• A genius among fools
• Hercules among the Amazons
• The experiences that occasion various proverbs
• A sane man on a ship of fools