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Comic Assaults and Somersaults: An Introduction

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.4.2.0137

2333-9934

Judith Yaross Lee,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

What new can anyone say about Mark Twain, humor, satire, and laughter? Articles and books on the topic date back nearly to the start of American studies and American humor studies.1 Yet the golden age of American satire that has arisen in the new millennium has not only spurred scholarship on new practices but also has invited reappraisal of its earlier masters—as in the contributions to this special issue of Studies in American Humor.2 The contemporary mood has inspired particular attention to the richly ironic, mordant fables and essays of Mark Twain's late writings, which run roughly from Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) through his anti-imperialist works of the next decade and the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts unfinished at the author's death in 1910. (Some scholars cite A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [1889] as the turning point for its apocalyptic, ironic end to an imagined American conquest of sixth-century England.)3 Late works of humor and satire thus stood in the foreground when the Center for Mark Twain Studies convened the Eighth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College in August 2017. Titled “The Assault of Laughter,” the program redressed a contemporary critical tendency to take Mark Twain's humor for granted in a way that sometimes mirrors the nineteenth-century reluctance to take it seriously.4 Not that the writer hailed in 1872 as “the best living exponent of American humor” didn't play a role in this imbalance by publishing unfunny works anonymously or withholding them altogether.5 But the Elmira meeting provided an opportunity to probe the significance of Mark Twain's humor, laughter, and satire for scholars and readers today.The title “The Assault of Laughter” comes from the posthumously published “Chronicle of Young Satan” (composed 1897–1900), Twain's second effort to develop the idea that unites the four Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. “Chronicle” includes such broad jokes as the remark that the title figure, going by the evocative name Philip Traum, has a home “away down somewhere in the tropics, they say—has a rich uncle down there.”6 But mainly the narrative channels a deep cynicism that supports Satan's scorn for the mess that humans have made of the world, especially through religion and monarchy. “Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them?” he asks. Then he adds, rising to a rhetorical peak without irony: “For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand” (165). So essential to the text did the remark seem that Twain's literary executor Alfred B. Paine and publisher Frederick Duneka included it when they wove the manuscripts into what William Gibson has called the “editorial fraud” that they published as The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance (1916).7 So close is Satan's lament to Twain's critiques of so-called civilization that readers attribute it to the author himself. It figures in nascent form in the title of his first comic lecture, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” (1866). It reappears in the ironic epigraph for chapter 20 of Following the Equator (1897): “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”8 And it returns in a 1901 essay in the North American Review, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which envisions “civilized power” arriving “with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other,” as its benighted beneficiaries wonder whether they can afford civilization.9 The same consistency does not, however, extend to Twain's characterizations of humor, either in the roughly contemporaneous “How to Tell a Story” (1895) or elsewhere. A 1906 autobiographical dictation, for instance, posited ideal humor as gentle correction. “Humor must not professedly teach, it must not professedly preach; but it must do both if it would live forever,” he advised, before adding, “By forever, I mean thirty years.”10 And whether humor assaults, instructs, or simply delights, it can uphold the status quo—not just transgress it.11Rather than trace continuities and contradictions about humor and satire across Mark Twain's writings, the contributors to this special issue probe what it means today to talk about humor, laughter, and comic assault in his works. Four of the articles here originated as roundtable offerings by members of the American Humor Studies Association at the Elmira meeting's closing plenary; two articles addressed similar themes in other sessions. As then-editor of StAH, I chaired the roundtable and moderated the lively discussion among the hundred scholars present. Bruce Michelson, StAH's contributing editor for “The Year's Work in American Humor Studies,” graciously offered to respond after the fact to complete the papers' move from auditorium to print.Jennifer Hughes and Jeffrey Melton consider laughter and joking explicitly. Hughes offers a historical and semiotic perspective in “WTF Is Laughter to Mark Twain?” She traces some of the social meanings attributed to laughter across Clemens's lifetime, starting with the antebellum medicalized view of laughter as a cure for individuals and the body politic. By contrast, Melton offers a rhetorical approach in “When the Candle Goes Out: The Complexity of Simple Jokes and the Limits of Satire,” examining how the audience for a joke—whether Huckleberry Finn or today's college students reading his narrative—determines its success as a joke and thus limits the efficacy of satire and other messages that go against a grain.Tracy Wuster and Holger Kersten consider the implications of young Satan's proclamation as a defense of satire's value to society. Wuster observes that privileging the weaponized types of humor marked by hostility and transgression ranks politics above aesthetics. Such a judgment not only revises the relative merit of individual novels such as The Gilded Age (1873) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but also sidelines much of Twain's comic writing, including key works that brought him renown, such as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), Innocents Abroad (1869), and even The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). A set of widening historical contexts informs Kersten's argument in “Mark Twain's ‘Assault of Laughter’ and the Limits of Political Humor,” which asks why readers in the author's time or our own would accept Satan's claim for the power of laughter, considering its paltry protection of the Filipino people who were at war as Twain drafted his “Chronicle” and its all-out failure when Europeans were being slaughtered as Harper's Magazine serialized the Romance version in 1916.Gregg Camfield and James E. Caron consider other contexts in which to place Twain's satire. In “Is Satire Compatible with Free Speech?,” Camfield addresses the American context in which Twain joked. A sarcastic headnote in Following the Equator—“It is by the Goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them”—provides a jumping-off point for Camfield to contrast Twain's skepticism about the efficacy of the First Amendment liberties that enable satire with his commitment to comic ambiguities that preserve complex truths. Caron argues in “The Pernicious Use of ‘Humorist’ to Describe Mark Twain (and Other Comic Writers)” that literary critics have looked in the wrong places to understand what assaults of laughter might be and what they mean. Defining the core of satire in ritual terms, Caron suggests, can not only illuminate Twain's comic performances as creative and social acts but also help critics find a way out of the three-century theoretical chaos over the terms “humor” and “satire,” the labels “humorist” and “satirist” applied to their practitioners, and, by implication (to my mind), such corollaries as “comedy” as a synonym for “humor” or “satire,” “comedian” as a synonym for “humorist” or “satirist,” “comic” as a synonym for “comedian,” and (imagine grimace here) “comedic” as an inflated synonym for “comic,” “comical”, “humorous,” or “funny.”Bruce Michelson adds questions about “wit” to the terminological chaos as he distills the concerns raised by the other writers into four themes: Philip Traum's role as Twain's “laughter savant,” critics' responsibility to historicize comic practices and the meanings attributed to them, challenges to humor and rationality posed by the contemporary news cycle, and comic chaos as the product of today's media age. Such comic chaos is, however, hardly new. In 1961, three years before Marshall McLuhan famously taught us that “the medium is the message” and warned that then-novel electronic media would heat culture to the boiling point en route to “the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness” now upon us, Philip Roth bemoaned that “the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality…. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”12 In writing Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the mock-oral narrative in Jewish American vernacular of a young man seeking to overcome the teachings of his childhood, Roth seems to have decided that the solution was humor, with Mark Twain as his muse.13Together these articles not only demonstrate the continuing significance of scholarship on Mark Twain to American humor studies broadly conceived but also raise questions about humor, satire, and laughter in our time. Twain set the story of “The Chronicle of Young Satan” in a village beset by religious hypocrisy and political corruption at a time of new media technologies and resistance to established social rules and roles. Satire and humor offer symbolic action as individuals face the stress of dramatic social change. Young Satan's remark remains appealing today because the forces that animated it in life and fiction a century ago are similarly urgent now. The authors and editors hope that StAH readers find this special issue a stimulating contribution to contemporary scholarship on humor by Mark Twain and others who launch laughter against colossal humbugs of our day.