Twain on Humor

Pal Garry Goodrow writes, re: Orwell:

"Mike: The Orwell piece was very interesting. Just this morning, I was reading something that I think connects nicely.



The Autobiography of Mark Twain [ghostwritten by U.S. Grant? :-) —MG] was unfinished by him when he died. His conceit in it was that since these were the words of a dead man, he could say anything he wanted. The pages were put together by editors after his death. Here’s a small piece of it, in which he discusses why certain old humorists have been forgotten:



   “Why have they perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the “mere” sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. Often it is merely an odd trick of speech and spelling, as in the case of Ward and Billings and Nasby and the “Disbanded Volunteer,” and presently the fashion passes and the fame along with it. There are those who say that a novel should be a work of art solely and you must not preach in it, you must not teach in it. That may be true as regards novels, but it is not true as regards humor. 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 the sermon can thenceforth interest no one.

   “I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor. I should have written the sermon just the same, whether any humor applied for admission or not. I am saying these vain things in this frank way because I am a dead person speaking from the grave. Even I would be too modest to say them in life. 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. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”