Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
Judith Yaross Lee
here is nothing that makes me prouder than to be regarded by intelligent people as
‘authentic,”’Mark Twain wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks in February, 1868, acknowledging
her praise of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; “I don’t
care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind-the
end & aim of my ambition is to be authentic-is to be considered authentic” (MTL, 2: 189).’
His clarification at the end of this statement reveals, as Everett Emerson observed, that
Twain hoped “not so much to be authentic as to be considered authentic” (“Strange” 143).
But his attitude is entirely appropriate for a someone earning a living through oral comic
performance and its print counterpart, the mock-oral narrative, in which authenticity is not
a fact or state of being but the outcome of perception, a conclusion drawn by an audience.
In fact, Twain’s humor depended on the idea that individuals performed rather than
expressed their characters. This was especially true of the standup comedy he was
performing from 1866 to 1874, but as late as his autobiographical dictation of July 3 1, 1906,
he remained convinced the selfwas artificially constructed. “I think we never become really
and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead-and not then until we have been
dead years and years,” he mused, in a reminder that the autobiography was to be held until
after his death. Then he added, performing the comedian for the stenographer, “People ought
to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier” (MTE 202-03).
It has become commonplace to identify Mark Twain as a forerunner of today’s stand-up
comedians, but exactly what he contributed to stand-up as a genre of popular culture has
never been identified.’ That is my task in this essay, part of a larger study looking at Twain’s
humor not as the apotheosis of nineteenth-century comic traditions but as a starting point for
a number of twentieth-century comic practices. Three are particularly relevant here. First,
as a writer who was also a publisher, publicist, and dealer in intellectual property (patents
and copyrights), Samuel Clemens was a trailblazer in the, information economy that began
to emerge at the end of the Civil War and has since moved the first world from
manufacturing to post-industrialism. Second, and in the process, Mark Twain helped
T
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Mark Twain a s a Stand-up Comedian
transform humor and humorist into commodities that could be branded, advertised, and
sold-preferably in multiple media formats-in ways that now dominate the American
entertainment business. Finally, Twain’s performances as a stand-up comedian were integral
to both of these endeavors because they expressed a particularly modern sense of self and
the world.
Stand-up comedians perform oral narratives, ushally monologues, in which they appear
to express themselves rather than play a role. Lawrence E. Mintz claims in an essay for
Comedy that the genre of stand-up comedy actually encompasses a broad continuum of live
performances ranging from solo and small-group verbal, musical, or physical clowning to
direct joke-telling and social commentary (576), but most scholars take the narrower view
advocated by David Marc: “the absolute ‘directness of artisuaudience communication’ is the
definitive feature of the art” (16). Stand-up comedians purport to speak autobiographically
and in their own‘ voice while engaging in apparently authentic, if not convincingly
spontaneous, communication with the audience, and their punch lines typically cap extended
anecdotes and observations instead of one-line jokes. Stand-up comedy thus imitates the oral
narrative genre of ordinary social relationships, which folklorists call the personal narrative,
although stand-up depends on the patently artificial rules of theatrical performance. Personal
narratives belong to an individual’s repertoire, as in the story of a frustrating experience, but
they fit thematically within an ongoing conversation in which participants take turns
speaking and listening. In stand-up, by contrast, the audience pays money to yield the floor
to a performer and restricts its own communication to laughter, applause, boos, and so on.
The license granted by the audience enables the comedian to perform the social functions of
the Indian shaman, medieval carnival fool, or Renaissance jester, as observers from Mintz
to Mikhail Bakhtin have explained.’ Yet those functions also require collaboration by an
audience to create an atmosphere of play, which includes what Johan Huizinga in Homo
Ludens calls a “joyful mood” and “the consciousness . . . of ‘only pretending’ ” (22)-that is,
the pleasures of joking around. As the audience vicariously joins in the clown’s verbal and
physical transgressions of taboos, the performance both resists and reinforces the society’s
most salient rules. This effect, best described by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, though
seldom cited in regard to stand-up, seems to be what Louis J. Budd had in mind in 2002
when he compared Twain’s after-dinner remarks to those of comedians today and claimed
that his lectures “defied that genre [the lecture] by approaching the stand-up comedy now
common on cable TV” (Budd, “Been There” 13).
One difficulty in assessing Mark Twain’s significance as a stand-up comedian or the
significance of the modern genre of stand-up for his career lies in the lack of scholarly
consensus about how to think about stand-up comedy’s nineteenth-century antecedents. Part
of the problem is that a history of stand-up involves performance and theater history
(including vaudeville and minstrelsy) as well as folklore (storytelling), humor, and popular
culture studies. Given this complexity, it’s not surprising that the task remains undone. The
recent Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture has separate essays on comic books
and comic strips, but none for stand-up comedy, and no one has attempted a major review
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ofthe scholarship on the subject since Stephanie Koziski Olsonpublished the reference guide
to stand-up for Humor in America (1 988). Daniel Wickberg glosses over the comic lecture
of the 1860s in tracing the stand-up monologue to vaudeville, which relied on professionals
who sold jokes as a commodity; he argues that “the kind of humorous story advocated by
Twain was increasingly marginal in the world of a market-oriented editor” of
commercialized joke books (153, 146).
On the other hand, the spread of stand-up through HBO, Comedy Central, and
franchised comedy clubs has prompted some useful recent theorizing about social
relationships between the humorist and audience-an important development because standup is marked above all by face-to-face interaction that imitates a (mostly one-way)
conversation. John Limon’s Stand-up Comedy in Theory accounts for the profusion of sexual
and scatalogical material in contemporary stand-up by drawing on the Freudian concept of
jokework as a means to elevate the comedian’s abjection for public admiration. Joanne
Gilbert, who had a career in stand-up before becoming a communication professor, argues
in Performing Marginality that stand-up comedy allows women and members of other
marginalized groups to make mainstream audiences pay for the privilege of watching them
perform their marginality. Despite their differences, Limon and Gilbert agree that stand-up
comedy relies on the transaction between performer and audience as the comedian humbles
himself or herself in exchange for money and laughter. Equally important, as Marc points
out, “the stand-up comedian addresses an audience as a naked self, eschewing the luxury of
a clear-cut distinction between art and life” (1 3).
