Humor and Regional Dialect
Overview
The reading assignment for this study session introduces you to a preeminent figure in American literature, Mark Twain. Drawing from the experiences of his early years along the Mississippi River, Twain was a prolific writer whose stories, novels, and essays were not only highly popular in his own time, but have endured as true American classics to this day.
Twain’s distinctive style is often marked by a unique combination of cynicism and a sharp, sometimes biting, sense of humor that often criticizes or makes fun of human behavior or aspects of society.
Humor, writing which intends to evoke laughter, may be created by a variety of techniques. Often, humor is derived from the exaggeration of an incident—treating a trivial event as something gravely serious, for example. Another approach to humor is the embellishment of circumstances or events, where fictional features whimsically alter simple reality. Humor may also be created by featuring a narrator who voices a serious tone while presenting a story with ridiculous or silly qualities of which the narrator is completely unaware.
In addition to his use of humor, Twain also exemplifies the literary technique known as regional dialect. Regional dialect involves the colorful use of language to realistically capture the way in which the people of a particular region actually pronounce their words. The following passage from Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” illustrates the usage of regional dialect:
“Maybe you understand frogs and maybe you don’t understand ‘em; maybe you’ve had experience, and maybe you ain’t only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I’ve got my opinion, and I’ll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County” (585).
