Twain’s Short Stories and Humor

Publication. The story first appeared in The Saturday Press of New York on November 18, 1865, under the title “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” It became the title story of Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867). Our quotations come from the later version in Twain’s collection Sketches New and Old (Project Gutenberg eBook #3189), where it is called “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Summary. A friend “from the East” asks the narrator to visit “good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler” and ask about a Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator finds Wheeler “dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove” of a run-down tavern in the mining camp of Angel’s. Wheeler gets as far as “Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le—” and drops the name for good. Instead he goes straight into “a feller here, once by the name of Jim Smiley,” from “the winter of ’49—or maybe it was the spring of ’50,” and he starts talking.

Smiley would bet on anything. He bets on a sickly mare that always wins at the last moment, and on a bull-pup named Andrew Jackson that wins every fight until he meets a dog with no hind legs to grab. Then Smiley catches a frog, names him Dan’l Webster, and spends three months teaching him to jump. One day a stranger comes to camp, and Smiley bets him forty dollars that Dan’l can outjump any frog in Calaveras County. The stranger has no frog, so Smiley goes to the swamp to catch him one. While he is gone, the stranger pries open Dan’l’s mouth and fills him full of quail-shot. At the word go, Dan’l cannot budge: he is “planted as solid as a church.” The stranger takes the money and leaves. Only then does Smiley lift Dan’l, find him heavy, turn him upside down, and watch him belch out “a double handful of shot.”

Wheeler is called away, and the narrator tries to escape. At the door Wheeler catches him and starts in on Smiley’s “yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail.” The narrator leaves without hearing it.

Summary. Thirty years after the Frog, Twain explains how a humorous story works. He opens modestly: “I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told.” Then he sorts stories into three kinds. “The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.” The comic and witty stories depend on what is told and “must be brief and end with a point.” The humorous story depends on “the manner of the telling,” and may “wander around as much as it pleases.”

To show the difference, Twain tells an old anecdote, “The Wounded Soldier,” the comic way: a soldier carries a wounded comrade to the rear, not noticing that a cannon-ball has taken the man’s head off. Told like that, says Twain, it “isn’t worth the telling.” But told by the poet James Whitcomb Riley, in the character of a muddled old farmer who keeps losing his place, it takes ten minutes and is “about the funniest thing I have ever listened to.”

Twain then lists the features of the American art: stringing absurdities together while seeming “innocently unaware” of them, “the slurring of the point,” dropping a studied remark as if “thinking aloud,” and, fourth and last, “the pause.” He ends with a ghost story, “The Golden Arm,” which he used to tell on stage. Its last line is a shout, and everything depends on getting the silence before it exactly right.

Summary. The narrator, Henry Adams, tells it himself: “When I was twenty-seven years old, I was a mining-broker’s clerk in San Francisco.” Sailing on the bay, he is carried out to sea, picked up by a ship bound for London, and made to work his passage. He lands with “only a dollar in my pocket,” and soon he is starving.

Two rich elderly brothers call him in from the street. They have made a bet: twenty thousand pounds on whether a penniless stranger could live thirty days on a single one-million-pound note, and keep out of jail. They hand him an envelope and send him off. Thinking it holds ordinary money, he eats a huge meal at a cheap eating-house, then discovers the note. No one can change it, so no one makes him pay. A tailor gives him clothes on credit, a hotel gives him rooms, and London starts talking about the foreign eccentric who carries million-pound bills in his vest-pocket. Harris’s little eating-house becomes famous because he ate there.

At a dinner given by the American minister, Henry falls in love with Portia Langham. An old friend, Lloyd Hastings, is in London trying to sell a mine and failing. Henry lets Hastings use his famous name, and the shares sell; when the month ends, each of them has a million dollars in the bank. Henry returns the note, the bet is won, and Portia reveals that the winning brother is her stepfather. The only “situation” Henry wants is “Son-in-law.”

Summary. “Hadleyburg was the most honest and upright town in all the region round about,” and it was proud of it. The town keeps its children away from temptation so their honesty will never be tested. Then it has “the ill luck to offend a passing stranger,” who decides to take revenge.

The stranger leaves a heavy sack with Edward and Mary Richards, an old, poor couple. A note says it holds gold weighing “a hundred and sixty pounds four ounces,” worth forty thousand dollars, meant for the citizen who once gave him twenty dollars and a piece of advice. Whoever can repeat that remark gets the gold. At a town-hall meeting, the Rev. Mr. Burgess will open the sack and check the answer.

Then the stranger sends a letter, signed “Howard L. Stephenson,” to each of the town’s nineteen leading men, telling each one the remark and inviting him to claim the money. One by one, every one of them writes it down and sends it in, Richards included. At the meeting, Burgess reads out claim after claim, all with the same words, and the crowd turns it into a chant. The sack is opened: the coins are “only gilded disks of lead.” Burgess skips the Richardses’ claim, to repay an old kindness, so the town hails Edward as its last honest man. The guilt destroys him. He and Mary fall ill and die, and the town changes its name and drops one word from the motto on its seal.

Twain wrote these stories in the nineteenth century, for readers of his time. Reading carefully means noticing what the stories show about their era, including what was hurtful then and still is.

• Dialect spelling. Wheeler says “p’ints” and “yaller.” This is vernacular, written to sound like a real voice from the mining camps. It is not a sign that Wheeler is foolish. Read it aloud.
• Cruelty played for laughs. In the Frog, Andrew Jackson faces a dog with no hind legs, loses, and “laid down and died,” and Dan’l is filled with quail-shot. Notice that the story asks us to laugh at the betting, not at the pain. Do you agree that it works?
• National types. Dan’l shrugs “like a Frenchman,” and “How to Tell a Story” assigns each kind of story to a nation. These are generalizations. Ask what Twain gains from them, and what they leave out.
• “The Golden Arm.” Twain introduces this ghost story with a racial term that was standard in 1895 and is outdated now, and he prints it in a heavy written imitation of Black Southern speech. We have not reprinted it here. His instructions also tell the teller to aim the final scare at “a girl, preferably.” Discuss: what do those choices show about Twain’s audience and his time?
• Hadleyburg’s rumor. Richards remembers an old scandal: after a young woman’s death, the village decided she had “a spoonful of negro blood.” Richards even half-remembers that spreading this rumor was the “service” he did for Goodson. The story presents it as one of the town’s hidden sins. Ask whether the satire fully condemns the town’s racism, or only its hypocrisy.

• Mark Twain, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” in Sketches New and Old, Project Gutenberg eBook #3189 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/3189). All Jumping Frog quotations come from this text.
• Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, Project Gutenberg eBook #3250 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/3250).
• Mark Twain, “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note,” in The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories, Project Gutenberg eBook #61522 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/61522).
• Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, Project Gutenberg eBook #1213 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/1213).
• Wikipedia, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (first printing in The Saturday Press, November 18, 1865, as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”; the 1867 book), “How to Tell a Story and Other Essays” (essay first published October 3, 1895; collection 1897), “The Million Pound Bank Note” (1893) and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (Harper’s Monthly, December 1899; the usual reading of the motto as “Lead Us Not Into Temptation”).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation on this page was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above.
• Art: the frog and bank-note illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.