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The Guy Who Told Us Mark Twain Was Funny

By Dean Norman

Suddenly one man laughed hysterically. Bob Haar was a Hallmark cartoonist who liked sick humor. Stories that didn’t have sympathy for a victim.

The old man told about an old lady who was very sick. Her doctor told her to give up drinking, smoking and swearing, and she would get well.

“I can’t give up those things,” she said, “because I’ve never done them.”

“So there was no saving her,” said the old man. “She was a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard.”

Bob laughed so hard that his face turned red. People in seats in front of him turned around to see what happened that was so funny. If Bob knew that people were looking at him, he would be embarrassed and stop laughing. But he was enjoying the joke so much he was not aware that people were looking at him.

Half a dozen of his friends laughed at Bob’s display. He continued to laugh at every word from the old man, and we kept laughing with him. People kept turning around to see what was funny. When they realized that Bob was laughing at the lecture, they decided maybe the old man was funny. The entire audience then laughed at everything for the rest of the lecture.

Hal Holbrook was doing his impersonation of Mark Twain at junior colleges. I had read some of Twain’s writing and didn’t think it was very funny. Maybe in his day, but it didn’t seem relevant to the 1950s. After the performance, I read Twain again. I could hear the voice, and hear the pauses. The pauses on stage made him seem like a person who was senile, and couldn’t continue a thought without rambling aimlessly.

Then realizing that he was pretending to be senile, and deliberately pausing for comic effect, you never knew what he would say next.

I think the junior college students probably had heard of Mark Twain, and may have thought like me. But when Bob Haar laughed, and we laughed — first at Bob and then at the lecture — we realized that Mark Twain really was funny. I wonder if that performance launched Hal Holbrook’s career? Well, he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show soon after that, and that probably did more for his career than the guy who liked sick jokes at the Kansas City junior college lecture.

It seems that people have be told that something is funny before they think it is funny. Bob told them it was funny at one lecture. Ed Sullivan told his audience that Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain was funny. Just the words spoken by an unknown performer weren’t enough to make most people laugh.

— Dean Norman

Dean Norman is a cartoonist and humor writer, whose work has appeared in greeting cards,The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine and The Kansas City Star. He's also written comedy for cartoon shows and written and illustrated children's books. He illustrated a cartoon book for Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland Metroparks Adventures.

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