Confessions of personal experience, anecdotes of opinion, and other comic narratives
of individuality imply the comedian’s unique character, but he or she must appear
unpredictable and even somewhat contradictory in order to maintain the element of surprise
that prompts laughter. Such inherent-and coherent-incongruity distinguishes stand-up from
the jokes of the vaudeville or its predecessor, the minstrel show, which circulated in fairly
stable form even when tailored to local circumstances. With its blend of commercial and
interpersonal exchange (hence the nightclub as the preferred venue), the stand-up
performance professionalizes the personal experience narrative, making popular culture by
imitating folklore.
This is much the role Twain chose for himself as a lecturer from 1866-1874, a century
before the comedians that most critics
Throughout his career, however, Twain saw
the platform as both a money-making enterprise in its own right and a means of supporting
and marketing his work as a writer, and he humbled himself onstage (sometimes grudgingly)
for the privilege. He toured his first lecture, usually known as “Our Fellow Savages of the
Sandwich Islands,” for 100 performances beginning in 1866 in order to support his plans for
a book on his Hawaiian experience.’ He developed “The American Vandal Abroad” (1 86869) and “Roughing It On the Silver Frontier” (1 87 1-73) to promote his first two subscription
books, Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872). He added readings when he
returned to the platform in 1884-85 to market Huckleberry Finn (1 884) on the “Twins of
Genius” tour with George Washington Cable, and again in 1895-96 on the world tour that
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Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
fed his last travel book, Following the Equator (1896). The incorporation of readings
highlights the difference between these later tours and the stand-up comedy of his early
platform career: the apparently spontaneous performance of an apparently authentic self.
Much of the humor of Twain’s early performances came from his platform presence.
He typically mocked himself even before starting to speak by entering in an awkward,
physically clumsy, or bashful way; then he painstakingly drawled a combination of
information, ridicule, jokes, purple prose, and self-deflation for the rest of the performance.
In the early years he affected mental slowness through bewildered facial expressions, delight
in his own jokes, and a tendency to drop punch lines (according to a Chicago reporter in
1871) “as if he had just thought of them a minute before, and didn’t perceive the point of
them quite as soon as the audience.”6 Alternatively, he might applaud himself like a small
child to comically undercut an eloquent description of the Kee-law-ay-oh volcano or Lake
Tahoe. In addition, he spoke so slowly that a reporter for the Virginia City Daily Trespass
quipped when reviewing his second western tour, “He still talks as rapidly as ever-gets out
a word every three minutes” (qtd. in Fatout, MTLC 93). Other reviewers noted that he
maintained a deadpan so intense that he actually seemed surprised and confused when people
laughed at what he said. Enhancing all these effects was his simulation of spontaneous
interpersonal remarks (communication specialists call it “fresh talk”) as he spoke from
memory in a colloquial style, exhibiting “Mark Twain” as an authentic physical presence
who seemed to express his authentic ideas and emotions.
Among his anecdotes were personal experiences not too different from the ritual selfhumiliations of recent stand-up comedians-Margaret Cho’s description of kidney failure
from excessive dieting, for instance, or Richard Pryor’s account of setting himself on fire.
A story that Twain relied on throughout his career told of his terror as a boy camped out in
his father’s office overnight to avoid punishment after playing hooky from school: “The
moon shed a ghastly light in the room, and presently I descried a long, dark, mysterious
shape on the floor. . . . By and by when the moonlight fell upon it, I saw that it was a dead
man lying there with his white face turned up in the moonlight. I never was so sick in all my
life. I never wanted to take a walk so bad! I went away from there. I didn’t hurry-simply
went out the window-and took the sash along with me” (MTS 5 ) . Like his self-deprecation
at the start of the “Roughing It” lecture- a recollection of the man who introduced him by
saying, “I don’t know anything about this man; at least I know only two things: one is, that
he has never been in the penitentiary; and the other is, I don’t know why” (MTS 49)-this
device serves the important comic function of enabling the audience to look down and laugh
at the performer from a position of social superiority, even if looking up at the stage from
below.
Yet Twain balanced comic self-deprecation with demonstrations of intellectual
competence and rhetorical eloquence. He capped his jokes in the Sandwich Island lecture
(e.g., “There is not a spoonful of legitimate dirt in the whole group [of islands1,”MTS 6) with
praise for Hawaii as the “almost soulless solitudes of the Pacific” (MTS 14), his hissing
alliteration stressing quiet mood and island breeze. He extolled the Greek night in “The
The Mark Twain Annual 2006
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American Vandal” as “a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the
moon” (MTS 34) and maintained that awe to describe his forced march back to the ship after
armed guards caught him and his friends stealing grapes: “Military escort-ah, I never
traveled in so much state in all my life” (MTS 35). The “Roughing It” lecture likewise offset
clowning with flourishes and facts.
Indeed, Twain’s juggling ofjokes and seriousness points to the nature of the transaction
between comedian and audience in both his day and ours. Definitions of stand-up as the
performance of abjection or the performance of marginality cannot explain the inherent
conflict between the form’s “absolute directness” of artist-audience communication and the
artificiality of any artist-audience relationship. That is, stand-up comedy’s conflation of
performed and authentic persona on a modem idea of the self: a complex and unpredictable,
apparently authentic self socially constructed in performance. The stand-up comedian offers
this self in deadpan earnest to the audience, who respond to its contradictions with laughter.
Samuel Clemens’ success in sustaining Mark Twain as such a self distinguished him
from comic contemporaries on the lecture circuit.’ The heavy ironies that made the character
of Petroleum V. Nasby a good vehicle for political satire in print would have kept David
Ross Locke from disappearing behind his persona during lectures even if he had not kept his
eyes glued to his manuscript in a manner that Twain found “destitute of art” (MTA I, 149).
