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Satire is the use of humor, exaggeration, and irony in order to make fun of a group of people or ideas. When people think of satire they usually think of television shows such as South Park, but Mark Twain was an expert in the art form of satire back in the 1800’s. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain is an excellent example of satire. This story uses satire to compare the people of the East coast of the United States to the people of the West coast, and Twain also uses satire to portray the struggles of gambling addiction. In the story Jim Smiley is a non-stop gambler who loves the thrill of competition. He claims that he has trained a frog to win a jumping competition. This is not the first animal that Jim Smiley has claimed to be a winner for him. The narrator states, “Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, …show more content…
Twain shows how people thought people of the west spoke with this quote, “The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, ‘Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.’”(Page 1). This quote shows how people in the west were looked at, but also shows how Twain viewed democracy in the United States. Twain wanted to show that the East was just as good as the West in the United States. Mark Twain is a classic writer who loved to use satire in order to show what he felt about America. Twain was a well traveled man that knew that the East and the West were not that much different from each other. His use of humor allows the writing to be open to many readers. We can look at Mark Twain's humor in the sense that he wanted people to be more accepting towards others. This is very important today , because we are starting to see more and more separation in this world
Satire can be defined as any work in which a human vice or folly is attacked with irony or sarcasm. An example of satire can be found in the song "When the President Talks to God" by Bright Eyes. In this song, the lyrics lay out hypothetical conversations between the President and God, which mocks current President George W. Bush and his use of strong religious influence while in office.
Throughout the book it is obvious that there are characteristics that Mark Twain either detests and despises, or respects and values them. Twain quite obviously is making fun of the undesirable characteristics such as the natural curiosity of people and also the greed for money. Although there are not many values that he respects, there is one that is shown in this book, friendship.
Every serious Twain scholar knows of Twain’s reputation as a burlesque humorist/satirist as well as his anti-imperialist and anti-religious tendencies. The scholar must be careful when labeling or categorizing Twain’s work because of his frequent use of sarcasm but Twain definitely liked blacks and abhorred slavery. His treatment of Natives and the Chinese was questionable when looked at apart from his work as a whole, but he slammed the white race more mercilessly than he ever condemned any other race. Sadly, the cynical and sarcastic Mark Twain can never be fully understood because only he knew what thoughts he was trying to convey.
Satire is the use of humor, juvenalian or horatian, in order to point out a problem with society or an individual, so people will notice it and work towards fixing the problem. Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is one novel that is well-known for it’s use of satire to point out racism, greed, hypocrisy, and many other large societal problems. Mark Twain used satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to showcase the
Humor is not always used to make people laugh; it can be used to point out how absurd a person or society is acting. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn between 1876 and 1883 and it was published in 1885, yet he set Huckleberry Finn back some thirty years before slavery was abolished in pre-Civil War Missouri. Mark Twain's use of satire in Huckleberry Finn exposes racial hypocrisy he witnessed in the American South in the mid-19th century. He writes an adventure story filled with biting humor revealing his poor opinion of how his peers treat each other. The absurdity of his characters' actions are humorous; Twain's use of irony also reveals their cruelty via Huck Finn's reflections. Twain's use of irony grossly highlights the
...nfortunate events, Mark Twain became very bitter, cynical and reclusive from the outside world. Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic style of writing and Mark Twain’s humorous and realism tone of writing have played a large role in the reasons of why literature is the way it is today.
In the story,”The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain is about this person who makes a request from his friend who is looking for a man who goes by LEonidas W. Smiley. But as the friend who found an old wheeler he tells his story of how he knew a man that went by Jim Smiley. But in his story we learn that Jim Smiley likes to gamble on anything. On one day he gambled that his frog would jump higher than anyone in Calaveras County. Mark Twain uses Diction to play with his words to describe the way people are in the south.
An Analysis of Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Everyone is familiar with the humorous works of Mark Twain. Some of Twain’s major works include, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”,” Pudd’nhead Wilson”, “Roughing It” “Innocents Abroad” and the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (Bloom 53). The Jumping Frog Story, which was published under several titles, including “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (Rasmussen 618-619). Scholars refer to it as the “Jumping Frog Story.”
People really do not have individual thoughts and just go along with the general opinions of others. Twain’s use of humor, rhetorical questions, everyday life examples, manners, literature, and outside influences present an effective argument for conformity. He believes that people like to imitate each other, so they can be accepted by the rest of society and agree with the public opinion. Without self-approval a person does not feel good about themselves and must always resign to be different. A person needs to conform to be a part of
In the story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country”, Mark Twain gives us the role of a bystander within a different time period- where we are able to experience the current custom and norms of the society—which shares many identical similarities in personality, humor and competitive interaction with the present time. Through the guidance of the plot, the characters become realistic with the portrayal of personality and humor. The Introduction to Smiley, and his strong willed personality “Why, It never made no difference to him—he would bet on anything—the dangdest feller” (Wheeler, 123); such personality is relatively identical to the competitive and prideful characters of the present time. With the exchange in interaction, humor through competitive talk becomes another realistic characteristic-in which the listener has the choice to believe Smiley, or to rule out his statement of “he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County” (Smiley, 124). With the given assumption a frog can do such attempt; to us may seem relatively imaginary and out of the realistic movement—nevertheless, such assumption is made to compete between what is known and what is not; competition between the educated and non-educated
The southern way of speech had yet to have been captured skillfully until Twain’s writing. Twain went into detail in L...
Through his writing, Mark Twain presents a satirical interpretation of man. He pokes fun at the nonsensical and ironic things that men do, especially in their attempts to be better and better reach God. Twain draws men as beings who attempt lack a self-awareness to realize what they do is all in selfishness.
Huckleberry Finn is a very good source of lighthearted, amusing literature. But, Huckleberry Finn has its own hidden theme relating to greed. Mark Twain used satire in Huckleberry Finn to show how disgusting the world truly is with the amount of greed spread throughout it. Mark Twain shows satire about greed in multiple ways. For example; Pap only wanting to reconnect with Huck for his fortune, the King and the Duke and, Jim being hunted for being a runaway slave. All of these examples are different uses of satire by Mark Twain to emphasize on how truly greedy the world really is.
Mark Twain was known as a humorist and in fact, humor was a tool he used to strengthen his points about what he saw as the major problems of the day. Living at the time of the Civil War, he clearly saw and chose to address such problems as slavery, child abuse, religion and feuds. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain expresses his loathing for some of these serious social problems and yet in general, he never loses his humorous touch. Nonetheless, when he deals with the ills of society that particularly anger him, he chooses not to use humor; rather this is reserved for other areas of his work.
“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” not only signifies what it was like to live in the 1800s, but also acts as a faithful representation of reality. This story is both believable and understandable. Perhaps it is the author’s use of vernaculars that makes the story even more plausible. Words such as “kep’,” “git,” “ketched,” and “feller” are used rather than their proper English words while characters are speaking.... ...