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Americas great humorist

America didn’t have much to laugh about during the Civil War, and the difficult years of reconstruction afterwards. Neither did Samuel L. Clemens, forever to be known as Mark Twain. He was frequently broke and unemployed, and lost three of his four children in either infancy or adolescence. Nevertheless, he still managed to find the humor in the world and people around him, and it was this irreverence he happily shared with the world. Twain’s humor was typical of nineteenth-century comedy, and usually structured around a satirical narrative (Yosifon 683). As twentieth-century humorist Russel Baker observed, “Twain's was the voice of the country's frontier newness, brashness, vigor, disdain for the polite and genteel. It was voice that enjoyed shocking the squeamish, mocking the piously upright” (105). The post-Civil War America in which Mark Twain flourished took itself very seriously, and he regarded it as his mission in life to “lighten it up.” He understood that humor in America was different than in other parts of the world because, “The American story-teller… is apparently unconscious of the effect of the joke. The method is quieter, more modified, and more subtle”

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