Charles Dickens no longer relied on his pseudonym “Boz” when he read in what Twain
found a “rather monotonous” style that left him “a great deal disappointed” when he covered
an 1868 appearance for the Alta California (MT in Washington”). By contrast, the persona
of Artemus Ward, a spoof of P.T. Barnum, did displace Charles Farrar Browne as the
persona evolved from print into the more generic deadpan burlesque preacher of the lecture
platform, but the humorist died too young to exploit the conflation to its fullest.
Twain’s deadpan self-deprecations, borrowed from Ward, burlesqued the conventional
oratory of his day and made clear that he wasn’t a conventional lecturer, but the genuine
information that Twain presented didn’t make clear what he was instead. Randall Knoper
argues in Acting Naturally that Twain’s deadpan performances, however tame they seem by
today’s measure, skirted respectability by challenging the intellectual seriousness of the
lecture, contemporary ideas of manhood and gentility, and the professionalism of the stage.
I agree with Knoper that Twain’s body and voice unify the antics of the Wild Humorist of
the Pacific Slope and give coherence to performances conceived (in Twain’s metaphor) as
a “narrative-plank” plugged with serious and humorous pegs,’ but as I read and try to hear
Twain’s early lectures, his shifting comic postures add up to anything but what Knoper calls
a “stable, continuous self’ (65). To the contrary, as Evan Carton has pointed out, the
response of an 1869 Boston audience set the pattern for a long line of critics and scholars:
“The audience gets into a queer state . . . . It knows not what to trust” (162).
In fact, compared to Ward’s “The Babes of the Wood,” the famous deadpan mocksermon that inspired Twain’s earliest efforts at platform performance, Twain’s persona was
notable for its instability and inconsistency. Edgar M. Branch’s reconstruction of the lecture
shows that Ward kept listeners off guard as he set up each joke, but his pattern of anti-
8
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
climax, diversion, and double-entendre established a stable ironic persona appropriate to the
overall pattern of his pieck. His burlesque of the preacher’s fulsome yet meaningless
remarks projects one of the literary comedians that Bernard DeVoto characterized as “Perfect
Fools” for their “deliberate exploitation of psychological dissociation” (DeVoto 20). For
example, in his third section, as he ticks off the various lecture topics he had rejected, Ward
waxes eloquent on French support for the American Revolution before veering off first to
warn them against a new American adventure and then to conclude, “We want to do without
Levi Napoleon. (I may have got his name wrong.) . . . We are very fond of music on this
continent, but we can’t stand French airs!” (qtd. in Branch 962). Such high-toned nonsense
reveals itself as a hoax, or practical joke, after Ward flits from joke to joke and introduces
topic after topic without ever lighting on his title subject-the “babes in the wood” evidently
referring to uninitiated who expected him to discuss it.9
Twain owed huge debts to Ward’s performance style, as Lawrence I. Berkove, Edgar
Branch, and David E. E. Sloane have shown, but Twain’s innovations exchanged the literary
comedian’s stable persona for the stand-up comedian’s comic confusion between art and life.
Whereas Artemus Ward’s solemn nonsense clearly lampooned famous preachers like Henry
Ward Beecher, Twain’s burlesque of nineteenth-century oratory pointed only to the fictitious
alter ego of Samuel Clemens. In this sense, the instability of Mark Twain as a comic persona
expressed a modem view of reality as unknowable and of identity as socially constructed
through performance-two ideas that continue to drive stand-up comedy today.
Almost from the start of his career, Twain comically blurred the difference between his
on- and offstage selves in the manner of today’s stand-up comedians, who feign artless
presentations of ostensibly authentic experiences in venues from Late Night with David
Letterman to press club dinners. Clemens began performing the comic persona “Mark
Twain” at public events like the Nevada mock legislature late in 1863, less than a year after
his pseudonym first appeared in print and just before he first saw Ward perform on
December 22.” In this regard, ceremonial speaking at banquets and other public events
proved more significant to the development of Twain’s persona than his platform lectures
in theatrical settings, because non-theatrical stand-up moved comic play into everyday life
throughout his career. Indeed, they moved it into daily life twice over. First, his appearance
at fund-raisers and club dinners gave the humorist a social reality. Then his remarks became
news when reported by journalists. By contrast, the comic lectures had a different link to
reality, because they combined jokes and other fictions with facts and anecdotes (sometimes
stretched) from his actual experiences in Hawaii, Europe, and Nevada. The “Vandal” and
“Roughing It” lectures especially complicated the blurring of life and art because he
performed oral anecdotes based on his first two book-length written narratives. Twain
complicated things further toward the end of his career, in the so-called “At Home”
performances of his 1895-96 world tour, when he combined aloud readings from his books
with apparently (but only apparently) unscripted oral anecdotes and personal narratives. Yet
the blurring of art and life, humorist and persona, was already well advanced as early as
December 1872, when a British cartoon depicted Samuel Clemens (then lecturing in
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England) astride a galloping frog with the caption “American Humor.”” That is, less than
ten years into the professional humor business, Clemens marked a milestone in what became
a lifelong effort to establish “Mark Twain” as the trademark of a humorous commentator,
author, entrepreneur, philosopher, statesman-and ultimately, the premier brand name in
American humor.
The confusion between authentic and performed self also became an explicit part of his
platform performance. He joked continuously, for example, about the fictitiousness of Mark
Twain, even as he spoke in person about actual experiences in the Sandwich Islands or
Europe. Conversely, he dispensed autobiographical fictions along with various facts. “One
of my ancestors cut a conspicuous figure in the ‘Boston massacre,”’ he remarked in the
Artemus Ward lecture (1 87 1-72). “Why, to hear our family talk, you’d think that not a man
named anything but Twain was in that massacre.” The tale led up to a conventional joke
about a purported ancestor killed at Bunker Hill: “He was everything, that ancestor of mine
was-killed, wounded and missing. He was a prompt, businesslike fellow, and to make sure
of being the last of the three he did it first of all-did it well, too-he was prompt that
way-before a shot was fired” (MTS43). Jokes about ancestry fed a democratic contempt for
lineage, Budd notes in Our Mark Twain (59), but challenges to authenticity itself were also
in play. In the “Roughing It” lecture, he feigned inexperience to impress and amuse the
audience with descriptions from apparently fresh eyes. Watching a storm in the valley from
a western mountaintop became “a miracle of sublimity to a boy like me, who could hardly
say that he had ever been away from home a single day in his life before” (MTS 5 1)-quite
a stretcher from someone who had already seen Washington, D.C. (1854), Philadelphia
(1854), New York City (1854), Cincinnati (1857), New Orleans (1861 with his mother,
doubtless before as well), and had worked on and piloted riverboats (1857-1861) before he
left for Nevada with his brother Orion on July 18, 1861.
