Dr. Mark Coburn A.B., University of Chicago M.A. and Ph.D., Stanford wrote: > > >I want to add loud cheers to Wes Britton for his message titled >"Anti-Burns." >The one that suggests, "We scholars are an interesting breed." > >Does it never occur to some of you nit pickers that Twain himself was a man >wholly in Ken Burns' tradition, and a man very remote from the constipated >traditions of academic writing & scholarship? > <snip> I suppose it would be nit-picking to ask how someone could be wholly in the tradition of a man he predeceased. So I won't. It's apples and oranges to compare Twain and Burns. Twain didn't bill himself as a documentary film maker. He was a noted teller of tall tales. He rarely failed to remind his audience that he stretched the truth. Burns gets a lot of credit for making good non-fiction films. The Twain film has lead a lot of people to the great man, and here's to that. Ken's non-fiction version of things reached more people in a few nights than Twain's versions of things did in years. Like someone said, Burns has immense resources and the ability to use them to get things right. I'm guessing Clemens didn't have any history interns on the "Roughing It" project. I'm anything but an academic. In fact I may be the only working satirist on this listserv. I'm certainly no Sam Clemens but I do feel an obligation to speak up for my fellow humorist/ writer/public speaker when it comes to properly attributing his work. My biggest complaint with the Burns special is that it didn't provide proper context for many words attributed to Clemens. Most everyone has some sort of a sense of humor. Humor loosens people up. Loosened people feel its no big deal to simply approximate when it comes to anything related to any stripe of humorist. "Hey, it's just comedy, lighten up! It makes us laugh, don't wreck it for us!" I can't tell you how many humor civilians have explained to me why its OK for people to steal jokes. It's all part of your business, they tell me. This same people would be outraged if someone signed another artist's painting but when it comes to humor they have no problem with people misappropriating the bread from a comic's table. Don't get me wrong, after nearly 30 years as a paid humorist I am far beyond being upset about this stuff. I am simply providing context from the third tier of my comedy cake. Because the humorist's craft causes pleasant sensations people begin to assume relaxed standards are in order. Humor seems easy to the impervious Sir Dinadan's of the world but to someone like Sam Clemens, striving for the incisive and original, it was an exacting science that required enormous work. So when I saw Burns do sloppy work, I spoke up when others would have me lighten up. Others spoke up for other reasons and they did a pretty good job of it. Too bad Burns didn't take this quote and dance with it a bit: "The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly & logically perceive what it is that you really want to say." -- Mark Twain, 1902. (_Mark Twain's Notebook_, pg. 380) Sorry, Doctor, I can't say for sure what Twain would say about Burns special. My guess is he would want his serious work, whether or not it provoked laughter, to have been treated with accuracy that would indicate proper respect for his lifetime of formidable efforts. Barry Crimmins http:www.barrycrimmins.com --