I agree emphatically with Tracy Wuster's general point.   Devotees of Mark
Twain should be the last people to apply any word remotely like "mere" to
humor, whether written or delivered in some other manner.

James Thurber famously observed that humorists "sit on the edge of the
chair of Literature."   No small part of the problem, I think, is that the
general public can never be cured of treating humor or satire as  the
opposite of "serious" art.

Nearly every time I taught Swift's "A Modest Proposal," discussion would
begin with someone blurting, "My God!  Was he SERIOUS??!!?"  I would
usually respond, "He was deadly serious.  But is that what you meant to
ask?  Perhaps what you meant was, 'Did Swift actually believe that
Ireland's problems could be solved by eating the babies of poor
people?'  The answer to that is No."

And, yes.  Usually my response drew utterly blank looks from those who
could scarcely grasp that Swift (Twain, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, Fielding,
Voltaire, Jane Austen, Dickens, Vonnegut....) were often at their most
serious when being funny.

Mark Coburn