Twain continued to joke about his authenticity throughout his career, particularly in
after-dinner entertainment. The most notorious example comes from the Whittier Birthday
Party speech (1 877), which hinges on the difference between the vulgar men impersonating
Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow and the Mark Twain character: “Ah-imposters, were
they?,” scoffs the miner, “-are you?” (MTS 4). As late as his remarks at the Galveston
Orphan Bazaar of 1900, Twain made the question of his authenticity central to a comic
anecdote. After a fellow train passenger told him, “you look enough like Mark Twain to be
his brother,” he admitted that he had always aspired to look like Twain and had in fact
dressed for the role-only to be informed, “you look very well on the outside, but when it
comes to the inside you are probably not in with the original” (MTS 346). This confusion
plays with the idea that Mark Twain himself is the real character and that Clemens’s physical
presence is something of a hoax.
The comic instability of his persona stemmed partly from Twain’s burlesque of
nineteenth-century oratorical conventions. Nineteenth-century American oratory followed
a neo-classical model of rhetoric in which speakers carefully wrote and performed their
remarks according to the five classical canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and
10
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
delivery); the model also treated the speaker’s character and knowledge (“ethos”) as
important constituents of afgument and rhetorical effect (Johnsonpassim, 125-26). Twain
already had strong ideas about rhetorical competence when, fresh from his first lecture tour
in February of 1867, he praised the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher for his mastery of four
of the five rhetorical canons. In a letter from New York to the readers of Alta California,
Twain cited the excellent invention and arrangement of “mosaic work” in Beecher’s sermon
(“wherein poetry, pathos, humor, satire and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon
a ground work of earnest exposition”) as well as his style and delivery, omitting mention only
of memory. (He particularly admired Beecher’s ability to work an audience by “pausing
impressively a second or two” before delivering a punch line at which “the congregation
. . . laughed like all possessed” (“My Ancient”). Twain’s preparations for lectures likewise
conformed to classical procedures even as the outcomes diverged from them. He
meticulously drafted and revised his remarks, then rehearsed with painstaking attention to
inflection, phrasing, timing, pauses, and physical mannerisms (MTS xxii-iv; MTLC 9 l), yet
his alternation of clowning and competence debunked the oratorical ideal of a stable
performance of the self. Today’s stand-up comedians rely on the same two-step rhetoric of
inferiority and significance. Performances of marginality and celebrations of bodily excess
(especially the limning of body and not-body in urine, blood, etc.)” help create a comic
mood by distinguishing the stand-up comedian from the preacher or teacher whose discourse
stand-up comedy spoofs.
In this vein, but more confounding to his persona, Twain made lying and falsehood the
themes of his factual presentations. He often announced a loose affinity with truth. “I shall
endeavor to tell the truth as nearly as a newspaper man can,” he cautioned at the outset of the
Sandwich island lecture (MTS 4). Later he described the top of the mountain in Honolulu
as “so cold that you can’t speak the truth” (13) before ending the talk with an anecdote to
illustrate that “these Sandwichers believe in a superstition that the biggest liars in the world
have got to visit the islands some time before they die” (1 3). Similar admissions of lying
frame the “Roughing It” lecture, where an ironic self-introduction launched the theme. “I
ask leave to introduce to you the lecturer of the evening, Mr. Clemens, otherwise Mark
Twain,” he began, “a gentleman whose great learning, whose historical accuracy, whose
devotion to science, and whose veneration for the truth, are only equaled by his high moral
character and his majestic presence” (MTS 48). The topic of lies returned toward the end,
when Twain confessed, “A reporter has to lie a little, or they would discharge him. That is
the only drawback to the profession. . . . Lying is bad-lying is very bad. . . . i think that for
a man to tell a lie when he can’t make anything by it, is wrong” (MTS 60). Then to prove
that point, he dove into the story of a duel that he escaped only because a friend scared off
the challengers with the lie that he had shot a sparrow through the head at thirty paces (MTS
61). And all this humor, based on the comic incongruity of informational lectures with lies
as their theme, is of a piece with the artistic performance of an authentic self.
Indeed, with these two comic devices, truth about lies and performance of authenticity,
Twain brought a modern perspective to American humor’s traditional contrast between
The Mark Twain Annual 2006
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characters and viewpoints. These staples of the framed vernacular tale of Old Southwestern
humor capitalized on the idea that a single stable reality exists, even if individuals sometimes
misinterpret or misrepresent it. A classic example is A. B. Longstreet’s “Georgia Theatrics,”
whose narrator misconstrues a boy’s play fight as a “hellish deed” (Longstreet 288).
Although the evasion sequence lacks a stable moral standpoint, Huckleberry Finn
incorporates divergent views into an otherwise stable reality: Tom’s A-rabs are Huck’s
Sunday School, witches are hoaxes, and Huck sees through the slave system. A less stable,
more Modernist view emerges inA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), one
of Twain’s many dream works to portray reality as relative. Yet long before Hank Morgan
saw pigs where Sandy saw princesses, Mark Twain’s oral humor characterized reality and
identity in the modern mode: as contingent on perception and constructed through rhetoric.
Hence he reported that Sandwich Islanders “are very fond of dogs”-though he personally
“would rather go hungry for two days than devour an old personal friend in that way” despite
his recognition that “after all it is only our cherished American sausage with the mystery
removed” (MTS 9-10).
