How Twain Said to Tell It
Mark Twain’s rules for the humorous story, and the test this project runs
On Mark Twain’s essay “How to Tell a Story,” 1895 · In the public domain
In 1895 Mark Twain wrote down how the trick is done. His essay “How to Tell a Story” is a short, dry manual for the one kind of story he thought was hard to tell.
One line in it matters especially to this project. His rules come first.
The hard kind
Twain draws a line between the comic story, the witty story, and the humorous story, and says only the last is hard to tell. The comic and the witty depend on the matter, on the joke itself, so anybody can tell them. The humorous story depends on the manner of the telling, and that, he says, is a high and delicate art.
The straight face
One rule carries all the others. The humorous story is told gravely, and the teller does his best to conceal that he even suspects there is anything funny in it. Set that beside the narrator of The Invalid’s Story, reporting a night of mounting horror over a wheel of cheese in perfect earnest, and you can see the rule at work.
The devices
Beneath that rule Twain names a few moves. String absurdities together in a wandering way, as if you never notice they are absurd. Slur the point, and drop the funny part quietly instead of announcing it. Let fall a studied remark as though you were only thinking out loud. And above all use the pause, held to exactly the right length and broken at exactly the right instant.
Read the calm chief editor in Journalism in Tennessee. He slots a shooting into the day’s work between reading proof and going to dinner. The straight face never breaks.
The experiment
Twain says the humorous story is a work of art that only an artist can tell, and that no art at all is needed for the other kinds. That claim is worth testing. A large language model can reproduce the matter of a story easily. It summarizes, translates, and rearranges prose. The manner is harder. Restraint, timing, apparent innocence, the decision not to explain the joke, none of that comes for free.
So we took Twain at his word. We used AI to retell not the easy stories he waved off, but the hard one he described, the humorous story that lives or dies on a straight face. If he was right, this should be a hard test. The joke depends on timing and restraint. The teller has to know when not to push it.
The project runs that test three ways. The Jumping Frog carries the joke through four languages and back. The Invalid’s Story holds a straight face over an entire story. Journalism in Tennessee drops the teller into a room full of mayhem, and the deadpan either survives or it does not. Twain’s words stay exactly as he wrote them. The test is whether the new teller beside him keeps the composure the humor depends on.
A note on this page
Twain’s essay and stories are in the public domain, and his words are untouched. The retellings, notes, and illustrations across this site were made with AI assistance and edited by R. M. Hume.
Read it, or teach it
The illustrated editions. The three stories put to the test above, retold and illustrated, on Kindle: The Jumping Frog, The Invalid’s Story, and Journalism in Tennessee.
For the classroom. Three Tellings, One Moment runs this test on a single Jumping Frog scene, and the For Teachers hub has the full set of units.
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