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  • Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor by Harold H. Kolb, Jr.
  • Henry B. Wonham
Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor by Harold H. Kolb, Jr. Lanham: University Press of America, 2015. 504pp. Cloth, $100.00.

Harold H. Kolb, Jr., is in no danger of making tabloid headlines with the publication of Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor. At a time when most literary critics are as giddy as teenagers to embrace the latest intellectual fad, Kolb builds his magisterial 500-page study around the disarmingly uncontroversial claim that Mark Twain was, first and last, a humorist. Kolb assembles no straw men to give this claim a false sense of novelty, and he makes no apology for the fact that his understanding of Mark Twain’s art and achievement is thoroughly anticipated in Howells’ century-old tribute to his close friend, part of which serves here as a forceful epigram: “[Mark Twain] was a thinker of courageous originality and penetrating sagacity [but] all his wisdom . . . begins and ends in his humor.”

It might seem unnecessary to reiterate this eloquent statement in the twenty-first century, but Kolb maintains that commentators of Twain’s time and our own often treat humor as “merely an attractive surface feature, a sugar coating on a social or philosophical pill, rather than a crucial part of both the meaning and the structure of Twain’s writings.” Of course, nothing is more common in American literary studies than the idea that Mark Twain was an American Cervantes or a Missourian Molière, but such celebrity comparisons rarely pack much explanatory punch, and Kolb is right to insist that Twain’s humor is often presented as something extraneous to whatever it is that makes his writing really important, such as his persistent critique of humbug, or his vision of democracy, or his ear for spoken language. Insisting that Twain’s humor deserves more sustained attention than critics have generally given it, Kolb carefully sketches the portrait of “a writer whose lifelong mode of perception is essentially humorous, a writer who sees the world in the sharp clash of contrast, whose native language is exaggeration, whose vision unravels and reorganizes our perceptions.“ [End Page 92]

To establish the outlines of this portrait, Kolb offers enlightening accounts of the structural, psychological, and sociological aspects of humor, which he understands as emanating from the perception of disparity: “there are always two parts to the physics of the humor equation: something is different from (away, against, off, not) something else.” Mark Twain, according to Kolb, “is our leading disparitist, working across the full range of incongruities.” Although he began his career as a practitioner of “frontier pranks” and “beer-hall . . . humor,” he gradually mastered “all three of the disparity cousins—comedy, satire, and irony.” These “cousins” define the arc of Mark Twain’s career as Kolb narrates it in a stunningly comprehensive survey, which insists that Twain’s keen appreciation for disparity provides the connecting link between his youthful literary hijinks, the satires of his middle career, and the misanthropic irony of his final decades.

There are so many highlights in Kolb’s discussion that a reviewer is helpless to do more than gesture toward some of the book’s more surprising episodes. One is the discussion of Bret Harte’s enduring popularity and the strange vehemence of Mark Twain’s eventual antipathy for his former mentor and friend. Kolb’s reading of their relationship and detailed comparison of their very different treatment of comic material is an important contribution to scholarship on both writers. Another surprising chapter focuses on Mark Twain’s “increasing interest in the essay,” a form much neglected in Twain scholarship, yet one that occupied him frequently during the last two decades of his life. Kolb gives extended attention to the humorous strategies animating texts that usually receive no more than passing notice from scholars, such as “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” “On the Awful German Language,” and many more. His subtle reading of these hilarious attack-essays produces an intriguing image of Mark Twain at mid-career, perhaps still at the height of his...

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