Three weeks into the semester, I think I can label myself as far as the comedy that I enjoy. I like witty worded and especially humorously performed pieces, mostly modern. The Word is King however. I love wordplay. I love the momentary flash of an ironic juxaposition or situation that can be commented upon, whether my own or someone else's. I love the dumb things that people do in the moment too, but those cannot be performed on stage. Those just happen. You have to be there. It's just one of those stories that you retell and it loses all of its life. Real life slapstick is the only kind for me, usually the unintentional kind and yes I laugh at myself often for this type of thing. It's those occassionally spacy, sometimes naive, or incredibly klutzy people that make the world laugh at their friends, or at least it's that way for me.
Sometimes I like to see just how naive people can be. It makes those tall tale stories even better. It is not usually the story itself that makes me laugh, but the naive listeners belief in its supposed truth. My thought process usually goes like this, "I don't want to smirk too much so that I give the joke away. O gosh I can't hold it in any more. I need to leave the room. I can't believe they believe this. I'm pretty naive, but not that much." In this way, the whole superiority thing does kick in a bit, but I feel I have paid my dues in this department. We all do. At some point each of us believes something outlandish and I have had my share.
The point I want to make however is that for some humorous works, you just need to be there. This is why I don't think that Mark Twain's Jumping Frog works. It is lifeless on a piece of paper (I have read it before too and had a similar reaction). Maybe I don't have a vivid picture mind from word to image, but it's just not that funny to me. If this happened to a friend of mine and he was actually relating it, it might be funnier. The funniest would be if I was the one leading the poor man on the wild goose chase and recieving the letter. I like to pull pranks and honestly, this one is more for the laughter of the pranker (and hopefully in some small way for the one being pranked if they are a good sport) than anyone else listening.
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If you believe that Twain's story is "written for the prankster" and if you yourself enjoy being the practical joker, then I'm not sure why you also believe that the story doesn't work. Do you mean that the performance would be more enjoyable than reading about it? You might, then, be interested in Twain's explanation of how the hoax works--and why it works, and the difference between telling a story and writing a story down. It occurs in his writings for the Galaxy in 1871.
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