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  • Announcing "On Second Thought"A New Feature
  • Lawrence Howe (bio)

The editorial staff is very excited about this special issue, which collects provocative work that was first presented during a plenary panel sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association at the State of Mark Twain Studies conference held at Elmira College in 2017. We invited two additional pieces from other conference sessions to provide complements to the positions that the panelists staked out. Last, we asked Judith Yaross Lee to contribute a brief introduction and Bruce Michelson to write a formal response.

We're confident that Michelson won't have the last word. These diverse thoughts on the fate of humor and the assault of comic laughter will, we believe, generate responses from you. To facilitate your voices, we're formally announcing a new feature, "On Second Thought"—a collection of your comments to run in our next issue, 5.1. We envision this feature as extending the dialogue begun by the contributors and thus affording you the opportunity to sound off. In some cases, your responses may prompt the contributors [End Page 135] to respond in kind. This exchange could get interesting or entertaining—hopefully both.

So after you've read this issue, we want to hear from you. Send your reactions to any or all of these articles to our journal's email address: StudiesinAmericanHumor@roosevelt.edu; please write "On Second Thought" in the subject line of your email. We're hoping for a range of opinion: additions to our contributors' lines of thought, polite rebuttals, or witty vitriol. We'll edit for space, but we'll strive to maintain the essence of your commentary. [End Page 136]

Lawrence Howe

LAWRENCE HOWE, Professor of English and Film Studies at Roosevelt University, is the editor of Studies in American Humor; before assuming the editorship, he was a member of the editorial advisory board. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority (1998) and coeditor, with Jim Caron and Ben Click, of Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon Through Critical Lenses (2013) and, with Henry Wonham, Mark Twain and Money (2017). He is currently the president of the Mark Twain Circle and has been a member of the editorial board of the Mark Twain Annual since 2010. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in 2014–15.

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