The 2025 Park Church Summer Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) begins at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, June 25 at the historic Park Church, known for its architecture and connection to Mark Twain and his close family and friends.  Located at 208 W. Gray Street, the lectures are free and open to the public and recordings of the lectures will be posted to the CMTS website.

The Park Church Lecture Series is sponsored by CMTS and Park Church. The Trouble Begins and The Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation and generous gifts from individual donors.

The first lecture, “Descent of the Laughing Animal” will be presented by Christopher Gilbert, Associate Professor of English in Communication & Media at Assumption University.

To say that Mark Twain held human beings—as a species—in particularly low regard is to affirm something endemic to the Great Humorist’s sense of humor. To omit mention of Twain’s attention to that which is nonhuman, however, is to risk missing a crucial piece of his comic sensibility: the idea that we humans represent a descent of the laughing animal. Numerous scholars have detailed the ways that Twain articulated his soft spot for nonhuman animals, and that he utilized such animals in his writing as comic foils for the foibles of humanity. But there are compelling bestial elements in what Twain imagines to be the essence of human nature as well as the meaning of laughter in these articulations and uses—elements that should inspire a more robust account of the connections between animality and Twain’s sense of humor. These connections emerge from essays like “What is Man?” and “The Lowest Animal,” from observations in the travelogue, Following the Equator, in short stories like “What Stumped the Bluejays,” and even in works like The Mysterious Stranger and the posthumously published collection Letters From the Earth. What does it suggest, as Twain indeed suggests, that human beings are the only animals that blush? Why might it matter that a bluejay can laugh as we do, and maybe with superior motives? What can be made of a peculiar animality that constitutes Twain’s notion of what we get wrong about humor, by rights? Some answers can be found in a reconceptualization of humans as the most laughable of all the animals, and with it a reimagination of what makes for an animal that laughs. Such a reconceptualization (and reimagination) is at the heart of this lecture.