Humor is just something you use strategically to achieve certain effects in storytelling. It is worth noting though, that as a contemporary master of the American spoken-word story, Dicks seems to agree with me that humor is not the essence of it. I just learned about this through Matthew Dicks’ fascinating book Storyworthy, which I’ll write about in a future part of this blogchain.

In its modern form, the tradition apparently persists as a whole subcultural scene of live, competitive storytelling events. While there are some American tales that fit this description, like those featuring Paul Bunyan, the primary American form of folklore is adjacent to, rather than within, this classic form. In this broad category I include everything from Grimm’s fairy tales and Aesop’s fables in the West, to the Arabian Nights and Jataka tales in Asia. Stories with unclear authorship that are collected and compiled by scholars rather than invented. The closest cousins of the classic American yarn I can think of are semi-mythological oral traditions that mix fact and fantasy freely in the form of folk tales, but are primarily about everyday events rather than epic cosmic-historical events. In making his exceptionalist claim for American storytelling, Twain was, I think, right about something. A form that appeared centuries after the rise of written and printed forms of storytelling, and within a modern, industrial context. For whatever reason, in the 19th century, America reinvented, in a unique new way, an old, primarily oral form of storytelling. I’m not sure if Twain’s claim is strictly true even within the narrow scope of his comparison to English and French storytelling traditions, but there’s something to what he was getting at in the essay.

The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind–the humorous. This entry is part 2 of 10 in the series NarrativiumĪdam Gurri pointed me to this 1895 Mark Twain essay, How to Tell a Story, which makes the interesting claim that the humorous story, dependent for its effect on the manner of telling rather than the matter, is an American invention:

Telling true stories mark kramer