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