More emphatic was his declaration at the Washington
Correspondents Club Banquet in 1868: “Look at the noble names of history! . . . look at
Mother Eve! You need not look at her unless you want to, but Eve was ornamental,
sir-particularly before the fashions changed!” (MTS 21). Indeed, the relation of interior to
exterior reality, comic in conception if not always in context, forms the major theme of
Twain’s humor. He mined the conflict to the fullest in “The American Vandal” lecture (oral
precursor to The Innocents Abroad), where romantic dreams of Venice, “the great city with
its towers and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of sunset,” gave way to the reality of
“shadows among long rows of towering untenanted buildings” and where the singing of
“romantic gondoliers” turned into the “caterwauling” of a “ragged, barefooted guttersnipe”
(30-3 1). That is, as early as 1866, Twain made the contrast between perceptions central to
his humor.”
The comic relativism of Twain’s lectures parallels the hoaxes of his fiction. A hoax’s
humor reflects enjoyable friction between its credibility and its falsity. The hoaxer replaces
facts with realistic details, understanding reality as a matter of rhetoric and perception.
Unlike stable irony, which nudges an audience toward a text’s opposite meaning, Twain’s
hoaxes tweak both “Mark Twain” and reality as comically unidentifiable: performances of
competent ineptitude and the truth about lies are infinitely regressive. As we know from
Berkove’s study of Nevada influences, Twain became immersed in the hoax during his years
in the West, where the Sagebrush writers gave textual form to the highly competitive,
aggressive economic, legal, and social environment of Nevada’s silver rush. There he
learned that success in all venues, from poker to politics (and journalism), involved bluffing
and lying for money (163).14 Berkove sees the effects of this environment across Twain’s
major fiction (164), but it also marked his oral performances. For instance, a comic speech
in which he accepted a (fake) meerschaum pipe in November (?)1863, involved two hoaxes:
his friends’ gift of a “mere-sham” meerschaum (get it?) and his own pretense of surprise yet
elaborate “impromptu” eloquence. I s (The next month he found himself on the receiving end
12
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
again when the visiting Artemus Ward spoke jibberish but blamed a tipsy Twain for the
incoherence.16) The importance of the hoax as a comic mode for western audiences may
have paved the way for a comic success of his persona who tells the truth about lies, and it
surely explains why he publicized his July 2,1868 San Francisco lecture, a triumphant return
to the scene of his debut, with a series of spurious handbills protesting his appearance (rpt.
in Paine, Appendix H). But hoaxes’ humor about reality as a product of perception and
viewpoint also gave Twain’s stand-up comedy a distinctly modem (and Modernist) twist.
In fact, Twain’s comic relativism also corresponds in important ways to then-emerging
concepts of modern psychology. Twain had a:life-long interest in this science, which was
still accessible to amateurs during this time of transition to mature form.” He took verbatim
notes from Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology by
George Sumner Weaver in 1855, when both men were living in St. Louis (Gribben, MT’s
Library 11, 750). In 1884, Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
emphasizing in his membership letter his agreement with their conclusions about creative
inspiration (Gillman 139). He speculated on psychological processes in an essay, “Mental
Telegraphy” (1 874/1891), which attributed coincidences of thought, speech, and writing to
communication between minds. But he withheld the essay, composed fairly early in his
career, until 1891, when research by the SPR and William James (whose two-volume
Principles of Psychology appeared that year) finally assured him that his musings would not
be mistaken for humor. Given his interests, it is not entirely surprising that Twain’s oral
humor expressed psychological ideas circulating in America at the time. But it is striking
nonetheless that an 1878 essay by James presented one of the foundational claims of modern
psychology in terms akin to ideas already in play for a decade in Twain’s oral and written
humor:
The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth. . . . Mental
interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human
action-action which to a great extent transforms the world-help to
make the truth which they declare. . . By its very essence, the reality
of a thought is proportionate to the way it grasps us. (James 17)
No evidence shows that Clemens read James’s essay, but here as in other instances, Twain
anticipated the key ideas of his time. Moreover, the modernity of Twain’s comic
relativism-the link between principles of modem psychology and techniques of Twain’s
humor-suggests, among other things, his role in founding modern stand-up comedy.
His concern that audiences would dismiss “Mental Telegraphy” as humor shows how
clearly he understood, eight years after his 1866 debut as a comic platform performer, the
constructed nature of his public persona as Mark Twain. This persona embodied the comic
brand that he had meticulously crafted in collaboration with his audience through stagecraft,
publicity, and rhetoric. I use the marketing term brand instead of the social term reputation
in order to take more literally Budd’s point that Clemens treated Mark Twain “as a logo-a
The Mark Twain Annual 2006
13
brand name, even-rather than a pen name” because he saw writing as a commercial project
(“Talent” 79). The same can be said of his lecturing, only more so, because it brought more
immediate profits (and, Fatout points out, the immediate pleasures of applause and laughter
[MTLC 122-231). His return to the stage in 1895 following the bankruptcy of his publishing
house underlines its commercial appeal. But looking at Mark Twain as a brand also reveals
how Clemens understood the modern brand-name economy emerging during his time. His
ability to exploit it not only resulted in his becoming America’s most famous humorist and
first modern celebrity, as Budd has shown in Our Mark Twain. It also made him the founder
of modern stand-up comedy.
America’s shift from an industrial base of manufacturing to an information base of mass
media, digital communications, and professional knowledge just recently reached maturity,
but began in Twain’s day, when allied industries such as public relations and advertising also
acquired their modern forms. He could feed the appetite for media content as a printer,
journalist, literary author, and celebrity because newspapers more than tripled in number
during his career, rising from 587 1 to 20,806 between 1870 and 1900 and to 22,603 in 1909,
and magazines grew even more dramatically.” They flourished in part from advertising,
which increased tenfold, to become a $500 million business, from 1867 to 1900 (Boorstin,
Americans 146). Fueled by post-Civil War booms in population and manufacturing,
advertising got an additional boost in 1870 from America’s first trademark legislation, which
in turn spurred brand-name marketing: the number of brand names and trademarks registered
with the U.S. patent office swelled tenfold between 1871 and 1875 (from 121 to 1,138) and
another tenfold following legislation in 188 1 and 1883 (hence the timeliness of Twain’s 1882
lawsuit claiming his pseudonym as a trademark), yielding more than 10,000 registered
trademarks by 190619-the year in which Twain adopted the white suit for his icon. From
1885-1894, Twain contributed to a national explosion in book publishing as the owner of
Webster and Company, which brought out Huckleberry Finn, U.S. Grant’s Memoirs, and A
Library of American Literature, among other works: the number of titles in the U.S. more
than doubled between 1880 and 1890, then tripled by 1910, the year Twain died.” Also in
place in the U.S. by 1910 were the more familiar electronic elements of today’s information
economy: the transatlantic telegraph network (1 866), telephone (1 876), radio (the “wireless
telegraphy” of American Marconi, 1899; voice and music broadcasting, 1906), and the
Hollerith punch card calculation system (antecedent of programmable computers, devised
for the 1890 census).
