Mark Twain and the two funniest tropes

Why we need broadminded humor, especially now.

My last post responded to a comment on a previous post:

“I wish I could be humorous in these times.”

That made me think back to a breakfast I had with the Dalai Lama, who laughed through the entire meal; about feminist humor (which provably is not oxymoronic), and of course penises. And suddenly I realized that my post had become so engorged…

Sorry…

My post had become so unbearably long…

Oh, god.

I wrote too much for one post and cut it…

Stop. This is the second of two installments. You might want to read the first one if you haven’t yet.

The Dalai Lama was undoubtedly seeing the breakfast table and me through more than just his dorky aviator glasses. His vision was—how else can I say it?—universal. He placed everything in a broad, maybe infinite, context.

In my next book, based on a yearlong rhetorical experiment on myself, I explore why some people laugh easily and others don’t. It’s a deeply rhetorical question. Going back through the texts of the ancient Sophists and their feuding offspring, the Stoics and the Epicureans, I found that the broader-minded philosophers seem much funnier.

This makes sense. The Stoics aimed toward an ideal state they called apatheia, or apathy, a state of mind free from passions, including “delight.” Stoic philosophy became part of Christian theology, too often including the joy-killing part. Think of the stoical Puritans, those witch-burning laugh riots.

The Epicureans, on the other hand, aimed toward ataraxia: freedom from the fear of death, pain, God’s punishment, and anxiety about earthly goods. This philosophy did not exclude humor. In fact, Lucretius, the Roman who popularized Epicureanism through the classic poem The Nature of Things, was good for a laugh. He used a drunken metaphor to explain the Epicurean invention of atomic theory. To explain why the soul is made up of atoms that disperse when the person dies, he wrote¹:

And another thing: when wine has soaked a fellow to the core,

And through his veins has scattered and distributed its heat,

Why do his limbs grow leaden, why does he trip on his own feet?

Why does his mind sop, his sight swim, his tongue drawl?

Why does he burst with bellowing, and belching and a brawl,

And all the usual things that follow on a drunken spree?

Why, indeed, unless the wine’s ferocity

Tends to disrupt the spirit even while it’s in the frame.

It’s clear that if a thing can be disrupted, then the same,

If penetrated by the force of slightly stronger sway,

Will be deprived of any future and will pass away.

If one drunken bout sets the body all ahoo, just think what the power of death can do! Lucretius crafted a deductive argument starring a Roman Dean Martin.

If that’s not laugh-aloud funny, maybe you had to be there. Still, I imagine the Epicureans laughed like Buddhist monks. This may be no coincidence; trade between Greece and India had been flourishing for centuries before the Sophist Epicurus wrote his stuff. In fact, the Greeks coined the word India. (The Indians in turn called the Greeks “Yonas,” the people of Ionia.) Some of the oldest Greek myths had gods and heroes—Dionysius and Herakles among others—who practically commuted between the two regions. We can easily imagine wanderlustful Sophists serving as ambassadors on trading missions and picking up some Buddhist philosophy along the way. So it may be no accident that Epicurean humor might sound a Buddhist gong.

Both groups seem to have gained some distance on the time’s troubles. I believe that a broad, even spiritual perspective might have enabled their laughter; or even was the source of it. If that’s true, how can you and I gain that kind of perspective? How can we laugh at what’s going on in America and the rest of the world without turning callous or sarcastic or chucklingly passive?

Mark Twain may offer an answer. His best humor relied on tropes, particularly irony and hyperbole. Most humor blooms out of the odiferous night soil of tropes. The very word trope implies a head-snapping change in perspective. (See my post on that word.)

Hyperbole is a trope. (At least, I argue that it is.) In fact it’s the GOAT of tropes, the greatest of all time. Which also makes it the most American. Think Paul Bunyan. Think Mohammed Ali:

"I have wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail."

Think Chuck Norris:

Chuck Norris doesn’t do pushups, he pushes the Earth down.

But only Twain is the GOAT of funny hyperbole. He had a trick for pulling off a proper exaggeration: make it precise.

“In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather within four-and-twenty hours.”

Irony is the other funny trope, and Twain played it like an organ. Huckleberry Finn is one huge ironic joke, starring an enslaved man who helped manage the fate of his “superiors.” Some of Twain’s irony gets icily bitter. When Huckleberry tells a woman that a boiler has exploded on a paddleboat, the woman asks, “Was anyone hurt?” “No’m,” Huck replies. “Killed a [n-word]. Twain had been through the Civil War, where both sides fought and died for “freedom.” We live in ironic times today in which some libertarians are throwing their support behind politicians who support Putin. Americans! You have nothing to lose but the opportunity to buy your chains!

Hyperbole lets us exaggerate our own personal struggles, or to smile at the exaggerations of others. And irony lets us laugh at the contradictions of our sillier politicians and our own strange modern times. The same things that can make our blood boil can, occasionally, therapeutically, make us laugh. There’s something about the Dalai Lama’s laughter that makes me think he sees a kind of universal irony that most of us can’t.

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the lama lived in times free of trouble. So what’s with the humor? Did they laugh despite the hard times. or as a way to bear them? I like to think the answer is more heroic: by viewing those times in a universal lens, they laughed at the trouble.

While it can be hard to be humorous in these times, what I get from the lama and the Epicureans is this: Maybe the times demand it.

Mudgett thinks I’m especially funny in the bathroom.

1. I quote from the delightful translation by A.E. Stallings.