All things considered, Mark Twain must be the quintessential American humorist. His work still holds up, a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication. While we still read many, many authors from this era, few of them have remained as effective as Twain. And it’s one thing for a writer, an author of literature, to still be seen as currently important, because those general themes of life that we see in nearly every novel still pertain. They remain unchanging. But for a comedian to still be seen as significant, well, that’s just unheard of. Humor is a constantly changing thing. What was funny even five years ago may not even be funny today. So for someone remain funny after 150 years, well, that person’s material must really be funny.
Twain is rare and amazing in the way that he incorporates both slapstick and intelligent humor into his works. In nearly everything he does, he manages to describe funny things, such as a bull climbing a tree, and work humor into the way he writes, local flavor being a great example of this. The television show “Arrested Development” is the only modern example I can think of that manages to balance the two so well. And while it was just a cult phenomenon when it was still playing, it has since amassed a massive following. And it is easy to imagine that will grow over the years. It is truly rare to find anything that so well uses both highbrow and lowbrow comedy at the same time, and Twain was the king of this. So it is no wonder why his work remains relevant today.
What exactly do you see as "rare" in Twain's work? Can you bring in something of Arrested Development that shows the affiliation you mention with Twain's way of predicating humor? In terms of his lectures--personal presentations from his work in progress or finished--we might compare the "working class" comedians like Ron White and Foxworthy who also use vernacular (dialect) to create humor and describe the "low" comedy that they see...
ReplyDeleteI guess I never really considered just how old his writing is. It's true though, for something to still be marketable as funny 150 years after its publication, it's got to be seriously funny.
ReplyDeleteI like how you pointed out the fact that his humor is a mixture of lowbrow, goofy, tall tale antics, and the obviously higher forms like linguistic humor (seen notably in Buck Fanshaw's Funeral). It seems like you really can't appreciate just how much of a master Twain was till you start picking out all these little elements in his stories.