_Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture_. Judith Yaross Lee.
Judith Yaross. University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Pp. 240. Hardcover.
2012. 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches. $55.00. ISBN-13: 978-1617036439.

Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from the
TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions that
benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit: Please visit
<http://www.twainweb.net>

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Janice McIntire-Strasburg
Saint Louis University

Copyright © 2013 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

In her new book _Twain's Brand_, Judith Yaross Lee examines Mark Twain's
influence on humor in American culture. Lee's previous books _Garrison
Keillor: A Voice of America_ (1991) and _Defining New Yorker Humor_ (2000)
have shown how humor influences the development of regional American
culture. Lee's new book discusses how Twain's humor and his unique style of
"branding" have influenced the development of humor into the twenty-first
century. She states that "the belief that Twain's humor belongs to a trivial
nineteenth-century popular culture of dialect writing, hoaxes, and tall
yarns" (p. 3) has hampered students and scholars from viewing his
contribution to humor as a whole. _Twain's Brand_ examines his innovations,
themes, topics and how Mark Twain marketed himself. Lee proposes that
contemporary humorists, stand-up artists, and cartoonists have been
following his lead ever since.

The book contains five chapters: "Twain's Brand and the Modern Mood,"
"Standing Up: The Self Made Comedian," "Humor and Empire," "Kid Stuff: The
Vernacular Vision and the Visual Vernacular," and "Comic Brands: More than
Funny Business." In addition, there is an excellent section of notes,
bibliography, and index pages, and twelve pages of color plates to accompany
Lee's text on comics and "unstable" personae.

Chapter One discusses how humor functions in popular culture and how Twain's
branding of himself facilitated his popularity and influenced the business
of humor beyond his own lifetime. Lee discusses the ways in which Mark Twain
anticipated today's contemporary humor and how comedy became big business.
She states that "What I call Twain's brand, then, is more than a metaphor
for the legacy of America's most famous humorist: rather, it highlights the
interrelationship among culture and commerce in modern American humor and
Mark Twain's role in linking the three" (23). She sees the hallmarks of
Twain's self-branding as the performed self, the comic cross-cultural
contrast, the vernacular vision, and brand-name marketing.

The second chapter looks at the legacy of stand-up comedy, courtesy of Mark
Twain. Lee outlines the nineteenth-century lecture platform comedians, and
Twain's debt to and divergence from them. Lee then discusses today's
performers who owe a debt to Twain's innovations in persona and marketing
technique. "Twain bequeathed to contemporary stand-up comedy a brand of
humor that simultaneously fulfills and mocks the myth of the self-made
American" (34). Lee discusses the marketing approaches Twain used in the
nineteenth century lecture tours to promote his new books. His adoption of
the name Mark Twain outside his written work and the signature white suit
offered a model for contemporary techniques. Examples offered in this
chapter include Garrison Keillor, Jerry Seinfeld, and Margaret Cho. Today
the most successful comedians become famous by creating their own personae,
"a distinctive brand of humor as comic identity" (69), and marketing that
brand into other marketplaces, such as film, television, and text.

Chapter Three discusses Mark Twain's contribution to the literature of humor
in his later works, primarily _Connecticut Yankee_ and _King Leopold's
Soliloquy_. Lee shows the influence of Twain on contemporary author Philip
Roth's _The Plot Against America_ and _The Great American Novel_. Lee's
examination of Roth's novels show him to be using parody and lampooning
public figures--mainstays of Twain's satire in his critique of American
culture, including governmental abuse and corruption and contrasts between
America and Europe that expose "patriotic myths . . . and clash with the
details of the nation's practices of internal colonization, present and
past" (99).

In her chapter entitled "Kid Stuff" Lee continues to trace Twain's influence
on comics and graphic novels. She discusses _The Katzenjammer Kids_ and _The
Yellow Kid_ along with more contemporary comics like _The Boondocks_ and
_The Simpsons_.

Lee's final chapter discusses how Twain pioneered a cross-over multimedia
approach to marketing himself as a humorist and tracing that development
through more contemporary media. The marketing of comedy and humor have
developed into big business for companies like Disney, Marvel comics, and
magazines such as the _New Yorker_ as these entities extend their brand into
other media. Text branches into film, comics transition into television and
films--and all license products for purchase such as t-shirts, lunch boxes,
action figures, etc. All become a part of recognizable branding. Lee states
that "the comics business model subsidizes young fans in order to cultivate
lifelong interest in the brands, a strategy validated by the success of the
comically inflected _Superman_ films and, in 2011, the brand extension to
Spiderman on Broadway" (169).

Lee's book is a broad look at both humor and Mark Twain. It is a study of
the "business" of humor--its branding and licensing which "invite America's
capitalist postindustrial democracy to put our money where the laughs are"
(179). She brings together a variety of texts, images, films, and
animations--inviting her readers in turn to see similarities we might have
missed while we were laughing, and recognize that what we are seeing didn't
happen in a vacuum.