WTF Is Laughter to Mark Twain?

This article argues that attention to Mark Twain's references to laughter across his work reveals an insecure vision of what laughter is and what it can do. Nineteenth-century understandings of laughter are different from today's (such as ideas that it can make one fat, make one sane, evince sexual voracity, or destroy one's moral sense). This article contextualizes Twain's unstable depictions of laughter's possible effect on his readership. His ambivalence toward his career as a humorist reflects ambivalences toward the hilarity of the era. His characters laugh in ways that exploit laughter's associations with mental capacity and physical health, connections that were commonly made during a period in American history in which embodiment determined the rights of citizenship. Finally, situating his relationship with laughter complicates the quote from young Satan that "against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand," which was the theme of the most recent Mark Twain Quadrennial Conference.