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Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor by Harold H. Kolb, Jr. (review)

Harold H. Kolb, Jr., is in no danger of making tabloid headlines with the publication of Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor. At a time when most literary critics are as giddy as teenagers to embrace the latest intellectual fad, Kolb builds his magisterial 500-page study around the disarmingly uncontroversial claim that mark Twain was, first and last, a humorist. Kolb assembles no straw men to give this claim a false sense of novelty, and he makes no apology for the fact that his understanding of mark Twain’s art and achievement is thoroughly anticipated in Howells’ century-old tribute to his close friend, part of which serves here as a forceful epigram: “[mark Twain] was a thinker of courageous originality and penetrating sagacity [but] all his wisdom . . . begins and ends in his humor.” it might seem unnecessary to reiterate this eloquent statement in the twenty-first century, but Kolb maintains that commentators of Twain’s time and our own often treat humor as “merely an attractive surface feature, a sugar coating on a social or philosophical pill, rather than a crucial part of both the meaning and the structure of Twain’s writings.” Of course, nothing is more common in American literary studies than the idea that mark Twain was an American Cervantes or a missourian molière, but such celebrity comparisons rarely pack much explanatory punch, and Kolb is right to insist that Twain’s humor is often presented as something extraneous to whatever it is that makes his writing really important, such as his persistent critique of humbug, or his vision of democracy, or his ear for spoken language. insisting that Twain’s humor deserves more sustained attention than critics have generally given it, Kolb carefully sketches the portrait of “a writer whose lifelong mode of perception is essentially humorous, a writer who sees the world in the sharp clash of contrast, whose native language is exaggeration, whose vision unravels and reorganizes our perceptions.“