Weblog Post #1

            After reading Twain’s selected readings I feel like I gained a good amount of perspective on the man’s sense of humor.  Two stories in particular struck as something only a very intelligent comedian would do: Letters From Earth, and The War Prayer.  

            While Letters I found to be very funny by playing with expectations and turning preconceived notions on their head, War Prayer is in its construction one big joke.  A joke essentially is a setup, and a punch line.  The set up was a church in the midst of a rousing, patriotic prayer from the preacher is then deflated by the observations of an aged stranger.  The stranger posits that, in a nutshell, praying for victory is praying for failure for somebody else.  The punch line is in fact the last line of the story: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”  I found it to be paralleling the same kind of thought process as George Carlin.  He drops a new idea on you, and then to break the tension pops in a punch line that makes the whole thing hilarious.  But while it makes you laugh, you feel like you are learning something important as well.  As well as juggling with such taboo topics as religion and war also put him in familiar territory with Carlin.

Or am I misinterpreting his sincerity with sarcasm?  Is his tone more dreadful and serious?