Mark Twain vs Oscar Wilde: The Duel of Wits — Is Comedy Armor, or the Only Honest Truth?

Mr. Twain, I have always admired the American gift for plainness. You take a small idea, dress it in overalls, and call it wisdom. It is a marvelous trick. In England we would simply call it a sermon with a moustache.

And you, Oscar, take no idea at all, dress it in a green carnation, and call it art. I've fished off the Mississippi with more original thoughts. The difference between us is I know when I'm bluffing. You put yours on a lecture tour.

A lecture tour, yes. I crossed your entire savage continent telling cowboys how to arrange their sunflowers, and they paid me for it. That is the true American dream, Mark. To be paid handsomely for saying nothing anyone needed to hear.

You told the Colorado miners aesthetics, and they poured you whiskey because they figured you were dying. That wasn't admiration, son, that was mercy. Out west we shoot the horse that limps that pretty.

Protecting? You mistake my meaning, Caleb. The epigram protects nothing. It exposes. When I say a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, I have not hidden. I have handed you a mirror and charged admission.

That's the prettiest lie you've told yet, and you've told some beauties. The wit is a mask, Oscar, and you wore yours to the theater every single night. I wore mine to funerals. Humor is the good-natured side of a truth, and the good nature is the part that keeps them from hanging you.

And yet they hanged me anyway, in every way that mattered. Reading Gaol did not care that I was amusing. So do not lecture me on masks, Mark. Mine came off in a prison yard, and the truth underneath was not funny at all.

No. It wasn't. And that's the thing I'd never mock. I buried a daughter and a wife and a fortune, and I kept cracking wise because the alternative was to lie down in the road. The frog and the joke, Oscar, are the two things a man does when he can't afford to weep in public.

Consider the paradox, Caleb, since Mark distrusts it so. A truth spoken plainly is merely an opinion. Men argue with it. But a truth folded into a jest slips past the guard and lodges in the heart before the listener thinks to defend himself. The joke is not armor. It is the smuggler's coat around a blade.

Now that I'll drink to, and I don't drink to much you say. I sat Huck Finn on a raft next to a runaway slave and made the country laugh its way into its own shame. No sermon could've done it. They'd have walked out of the church. But you can't walk out of a laugh, Oscar. It's already inside you.

Precisely. The Puritan will forgive a man anything but a good time, so I gave them the good time and hid the reckoning inside it. Dorian Gray smiles on every page. And every reader who called it wicked had, I assure you, already recognized his own face in the portrait.

So we agree, near as two proud men can. The joke tells the truth the plain word can't. But here's where I part from you, Oscar. You believed the wit was the whole man. I always knew it was the smallest part of me, and the least honest.

Grief, mostly. And rage. Everything human is pathetic, I once wrote, the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. A man makes jokes because he has looked at the world square and found it unbearable, and refused to be beaten by it.

How very Protestant of you, to make even laughter into penance. I confess I find sorrow overrated as a muse. I wrote comedies because the world is already a tragedy, and I saw no reason to be redundant. To be witty in the face of ruin is not denial, Mark. It is the last freedom they cannot confiscate.

The last freedom. Yes. When the bankruptcy men took my house and the sickness took my Susy, the wit was the one thing I owned outright. So maybe we're both right and both scared. The joke is armor and it's a blade, and a man reaches for whichever one keeps him standing that particular night.

We are agreeing, Mark, and it is ruining the entertainment. Let the record show I said it more elegantly. You said the same thing, but you spat in the river first, so it would seem sincere.

And you'd have said it lying down on a chaise so it would seem effortless. That's the whole quarrel between us, Oscar. Not what's true, but which pose you strike while telling it. You dressed the truth for the opera. I dressed it for the poker table.

He is not diminished, Caleb. He is finished. When the wit failed me in that cell, I did not become more honest. I became silent. The laughter was never the lie. The laughter was the only part of me brave enough to keep speaking after the rest had been sentenced.

And when my jokes ran dry at the end, I wrote things so black they didn't dare print them till I was long in the ground. The Mysterious Stranger, no punchline in it, just the cold truth I'd been sweetening for sixty years. Turns out the sugar was the mercy. The comedy was me being kind to you.

So the jester is the kindest man in the kingdom, and the only one permitted to tell the king he is dying. We were court fools, Mark, both of us. The difference is you wanted them to thank you afterward, and I only wanted them to remember the line.

They remembered both our lines, Oscar. That's the joke on us. We spent our lives dressing the truth up funny so folks could swallow it, and a hundred years on they've kept the costume and forgotten the wound it was covering. Every quote of ours on a coffee mug. Not one of the tears.