25 pages • 50 minutes read
Mark TwainThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Humor
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog” is structured like a joke, with the setup of the Narrator literally “walking into a bar” (a common joke introduction) followed by several increasingly ridiculous anecdotes, then arriving at the final punchline as the Narrator narrowly escapes the bartender’s next tale. Chief among Mark Twain’s virtues as a writer is his humor. It can be frank and cynical but always cheerful and often absurd or downright silly. Much of his humor stems from his wry observations of human ambition and folly.
In “Jumping Frog,” Twain employs the power of the tall tale and its tropes of wild exaggeration to create hilarious situations, including the eponymous frog filled with shotgun lead. Twain also has fun with Wheeler’s dialogue. The bartender speaks in a rural vernacular that allows Twain to create surprising and amusing turns of phrase. Wheeler’s expressive language also pokes fun at the Narrator’s implied upper-class pretensions, nearly daring the polite visitor to protest their absurdity. In addition to being Twain’s chosen genre, humor and satire serve to make social commentary more accessible and enjoyable to many readers, especially readers who may have been resistant to stories about rural life during Twain’s time.
Vernacular Speech
Mark Twain is well known for his representation of regional American dialects. The effect is vibrant, creating rich context for his stories and helping to establish dynamic, recognizable, and appealing characters while allowing unfamiliar readers to understand with ease. For example, Simon Wheeler describes how “Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner […]” (Paragraph 24). While Simon’s accent creates opportunity for humor through its expressiveness, Twain is also careful to make the content of his speech the center of the joke. Rather than ridicule Simon’s accent, Twain uses its musicality to emphasize the silliness of the cow and the ridiculousness of Simon’s story. This technique serves several purposes: It establishes local color, it suggests a world different from that of most readers, and it brings out the intentional humor of the storyteller. It makes fun not so much of Wheeler as of the Narrator, who assumes that Wheeler’s idiomatic speech betrays ignorance, when it is really a local dialect with complex rules that can be used to play games with outsiders.
Twain’s use of idiomatic dialog became a trademark, especially with its appearance in his 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its 1884 sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The technique adds a realism to his stories that thrusts readers directly into those scenes. Instead of reading about interesting local characters at some remove, readers have the sensation of being nearly face-to-face with real-live people in all their uniqueness. It was an important early development in the American realist literary movement that preferred to show everyday people and places as they were, rather than in some idealized or fantastic manner.
Long Paragraphs and Run-on Sentences
Twain uses long sentences and paragraphs to create humor and to enhance characterization in the story. First, the Narrator warns the reader that Wheeler’s story will be repeated verbatim: “I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once” (Paragraph 3). There follows the first of several extremely long paragraphs and sentences, which capture Wheeler’s speech. For example:
If there was a horse-race, you’d find him flush, or you’d find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he’d bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he’d bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he’d bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg’lar, to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good man (Paragraph 4).
The length of these paragraphs, and the repetition of phrases like “he’d bet on it” is meant to depict the relentlessness of the bartender’s story while also amusing the reader. The sentence above, while funny in and of itself, makes clear Wheeler’s obsessive verbosity and establishes a playful, satirical diction.
Frame Story
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog” tells a story within a story: The Narrator describes a bartender who tells a yarn about a man who will bet on anything. As such, the tale is a “frame story,” in which one story frames another one inside it. One purpose for the story’s frame story is to establish the narrative as a tall tale. Such yarns often begin with the Narrator claiming to have heard the story from another source, or to have spoken to a witness of the events they intend to relate Another purpose of framing Wheeler’s story is that it misdirects readers, keeping them busy trying to decide which character—the Narrator, his friend, or Wheeler—is playing a prank. This helps to obscure the joke at the end, that quite possibly all three of them have managed to play jokes on each other, and the reader.
Twain loved puzzles and mysteries, and his books contain many examples. One of his novels, Pudd’nhead Wilson, involves a mistaken-identity mystery that the hero must solve; in Tom Sawyer, Detective, Tom and Huck Finn solve a murder.
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