MARK TWAIN

TWAIN'S HUMOR

• Twins attitude of humorous tolerance balanced his understanding of human weakness.
• He is considered the GIANT of American humor.

HUMOR

• His humorous sketches presented our nation
• His writing inspired comedy as readers know it today.

HUMOR

• Twain employed his exposure to early Southwestern humor in his writing
• He creates humor from his own mishaps

HUMOR

• His humor made his work flourish
• Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was hailed the
• Finest piece of humorous literature that was yet produced in America

HUMOR

• Twain didn’t adapt the poor spelling and bad grammar of the earlier humorists
• He was a master of exaggeration, which was to be the nature of American humorist

HUMOR

• Mark Twain was trained as a writer during the days of the flowering of old Southwest humor
• He rose to prominence as a “literary comedian"

HUMOR

• Twain simply outshone all of these earlier humorists
• His favorite humor techniques were, exaggeration, understatement, and anticlimax.

HUMOR

• Twain’s favorite comic devices: understatement
• Twain had a good eye for the anticlimax and very seldom used cliché twisting, but when he did, it was usually funny

HUMOR

• Twain’s use of the other techniques was heightened by his stage manner, a deadpan, earnest style
• Twain had a point that “mere humor” cannot survive

HUMOR

• Humor must be directed at a target, and Twain’s targets tell us something about Twain’s own views of life.
• The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, it's for a person who made a significant contribution to American humor

HUMOR

• Twain began his career writing light, humorous
• He was our first major stand-up political humorist

HUMOR

• not all of Twain's progressive social and political writings, speeches, and quips were humorous
• Twain's humor sprung "from a certain intensity of ,and a generous scorn of what is petty and mean

HUMOR

• Twain's humor was based on the incongruity between words and deeds
• Twain's humor rebelled against "whatever seemed rigid and regulating to mind and identity

HUMOR

• Twain poked fun at incongruities between words and actions.
• His humor rebelled against whatever seemed rigid and regulating to mind and identity

HUMOR

• Twain's humor being aimed at oppressors and hypocrites.
• Humor was essential to his very being

HUMOROUS BOOKS BY TWAIN

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• The Celebrated Jumping Frog and Other Stories
• The Prince and the Pauper

HUMOR

• Twain never failed to amuse
• Mark Twain loved to make people laugh

HUMOR QUOTES

• "Humor is man kind's greatest blessing"
• "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." - Mark Twain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• www.pbs.org/weta/onstage/twain2000/teachers/lesson_one.html
• www.pbs.org/weta//onstage/twain2002/teachers/glossary.html
• http://fayette.k12.in.us/~cbeard/twain/
• http://hnn.us/article/147643
• http://www.twainweb.net/reviews/florence.html