Comic Assaults and SomersaultsAn Introduction

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...