The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) began the 2025 Park Church Lecture Series with a talk entitled, “Descent of the Laughing Animal” presented by Christopher Gilbert, Associate Professor of English in Communication & Media at Assumption University.
Mark your calandar for upcoming 2025 Park Church Summer Lectures!
- Wed., July 9: “Detecting Twain in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins” by Aliza Theis, University of California, Berkeley.
- Wed., July 16: “Beyond Mental Telegraphy: Twain’s Late Psychological Fiction” by Thomas W. Howard, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.
The Park Church Summer 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.
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.
Christopher Gilbert is Associate Professor of English in Communication & Media at Assumption University. He is author of When Comedy Goes Wrong (2025) and Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (2021) as well as numerous journal articles in Studies in American Humor, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and more, in addition to book chapters in a number of edited volumes. He is also co-editor with John Louis Lucaites of the collection Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture (2024). When he is not writing or teaching, he is usually somewhere on his family’s farmstead, riding a bike, playing the guitar, reading, drawing, or spending time with his wife and two kiddos.
About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series – In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or on Elmira College’s campus. In 2016, CMTS expanded the series, creating the Park Church Summer Lectures Series. All lectures are free and open to the public.