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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
The story that made Twain famous, first printed in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." A narrator asks after a stranger and gets trapped by Simon Wheeler, who answers with a long, perfectly solemn yarn about a man who would bet on anything.
The joke is in the delivery: Wheeler never cracks a smile, and the frog story itself is only the last turn of a ramble. It takes ten minutes to read and is the best single test of whether Twain's deadpan style is for you.
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The Innocents Abroad (1800)
6.9/10on Open Library
Published
Twain's 1869 account of an 1867 pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, and the best-selling of his books in his lifetime. Its comedy comes from refusing to be impressed on cue: Twain needles pious fellow passengers, tireless guides and the Old Masters with the same cheerful irreverence.
It is long and episodic, so dip in rather than march through. The Italian guide chapters are a good place to start. Expect some sneering at the locals of the Middle East that reads harshly now.
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Roughing It (1872)
8.3/10on Open Library
Published
Twain's 1872 memoir of heading west by stagecoach when his brother was appointed secretary of Nevada Territory, then flailing through silver mining, newspaper work and San Francisco. He plays himself as a greenhorn who believes every promise of easy riches, and the gap between his hopes and his luck drives the jokes.
It is the funniest of the travel books for many readers because the West gives him tall tales to tell as well as to mock. The chapters on Native Americans are the book's ugliest and are easy to skip.
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Sketches New and Old (1875)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
The 1875 collection of Twain's early newspaper and magazine sketches, and the place to find his short-form absurdity. "Journalism in Tennessee" turns a small-town newspaper office into a war zone, and "My Watch" follows a perfectly good watch through a series of repairmen who each leave it worse.
These pieces were written for a quick laugh in a periodical, so quality varies. Read a few at a sitting and skip any that fall flat; the best ones show how much of modern comic writing Twain had already worked out.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1817)
7.9/10on Open Library
Published
The 1876 boyhood novel earns its place here for its comic set pieces rather than its adventure plot. Tom tricking his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing a fence is one of the great scenes in American humor, and the Sunday school prize and the boys attending their own funeral are nearly as good.
The comedy is gentle and grown-up, aimed at adults remembering childhood. Injun Joe, the villain, is drawn with the prejudices of the period.
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A Tramp Abroad (1878)
6.8/10on Open Library
Published
If you only read one Twain travel book for laughs, make it this 1880 "walking tour" of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, which keeps turning into train rides and a raft trip down the Neckar, with his companion Harris suffering alongside him.
It also holds two of his most quoted pieces: Jim Baker's yarn about the blue jay who tries to fill a house with acorns through a knothole, and "The Awful German Language," an appendix that takes German grammar apart, compound words and genders included, with the exasperation of every struggling learner.
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Life on the Mississippi (1883)
7.7/10on Open Library
Published
Read this 1883 book for its first part, Twain's account of training as a steamboat pilot under the exacting Horace Bixby. The cub who fills a notebook with river names, only for Bixby to quiz him on points he cannot name, is comedy built on humiliation, and every reader who has started a hard job will recognize it.
The later chapters, on a return trip decades on, turn into a looser travelogue with flashes of wit rather than steady laughs. Stop when the fun runs out; nothing is lost.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876)
7.9/10on Open Library
Published
Huck's novel is here on comic merit, not reputation. Huck tells his story in his own voice and never sees the joke, so the humor comes from what he describes with a straight face, above all the king and the duke, two con men who rehearse a mangled Shakespeare, then fleece a town with a crude show called the Royal Nonesuch.
It is also a serious book about slavery, and it uses a racial slur constantly, which many readers find hard going. The final Tom Sawyer chapters are a farce that divides readers.
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
7.5/10on Open Library
Published
A 19th-century factory superintendent, Hank Morgan, is knocked out with a crowbar and wakes in sixth-century England, where he escapes being burned at the stake by "predicting" an eclipse he happens to remember. The first half of this 1889 novel is a gleeful send-up of chivalry, knights who wear sandwich boards to advertise soap, and Hank's Yankee salesmanship.
