#7 in a series; read the complete blog.

12 p.m., Friday, Nov. 12 –

Mark Twain is famous for cranking out a lot of pieces that, uh, were not exactly of Shakespearean quality. But even in his weaker efforts, there’s usually a little gem or two that make it worth sticking around. Take a previously unpublished piece titled “Travel-Scraps I: London, Summer, 1896.” It’s a fair-to-middling excursus on London taxi drivers, omnibuses, the Queen’s Jubilee and the excessive appeals for donations to worthy causes that attended it. You’re cruising along, dutifully turning the pages, and then you come to this. 

 “Drivers of cabs and carriages know that a collision with a ‘bus is not a desirable thing, and they take pains to avoid it. The ‘bus is English. When that is said, all is said. As a rule, any English thing is nineteen times as strong and twenty-three times as heavy as it needs to be. The ‘bus fills these requirements. It is a lumbering big ark, it weighs no one knows how much and it minds collision with an ordinary vehicle no more than a planet would. It is a pity they did not keep the first English bicycle; it must have weighed upwards of three tons. And if it ever collided with an express train, the remains of the train must have been a spectacle.”

The Deadpan Ludicrous Exaggeration, as in the second clause of the sentence about the bicycle, has roots in the Western tall-tale tradition. Twain raised it to a comedic art form because of his exquisite control of tone. The brisk, authoritative, almost pedantic sound of the first clause of the sentence (“It is a pity…”) is the perfect foil for the three-ton kicker that follows.

Twain uses the same trick in a piece titled “Comment on Tautology and Grammar,” one of “Four Sketches About Vienna.” After skewering a writer for using the word “delightful” 13 times in a book about Gladstone, when only five were justified, Twain goes on to whack him for his show-offy command of grammar. “This reviewer even seems to know (or seems even to know, or seems to know even) how to put the word ‘even’ in the right place; and the word ‘only,’ too. I do not like that kind of persons. I never knew one of them that came to any good. A person who is as self-righteous as that, will do other things. I know this, because I have noticed it many a time. I would never hesitate to injure that kind of a man if I could.”

It’s hard to know which is more delicious: the self-mocking use of the ungrammatical phrase “that kind of persons,” or the Deadpan Ludicrous Exaggeration kicker “I would never hesitate to injure that kind of a man if I could.” What's fascinating is that Twain adroitly sets up the latter by preceding it with a completely meaningless sentence: “I know this, because I have noticed it many a time.” If you take that sentence away, you don’t lose any meaning – but the kicker isn’t half as funny. It’s another example of Twain’s acute internal sense, honed by years of performing in public, of exactly how to hit the funnybone.