Mark Twain: "Since he couldn’t renounce humor, he enriched it."

Once Upon a Time in the West

"Ward’s success set him apart, but he wasn’t alone. He belonged to a generation of humorists who emerged around the time of the Civil War. They wrote under a variety of pseudonyms—Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, Orpheus C. Kerr—and helped popularize the telling of funny stories. They did little to elevate humor into art. Their comedy largely relied on misspelled words and malapropisms, illuminated by the occasional witticism. While there was plenty of quaint American slang on offer in their work, these writers didn’t try to develop the deeper potential of vernacular language into anything approximating “good square American literatoor,” as Ward called it.

That task fell to Twain. His anxiety about humor’s lowness worked to his advantage, pushing him to improve on the more buffoonish antics of predecessors like Ward and find a more literary key for his work. Since he couldn’t renounce humor, he enriched it. To do so he drew on the particular strain of frontier storytelling that he had encountered in his youth: Southwestern humor, named for a loosely defined region that included Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri."