Judith Yaross Lee

There are two words missing from the title of this book: of humor. This turns out to be an academic analysis of Twain’s talks and writings, somehow extrapolated to the present. It is not what I thought it would be – an analysis of how Twain was conscious of his personal brand, how he leveraged it, and his strategies in various endeavors. There is no deep analysis of his empire; there is no examination of leverage, line extension, or horizontal expansion. I had hoped for a remarkable insight into the purposeful, strategic building of the industry that was Mark Twain. Instead, there is a meandering, tangential potpourri of ways in which Mark Twain supposedly influenced every American entertainer after him.

First of all, I’m a big fan. Twain got away with a lot, considering the times, and his legal maneuvers in the copyright field deserve to be legendary. Incredibly, you have to get to page 170 before there’s any real talk of Twain’s marketing of his brand. I was hoping there would be a comparison to Dresser, the Ralph Lauren of the 19th century, who branded himself into an entire industry. How did that inspire Twain, and how far did he pursue it in his own particular realm of social comment?

Instead there is a longwinded exegesis on standup comedy, as if there is a connection between Twain’s brand and modern standup. It gets sidetracked on what a standup does. Lee professes the standup is expressing autobiographically and authentically, and creating a brand around that true story. But that’s absurd on its face. So many of the greatest standups created characters that had nothing whatever to do with who they really were/are: Phyllis Diller, Jerry Lewis, Tommy Smothers, Jeff Foxworthy, Moms Mabley just to name some you probably know.

But worse, as they say in medical science – correlation does not imply causation. And humor is so broad and extensive, you can always find an example to back your thesis. Standup would almost certainly still be standup without the existence of Mark Twain, because it owes its ascension to vaudeville far more than to the literary salon circuit. But most of all, this is not Twain building his brand. It’s a digression, and the book is a hub and spoke collection of digressions on modern comics. Even if all standups do owe their careers to Mark Twain, it’s not what this is supposed to be about, at least from the title.

When it settles down and focuses on Twain’s performances, it does far better. You can see Twain building the persona, developing the patter, building the brand. But he never did standup. Standup is performing the same act every night of the week, often several times, experimenting, refining, honing. Twain gave talks, each one unique. He was not a standup.

When we finally get to Twain’s actual branding efforts, it ends in a couple of pages, then digresses into about 20 pages on the successes of Comedy Central, from its birth as a merger of two losing cable channels, to today with its flagship Daily Show. Mark Twain plays no role. Most of the book is like that.

Mark Twain was an absolutely brilliant satirist. He could skewer hypocrisy in all (seeming) innocence. That was his brand and it was explicitly calculated and intentional. The other feature of Twain’s brand was laughter: laughter so hard and prolonged it was painful. No one else in this book ever achieved that. Not Philip Roth, not Jon Stewart, not the Simpsons. Peter Cook could do that at will, and for hours on end, even to the point of literally disarming enemies (criminals and police alike). People laughed so long and so hard they couldn’t remember a single joke the next day. All they knew was their sides hurt and they had the night of their lives. That was Twain’s brand too. But Peter Cook is never mentioned, because Twain’s Brand doesn’t examine laughter and because Peter Cook was not American (though some of his greatest successes were achieved in the USA). Instead we are treated to four pages on Margaret Cho, and endless mentions of Comedy Central.

It is unfortunate that this book is about humor and not marketing. Like every other attempt to analyze humor from an academic standpoint, it disappoints. Humor, like magic, loses everything when analyzed.

I confess, for the first time in my life, I have read a book and I have no idea what it was about.… (plus d'informations)