ABSTRACT
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn represents the point at which Mark Twain most completely merged the practices of the literary comedians with the possibilities of the tradition of the novel as a genre stressing observed scene and continuing action. While literary comedy as such can be seen as little more than a collection of devices, the persistent humanism of the comedians lies behind the novelistic action of Huckleberry Finn. Humor is integral in Huck's world, and certainly with certain aspects of Huck himself; Huck is also the deadpan humorist with many of the features of Twain and Artemus Ward, the professional comedians, which such a role implies. Twain's theme as it appears in the burlesque Duke and Dauphin represents a refinement of the royalty themes posed by Ward in the 1860s. In criticizing society, literary comedy from the 1840s and 1850s through the 1890s makes little or no distinction between orthodox literary forms and burlesque, parody, and exaggeration.