Brands drive this economy. When goods take a back seat to media (information) and
services (know-how), brands distinguish one commodity from another by embodying the
intangible values of denotation, differentiation, and connotation-themselves also forms of
information. In 2002, brands represented more than 70% of the total market value of top
publicly traded companies, up from 40% in the late 1 9 8 0 ~ Stand-up
~’
comedy’s exchange
of personal narrative for laughter and the performed self for money emphasizes the degree
to which stand-up belongs to an economic system-and this post-industrial economic system
in particular- as well as an aesthetic one. Stand-up comedy brands the comic self for sale
14
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
in clubs (often franchised), on commercial television, DVDs, autobiographical books, and
the celebrity engine of (advertising-supported) mass-market periodicals. That is the raison
d’etre for the cable television channel Comedy Central, as its president Doug Herzog told
the Wall Street Journal in May, 2006: “A guy can tell a joke Sunday night at the comedy
club . . . and we can deliver it to our audience in six different ways the next day. We
provide a brand and a platform” (Flint B3).
Twain’s comic brand was similarly commercial. One reason, Gribben has suggested,
is that his early jobs accustomed him to payment by the piece: by the em, as a printer; the
voyage, as a river pilot; the ounce, as a miner; the column, as a journalist; the performance,
as a lecturer (“MT, Business” 32). But it would be surprising had the co-author of the novel
that named The Gilded Age (1 873) failed to recognize that humor and the self must also be
commodified to function in a capitalist culture. Clemens proved his sophisticated
understanding of the emerging information economy, in this context perhaps better thought
of as post-industrial capitalism, not only by creating the Mark Twain Company in 1908 to
manage his copyrights, but also by successfully branding and marketing “Mark Twain”
through mutually reinforcing performances, journalism, authorship, publishing, and
entrepreneurship.
From the start of his career as a performer, he had treated humor as a commodity and
marketed his brand in the modem mode. The Mark Twain brand united the pseudonym of
Samuel Clemens’ written humor with his physical body and his invented comic personality.
The process began on stage and later moved to less explicitly performative venues-including
literary narration as well as after-dinner and occasional speaking-in order to trade, in the
literal commercial sense, on Twain’s celebrity. He understood, for example, the links
between publicity-any publicity-and profit as early as his 1868 San Francisco hoax, by
which time he had already begun to exploit the synergy among media: he used his reputation
as a newspaper humorist to promote his first lectures, his comic performances to subsidize
book-writing (The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Following the Equator), his authorship
to sell magazine pieces, and his writing to supply lecture material. As his celebrity grew, he
also entered the media as a subject, especially in the human interest news report and the
celebrity interview-a post-Civil War novelty he frequently lampooned, most notably in “An
Encounter with an Interviewer” (1874). Budd has estimated that Twain’s more than 300
interviews between 1879 and 1910 represented “more than any other human being except
perhaps-but only perhaps-for a few statesmen or politicians” (Interviews ix).22 The earliest,
“Mark Twain as a Pedestrian,” coincided with his debut in the distinguished Atlantic monthly
and the successful New York City run of his play Colonel Sellers. The interview covered
what Daniel Boorstin in The Image called a pseudo-event, an incident created to attract
media reports, Twain’s planned 1874 walk from Hartford to Boston with Joseph Twichell.
It also certified Twain as a celebrity, a status conferred by mass media and famously defined
by Boorstin as being “known for . . . well-knownness” (Image 5 7 ) . Twain’s famous
seventieth birthday celebration in 1905 was a publicity event sponsored by his publisher
Harper and Brothers, and duly covered (not at all coincidentally) in a special supplement to
The Mark Twain A n n u a l 2006
15
Harper’s Weekly (“Dinner at Delmonico’s”).
Always Clemens sought to control the brand’s identity. He bragged to his brother Orion
in 1880, “I take precaution against unnecessary publicity”-defined as any interference with
his ability to make a profit, such as verbatim accounts of his lectures-and insisted, “I have
never yet allowed an interviewer or biography-sketcher to get out of me any circumstance
of my history which I thought might be worth putting some day into my autobiography.””
He expressed a particularly sophisticated understanding of marketing as a feature of modern
America in A Connecticut Yankee. At a time when Pears Soap was one ofjust four national
brands other than patent medicines (Ohmann 82), Twain parodied its marketing campaign
by having Hank outfit wandering knights in sandwich boards for Persimmons Soap. The
joke, enhanced by three illustrations, hinges on Hank’s proclaimed “wholesome purposes in
view toward the civilizing and uplifting” (1 90) of Arthurian Britain, to be achieved partly
through bathing but mostly (and more seriously) through commercial co-option and control
of culture. The climax of the joke conveys its ambivalence: when a knight died after a bath,
Hank changed the marketing slogan from “All the Prime-Donne Use It” to “Patronized by
the Elect” (CY 184-88). The social shifts accompanying the economic changes of the 1880s
highlights the wisdom of Twain’s tendency to set his major writings in earlier
days-Huckleberry F i n n and Pudd ’nhead Wilson in the antebellum era, Connecticut Yankee
and The Mysterious Stranger in the Middle Ages, and Extractsfrom Adam ’sDiary and Eve’s
Diary in Biblical times. Indeed, his choice of older settings seems as canny a marketing
decision, given the nostalgia then feeding the local color movement and boy books, as his
decision not to publish his most avant-garde writing while he lived. Even as his imagination
reached backward, however, his business practices looked ahead.
