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How Authors Create Humor?: Amusing or Funny, Which Is Commonly Found in Literature or Verbal Communication

Mark Twain uses various literary devices like hyperbole, dialect, and irony to create humor in his short stories. In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog", he employs a regional dialect between characters and exaggerates a frog's jumping abilities and a man's gambling habits. The story's irony lies in a gambler being outwitted. Similarly, "Ransom of the Red Chief" features hyperbolic descriptions, ironic situations where a kidnapped boy prefers the kidnappers to his parents, and ironic endings. These elements make the stories and characters more vivid and amusing.

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Minh Nguyen Duc
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34 views

How Authors Create Humor?: Amusing or Funny, Which Is Commonly Found in Literature or Verbal Communication

Mark Twain uses various literary devices like hyperbole, dialect, and irony to create humor in his short stories. In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog", he employs a regional dialect between characters and exaggerates a frog's jumping abilities and a man's gambling habits. The story's irony lies in a gambler being outwitted. Similarly, "Ransom of the Red Chief" features hyperbolic descriptions, ironic situations where a kidnapped boy prefers the kidnappers to his parents, and ironic endings. These elements make the stories and characters more vivid and amusing.

Uploaded by

Minh Nguyen Duc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How Authors Create Humor?

By definition, humor is the quality of being amusing or funny, which is commonly found
in literature or verbal communication. There are some of the elements that help make

up humor in literature such as hyperbole, an exaggeration or overstatement a thing,


while we have the opposite, which is understatement. Beside the

In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog”, Mark Twain uses hyperbole, dialect and irony to
create a humorous personal style. The story starts with the narrator asking a man named Simon
Wheeler about Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of answering the question, the man was telling a
tale about Jim Smiley. Jim Smiley is a person that can bet on anything, he even uses a frog to
bet on a game and realizes that he is not lucky as he thought. In the beginning of the story,
Mark Twain uses a dialect between two main characters that creates humorous images for the
readers. For example, Simon Wheeler says that, “Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yeller one-eyed
cow that didn’t have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and.” While we are
reading the correct grammatical English, what Simon said are used as the common dialect of the
West during that time. Because of these elements, the character appear more lively to us.
Besides dialect, Mark Twain also use hyperbole to describe Simon Wheeler. In the story, Simon
exaggerates the talent of his frog, “And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level,
he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see.”
Another example of hyperbole is when Simon Wheeler talks about Jim Smiley’s gambling habit,
he says that Smiley would bet on almost everything in the world. The irony in the story is when
Smiley is tricked by a stranger. Smiley knew that his frog was the best jumper so he is looking for
a person that can beat him. While Smiley is finding a frog for the stranger, he fills Smiley’s frog
full of quail shot. When the contest begins, the frog could not even get up and Smiley lost 40
dollars. This is a typical story about a trickster being out tricked.
The second story is “Ransom of Red Chief” by O’ Henry. There are several different types
of humor elements in the story such as hyperbole, dialect and irony. At the beginning of the
story, the narrator was using hyperbole to describe a town, “There was a town down there, as
flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit.” The narrator also uses irony to create humor in the
story. For example, when Bill asks the boy, “would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice
rice?”, he does not mean to give the boy something nice, he just wants to kidnap him. Another
example for situational irony is when Bill asks the kid that would he like to go home after they
kidnapped him, and the kid answers, “I don’t have any fun at home. I hate to go to school. I like
to camp out. You won’t take me back home again, Snake-eye, will you?”. This turns out to be
weird because most of the kids would really scared, crying and want to go home if they are
being kidnapped. In the end, instead of Mr. Dorset taking a chance to have his son back, he
offered the two kidnappers to pay him so he would take his son back from their hands.

In conclusion, these two stories are amazing examples of humor story. In “The
celebrated jumping frog”, Mark Twain was using hyperbole, dialect and irony to create a
personal style of humor. While in “Ransom of Red Chief”, Mark Twain used irony to create
humor in his story. Through those element, the characters appear more lively and colorful.

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