America didn't have much to laugh about during the Civil War, and the difficult years of reconstruction afterwards. Neither did Samuel L. Clemens, forever to be known as Mark Twain. He was frequently broke and unemployed, and lost three of his four children in either infancy or adolescence. Nevertheless, he still managed to find the humor in the world and people around him, and it was this irreverence he happily shared with the world. Twain's humor was typical of nineteenth-century comedy, and usually structured around a satirical narrative (Yosifon 683). As twentieth-century humorist Russel Baker observed, "Twain's was the voice of the country's frontier newness, brashness, vigor, disdain for the polite and genteel. It was voice that enjoyed shocking the squeamish, mocking the piously upright- (105). The post-Civil War America in which Mark Twain flourished took itself very seriously, and he regarded it as his mission in life to "lighten it up."" He understood that humor in America was different than in other parts of the world because, "The American story-teller is apparently unconscious of the effect of the joke. The method is quieter, more modified, and more subtle- (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 can thenceforth interest no one- (DeVoto 202).