Over the years he attached the name “Mark Twain” to a scrapbook (“Mark Twain’s
Patent Self-pasting Scrap Book,” 1873), history game (“Mark Twain’s Memory Builder,”
1885), and product certification “None genuine without this label on the bottle. I Ys Truly
I Mark Twain” (1880-1905).24 In 1882, he protested a pirated edition of Sketches New and
Old with a lawsuit claiming “Mark Twain” as a trademark. The judge in Clemens v. Belford,
Clarke Company rejected this attempt to close loopholes in American copyright laws, which
put newspaper stories in the public domain while trademarks could be renewed forever, but
Twain was not joking when he told a Canadian audience that “literary property. . . [should]
be as sacred as whiskey”:
if you steal another man’s label to advertise your own brand of
whiskey with, you will be heavily fined and otherwise punished for
violating that trademark; if you steal the whiskey without the
trademark, you go to jail; but if you could prove that the whiskey was
literature, you can steal them both, and the law wouldn’t say a word.
It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect
the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on
it.” (MTS 158)
“
16
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
He had gone to Canada to secure a British commonwealth copyright for The Prince and the
Pauper (1882), and his-comments became part of his lifelong campaign to strengthen
international copyright protection. Loren Glass has interpreted these efforts as “a
fundamental transformation . . . in our basic understanding of literary property,” as authors
claimed commodity value for texts (688), and Alan Gribben has pointed out that Twain
claimed property value for his very life story as well as his texts (“Autobi~graphy”).~~
But
Clemens’ claims of trademark status also have broader significance. All kidding aside, his
equation of label, whiskey, and literature shows how well he understood that the emerging
information economy trades more in intelIectua1 property (copyrights and patents) and
human knowledge (including comic skill and media know-how) than in goods (paper and
ink).
Numerous stand-up comedians have since followed in his wake. Lenny Bruce became
a cultural phenomenon because mass media enhanced his brief stage career with recordings
of his comic routines, gossip about his personal transgressions, newspaper articles about his
legal troubles, and books and films about his martyrdom. The career of Richard Pryor
followed a similar arc as he moved from stand-up performance to script writing, comic film
writing and acting, and comic statesman: six years after his 1992 retirement due to multiple
sclerosis, he received the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually
since 1998 by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The accolade returned him to
the public eye, yielding three documentaries and three boxed CD sets since 2000.26 Today’s
stand-up comedy has achieved its contemporary cultural status precisely because such crossmedia synergies (audio and video recordings, television specials, comedy films, sitcoms,
autobiographies or humor books, celebrity appearances on late-night TV, and the event
hosting circuit) enable performers to reach wider, more enduring, and hence more profitable
markets than possible through live shows alone.
The need for durable media to market, distribute, and otherwise exploit stand-up comedy
emphasizes a paradox of the information economy. When Twain discouraged verbatim
reports of his lectures, he not only protected his copyrights, but also maintained the
performances’ ephemeral quality as speech. Live performance invites liberties too risky for
storage media such as print or film; the bold transgressions of stand-up comedy exploit
sound’s prompt disappearance into the air. That’s why the oral version of Garrison Keillor’s
“Aprille” (1 986) monologue questions the limits of religious faith in ways completely absent
from the version he published in Leaving Home (1987), as I have detailed elsewhere (GK
164-70; “Five Ways”). That’s why “The Aristocrats” remained largely a trade secret until
the legal and distribution environment could support a film like Paul Provenza’s The
Aristocrats, in which some 100 stand-up comedians tell and talk about the world’s dirtiest
joke. And that’s why the modem epistemology and unstable persona of Twain’s stand-up
comedy precede his related literary experiments. The increasing cultural importance of
stand-up comedy throughout the twentieth century, but especially since World War 11,
reflects the expanding opportunities to imitate live performance made possible by an
increasing array of audio and visual broadcast and storage technologies. In this way, as well,
The Mark Twain Annual 2006
17
multiple, mutually reinforcing media underscore the link between stand-up comedy and the
modern information economy. Twain’s comic performances pioneered these links when the
primary storage medium remained print.
Twenty years ago, Lou Budd urged scholars to read Twain’s speeches closely for signs
of “his wrestling with perceptions of himself‘ and of his interactions with the audience
(“Hiding” 139). The performance of an “authentic” self, the sense of a contingent reality,
the brand-name synergies of the information economy-I identify these modern dimensions
of Twain’s oral humor not to ‘‘rescue him for modernism” (in the words of Everett
Emerson’s lament ), but to clarify continuity between his comic performances and
contemporary stand-up comedy. In the years following the Civil War, as William Leach has
pointed out, consumer marketing transformed pleasure itself into a commodity, one more
mass-marketed good qr service hawked (in a self-sustaining cycle) by commercial mass
media (3, 150). Twain’s stand-up comedy participated in this trend. Indeed, he as much
confessed to commodifying his persona, brand-name marketing across media, and hoaxing
at his audience’s expense when he remarked to Archibald Henderson, “When I first began
to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of
everything I saw and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh.
I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else-eager to betray them at the end
with some monstrous absurdity or some extravagant anti-climax’’ (Henderson). That is, in
creating oral hoaxes for professional and financial success, Mark Twain, like contemporary
stand-up comedians, drew on modem ideas of commerce, reality, and the self.
Ohio University
Notes
’ I abbreviate sources as follows:
MTA, Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography
MTE, Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption
MTLC, Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit
MTL, Twain, Mark Twain ’s Letters
MTS, Twain, Mark Twain Speaking
MTBM, Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man.
* See for example Budd,
“Been There” 13, and Wickberg 126. Marc 15-16 doesn’t mention
Twain, but includes the nineteenth-century public lecture among the sources of stand-up.
See for instance Mintz, “Stand-up as,” which invokes the stand-up as a “negative exemplar”
and “our contemporary anthropologist” (74-75).
18
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
See for example Borns, whose oldest subjects are Phyllis Diller, Alan King, and George
Carlin.