Later it turns dark and the ending is violent, so treat it as a comedy that becomes a warning. It is the longest stretch of sustained comic invention in Twain's novels. The British first edition shown here called it A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
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Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895)
Published
Twain's 1895 demolition of James Fenimore Cooper is a strong candidate for the funniest literary criticism ever written. He announces that there are nineteen rules governing romantic fiction, that Cooper broke eighteen of them in The Deerslayer, and that in two-thirds of a page Cooper scored 114 offenses out of a possible 115.
You do not need to have read Cooper. The essay works as a lesson in how not to write, delivered by a man enjoying himself enormously, and it takes about half an hour.
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How to Tell a Story (2002)
Published
Twain's 1895 essay on his own craft: "The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French." He argues that the humorous story depends on the manner of the telling, not the matter, then proves it with "The Golden Arm," a ghost story that only works if you get the pause right.
Read it after the Jumping Frog and you will see exactly what Twain was doing on stage and on the page. It became the title piece of a collection in 1897. The dialect in "The Golden Arm" leans on racial caricature of its era.
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Following the Equator (1897)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
Twain's last travel book, from the round-the-world lecture tour he took to pay off his debts in the mid-1890s, and published in 1897. The travel writing is uneven, but its chapters open with maxims from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," and those are pure distilled Twain: "Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to."
Many readers come for the maxims and stay for the Australia and India chapters. Its views on colonized peoples swing between respect for their cultures and the assumed racial superiority of the day.
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The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1903)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
A long short story from 1899 about a town so proud of its honesty that a stranger it once offended sets out to prove it wrong, with a sack of supposed gold and a cunningly worded note. Watching the town's leading citizens each convince themselves they deserve the money is satire at its most precise.
It is darker and drier than the early sketches, more wicked grin than belly laugh, and it shows where Twain's humor went in his later years. A good pick for readers who like their comedy with a moral sting.
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The Diaries of Adam and Eve (Extracts from Adam's Diary / Eve's Diary) (1953)
7.0/10on Open Library
Published
Two short pieces, "Extracts from Adam's Diary" (written in 1892) and "Eve's Diary" (written in 1904), often read together. Adam is baffled and irritated by the talkative new creature who keeps naming things before he can, while Eve is curious, vain and delighted by everything, and the joke is how differently they record the same Garden.
It is the warmest comedy on this list and a tender one by the end; Twain wrote Eve's Diary weeks after the death of his wife, Olivia. The battle-of-the-sexes humor is of its time but rarely mean.
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Extract from Captain Stormfield's visit to heaven (1909)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
An old sea captain dies, races a comet on the way to heaven and arrives at the wrong gate, only to find the afterlife nothing like the Sunday school version. The harps and halos are given up quickly, and heaven turns out to be vast, bureaucratic and so crowded with other worlds that the clerks at the gate have never heard of Earth.
Published as a book in 1909, months before Twain's death, it is a short, genial satire on comfortable religion. It makes a gentler warm-up for Letters from the Earth.
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Letters from the Earth (1962)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
The title piece is a run of letters from Satan to the archangels Gabriel and Michael about the strange species that prays for help every day and is sure God is listening. It is Twain's fiercest religious satire, and the jokes land hard.
Written in his last years and edited by Bernard DeVoto, the collection was held back by Twain's daughter Clara and not published until 1962. Readers who are devout may find it offensive, which is rather the point; everyone else will find late Twain at his most fearless.
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Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010)
8.5/10on Open Library
Published
Twain directed that this material stay unpublished for a century after his death, and the first volume duly appeared in November 2010. He dictated it as he pleased, jumping between memories, grudges and tall stories, and the freedom of that long embargo shows in how cheerfully rude he is about people he knew.
The scholarly edition runs to more than 700 heavily annotated pages, so newcomers may prefer the shorter Reader's Edition. It rewards readers who already like Twain's voice and want more of it unfiltered.
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