things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth… I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book- which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before” (28-29). Then, there was the supposedly true story of Bemis in Roughing It, where an injured bull chased him for miles. According to Bemis, “I watched the bull, now, with anxiety--anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that at any moment death might come. Presently a thought came into the bull's eye. I knew it! said I… Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he started in to climb the tree” (Quoted in Crisler The Comedy of Mark Twain). When asked if he was telling the truth, Bemis replied, “I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn't” (Quoted in Crisler The Comedy of Mark Twain).

In terms of specific techniques, Mark Twain proved to be the master of exaggeration, understatement, and anticlimax (or the twisting of a cliché for humorous effect) (Crisler The Comedy of Mark Twain). Exaggeration was a way of enlarging a story “beyond the bounds of truth” (Crisler The Comedy of Mark Twain). Twain would employ exaggeration not only in his lectures and essays, but in the internal situations of his novels. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there were ‘tall tales’ which were referred to as ‘stretchers.’ As “Huck” explained, “You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain't no matter. That book

(Mark Twain Talks Mostly About Humor and Humorists). Simply put, humor was not simply emphasis on a punch-line, but was about the story itself. It had to be about something (or someone) with which (or whom) the audience and readers were well-familiar, spoken in a regional dialect they could easily understand. According to Twain, “Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years. With all its preaching it is not likely to outlive so long a term as that. The very things it preaches about, and which are novelties when it preaches about them, can cease to be novelties and become commonplaces in thirty years. Then that sermon

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