Qtd. in Frear, Appendix D3. I rely on Fatout’s lecture composites throughout because his
version of the “Sandwich Islands” lecture includes political comments about America’s
intentions toward Hawaii omitted by Lorch. Frear’s Appendix M includes more such
comments, from Twain’s letter to the New York Daily Tribune published January 6, 1873.
Chicago Evening Post for December 20, 1871, qtd. in Fatout,MTLC 91.
’ Knoper argues for the influence of the deadpan theatrical style, especially as popularized
by the famous comic actor Joseph Jefferson I11 (1829-1905), whose portrayal of Rip Van
Winkle relied on an unconscious humor parallel to that of Simon Wheeler and the Twain
narrator in the “Jumping Frog” (1865) story (67). But Jefferson enacted dramatic
monologues in a conventional theatrical performance requiring willing suspension of
disbelief, rather than the direct author-audience communication of the lecture or stand-up
comedy.
* SLC to OLC, Nov. 27, 1871, MTL, 4: 498.
For a reconstruction and analysis of Ward’s signature lecture, see Branch.
10
Clemens first used “Mark Twain” in a comic letter from Carson City, Nevada, published
in the Territorial Enterprise of Feb. 3, 1863. His remarks as president of Carson City’s
burlesque “Third House” have not survived, but his Dec. 13, 1863 account of the event ran
in the Enterprise (see MTE 102-1 10). The fullest account of Ward’s visit to Virginia City
is Pullen 78-99.
I’ Frear 176-77, 188-89, traces the image to “American Humor” [sic] by Frederick Waddy
in the December 14, 1872 number ofthe London periodical Once a Week, correcting the date
of its reuse in an advertisement for Twain’s only lecture at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
erroneously dated 1877 (Modern Eloquence 1900), 1866-67 (New York Independent, May
5 , 1910), and 1869 (Albert Bigelow Paine, 1912).
I2
Julia Kristeva develops the theory of the abject in Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection. John Limon argues that it represents the essence of stand-up in Stand-up Comedy
in Theory, or Abjection in America. Among the many critics who have explored stand-up
as the performance of marginalization, see, for example Schulman, Price, D. L. P., and
Gilbert.
13
One might argue from a rhetorical standpoint that the contrast between a narrator’s and
audience’s perceptions underlies all humor of pain and embarrassment, including slapstick,
and that the bewilderment of the narrator in “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1 865) falls
into this category as well, but here I am talking about this contrast as a matter of theme, not
rhetoric.
14
For a broad introduction to the Sagebrush writers see Berkove, Sagebrush Anthology.
Is
The month is Schmidt’s estimate; the recollection is De Quille’s.
The Mark Twain Annual 2006
16
19
Twain’s own version of the incident is “A Reminiscence of Artemus Ward” (1867).
One hallmark of a mature science, according to Thomas Kuhn, is the exclusion of
amateurs. Twain followed a number of sciences, although his interest in psychology is less
well known than his reading ,in those nineteenth-century favorites, geology (from his mining
years) and biology. Sherwood Cummings details the importance of these two, but not
psychology, in Mark Twain and Science. Twain met James in 1892, the same year he
purchased an 1890 edition ofPrinciples ofPsychology, and he mentioned James’s ideas both
in an 1894 letter to his wife Olivia, urging her to seek hypnosis in Paris, and in the 1898
notebook entries for the psychological tale “My Platonic Sweetheart” (Gribben I, 35 1;
Gillman 153; “James, William,” MT Encyclopedia). No evidence links Twain directly with
Freud’s texts (though Freud attended at least one of Twain’s performances), but they traveled
in the same circles, and Twain may have consulted him regarding his daughter Jean’s
epilepsy when the family was in Vienna for twenty months in 1897-1899 (“Freud,” Oxford
Companion;“Austria,” MT Encyclopedia). Twain’s understanding of psychology, including
what we would now call psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect, was one reason for
his attack on Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science (1907).
18
Bureau of Statistics United States Department of Commerce and Labor, “Progress of the
United States in Its Area, Population and Material Industries,” Monthly Summary of
Commerce and Finance of the United States, December 1909, “Progress of the United
States” (Table), inside cover.
19
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, “Timeline,” in
Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1 920. <http://scriptorium.lib.duke.
edu/eaa/timeline.html>; Ohmann 101.
20
United States. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970, Bicentennial ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau ofthe
Census, 1975), 808. The number of book titles published in the U.S. rose from 2076 in 1880
and to 4559 in 1890, and reached 13,470 in 1910.
For an introduction to branding, see Landa. For statistics on brand to total market values,
see “Editorial.” What accountants call the “asset value” of a brand equals the difference
between the market value of its stock and the net asset (or “book”) value of the businesssomewhere between $70 and $125 billion in the case of Coca-Cola, the world’s most
valuable brand (Blackett 5 ) .
12
Budd cites 278 interviews in this volume but estimates in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia
(“Interviews” 402) that Twain gave at least 50 more.
’’ MT to Orion Clemens, April 4 [1880], December 8, 1887, rpt. in MTBM 145-46,389.
24
No evidence links Clemens to the production of Mark Twain Cigars, the first of which
Kevin Mac Donne11 dates to 1877 and the most common (with the caption “KNOWN TO
EVERYONE-LIKED BY ALL) to 1913, after Twain’s death (Mark Twain Forum, 7 July
2006, 4:2 1 PM ~https://listse~.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0607&L=twainl&T=O&P=1503>).
20
Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian
25
Both Glass and Gribben offer theoretical arguments different from Joe Moran’s point in
“The Author as a Brand Name” that the conventions of Time magazine’s author profiles stem
from “the culture of advertising . . . [and] its techniques af product differentiation,” resulting
in John Chewer’s complaint, “I’m a brand name . . . like corn flakes, or shredded wheat”
(358).
26
Documentaries include Bitter Jester (2003), IAin ’t Dead Yet, #*%$#@!! (2003), Richard
Pryor: The Funniest Man Dead or Alive (2005). Boxed sets include And It’s Deep Too!
(2000), Anthology (2002), Evolution/Revolution (2005).
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