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What's funny about Huckleberry Finn is that it's a humorous story. This sounds like a tautology and it is, but in a special sense. The story is humorous because it's told by the quintessential American Boy, Huck Finn, and according to the American humorist, Mark Twain, the humorous story is quintessentially American. Here is how Twain explains it, in a late essay entitled "How To Tell A Story":
The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect on the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.... The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.
The humorous story is strictly a work of art-high and delicate art-and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with an eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.
Very often . . . [the] humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from the nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.1
The present essay is about the nubs or snappers in Huckleberry Finn, and by extension about a distinctive and (according to Twain) a uniquely American mode of being funny-a Trickster's mode with an American slant. I refer to deadpan, of course, the comic form familiar to Americans through a wide range of folklore, from Yankee Peddler to Riverboat Con Man, and particularly the Western Tall Tale. The joke is told "gravely," the teller is straight-faced-he recounts in earnest detail how Davy Crockett at six years of age killed the biggest bear in Arkansas or how you can...