Mark Twain's Use Of Satire Essay

Satire is the use of humor, exaggeration, and irony in order to make fun of a group of people or ideas. When people think of satire they usually think of television shows such as South Park, but Mark Twain was an expert in the art form of satire back in the 1800’s. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain is an excellent example of satire. This story uses satire to compare the people of the East coast of the United States to the people of the West coast, and Twain also uses satire to portray the struggles of gambling addiction. In the story Jim Smiley is a non-stop gambler who loves the thrill of competition. He claims that he has trained a frog to win a jumping competition. This is not the first animal that Jim Smiley has claimed to be a winner for him. The narrator states, “Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag,

Twain shows how people thought people of the west spoke with this quote, “The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, ‘Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.’”(Page 1). This quote shows how people in the west were looked at, but also shows how Twain viewed democracy in the United States. Twain wanted to show that the East was just as good as the West in the United States.
Mark Twain is a classic writer who loved to use satire in order to show what he felt about America. Twain was a well traveled man that knew that the East and the West were not that much different from each other. His use of humor allows the writing to be open to many readers. We can look at Mark Twain's humor in the sense that he wanted people to be more accepting towards others. This is very important today , because we are starting to see more and more separation in this world