“How to Tell a Story” (1895)

This short piece is the title essay in a collection Mark Twain published in 1897. It’s an interesting look specifically at the various problems of the humor piece, abstracted as such. He uses a joke as illustration that is actually funny—literally made me laugh. “There are several kinds of stories,” he writes, “but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” He discusses the problem awhile, turning to Artemis Ward for his example (“considered to be America’s first stand-up comedian,” per Wikipedia), along with the joke, called “The Wounded Soldier.” Twain describes his own approach perhaps better than anyone could, which he used all his career: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art [of storytelling].” Then he gets into timing, which he calls “the pause,” a deadly and delicate matter. This leads to “The Golden Arm.” Twain illustrates the utility and technique of “the pause,” but unfortunately indulges dialect in a way here that too readily suggests racism. A 19th-century African-American from Missouri tells the story, complete with the prized pause. “You must get the pause right,” Twain concludes; “and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.” It’s true, and Twain is too modest—which is not really like him—to mention it’s even harder to capture in writing. I’ve been thinking through these difficulties a lot as I go through Twain because his humor is my single favorite thing about his work. He doesn’t always pull off his various gags but his comic instincts always seem solid and I often appreciate even his misses. His humor makes a lot of his miscues worth bearing, though it’s not always easy. Reading across his career, it’s plain that he learned and changed and became reasonably more enlightened in his old age. Indeed, he was probably considered radical by contemporaries. His outrage about things like US foreign policy, however, was not a bit unreasonable. But he may have lost some of his comic instincts then and become more humorless. This piece suggests he spent most of his career knowing well what he was doing as a humorist.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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