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  • Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor by Harold H. Kolb Jr.
  • Ben Click (bio)
Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor. By Harold H. Kolb Jr. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2015. 504 pp.

This is a wise book—coherent, insightful, and highly useful. Harold H. Kolb Jr. argues that Mark Twain must be understood as a humorist to be justly appreciated as a writer. He addresses the inadequate response to Mark Twain’s humor vis-à-vis his achievements as a writer: critics either disparage him for relying on humor, or they leapfrog over the comedy to canonize him as a great American author. Kolb reconciles this problematic binary in a convincing and engaging narrative that traces Mark Twain’s gift for “seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures,” examining the lasting quality of Mark Twain’s serio-comic humor in all stages of his career (95). Particularly useful are Kolb’s detailed examples of this humor at work and the linkages between works that reveal Mark Twain’s development as a writer. The book compliments, even corrects, previous criticism that addressed Mark Twain’s (failed) development as a writer. Kolb’s clear methodology, wide-ranging sources, and crisp writing document and enhance our understanding of humor’s force and Mark Twain’s unique gift of harnessing it.

Kolb organizes his narrative into six sections. In the first section, he outlines the “shape” of Mark Twain’s career, defining his “unique gift” as “his extraordinary capacity to recognize disparity” and its three “cousins—comedy, satire, and irony” (4). Kolb separates Mark Twain’s development into three periods: early works relying on comedy, middle works on satire, and later works on irony, noting that each disparity bleeds across each period. He stresses that Mark Twain, in all stages, never “abandoned his career as a humorist for the deeper waters of Literature. Rather, his combination of humor and quasi-factual literature transformed both” (9).

The next section, “Toward a Discussion of Humor,” is a highlight of the book. Kolb “construct[s] a general foundation on which most theories of humor can rest, one which both suggests its essence and allows for its infinite reality” (22). It has two parts: “the physics of humor … its structure, mechanics, technique,” and “the psychology of humor … the relation of a [End Page 137] potentially humorous situation to the individual participant or observer or reader or audience” (22–23). These two parts focus on how individuals perceive humor. A third aspect, “The Sociology of Humor,” explores “the ramifications of humor for groups” (50). Kolb claims that “There is no humorous statement or situation that cannot be factored down to a duality,” noting that not all dichotomies are comic but that all “humor begins with disparity” (23–24). This section of the book (with accompanying notes) would function well as a stand-alone introduction to humor theory as well as a valuable way to discuss all kinds of humor, not just Mark Twain’s.

In “Early Years: Comic Creations (1851–1872),” Kolb ties Mark Twain’s early humorous offerings to his natural gifts, family inheritance, and his various vocations. The culminating “Western works” from Nevada and later California “demonstrate two crucial techniques” Mark Twain employed throughout his career: contrast and exaggeration (79). The physics of such contrasts include using commas, dashes, bracketed interjections; pitting two kinds of language against each other; writing a “yin-yang dialogue between two persons;” beginning sketches with propositions, newspaper articles, epigraphs and then countering them; and presenting incongruous lists (79–81). Kolb then connects contrast to exaggeration, which in itself contrasts an original situation with a “piled-up version” (83). Mark Twain honed these techniques to stretch “the truth without destroying the substratum of reality” (88), ultimately producing “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), marking the “point in his life where talent, confidence, and fame first came together, and he began his career as a humorist in earnest” (96). Kolb also discusses Mark Twain’s invention in the frog tale, its use of “naïve narration,” and its contrasting narrative styles.

Next Kolb analyzes the use of contrast, exaggeration, and the naïve narrator in Innocents Abroad...

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