Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian

Stand‐Up Nation: Humor and American Identity

“… A number of scholars have pointed out how Twain's lecture tours in the 1860s prefigure today's stand‐up comedy. Judith Yaross Lee, for example, argues that we should view Twain's live comedy “not as the apotheosis of nineteenth‐century comic traditions but as a starting point for a number of twentieth‐century comic practices,” most notably the creation of a comic persona that can be marketed and sold (3). …”