Congress: a laughing matter

"I know of an instance which greatly touched me," he said. A railroad company sent home the remains of a relative killed in a train accident. The corpse was in a basket to which a note was attached. "Please state what figure you hold him at--and return the basket," the note said. "Now there couldn't be anything friendlier than that," Twain declared.

Twain delivered his lectures in his idiosyncratic twang, which one critic denounced as a "sing-song snuffling tone," and more than one critic recommended he give up speaking in public altogether. But Twain's audiences ate it up because he sounded like one of the people.

Twain occasionally spoke about speaking. He boasted about how he had become the master of the pause, able to hold an audience's attention as they waited for his next word. In an 1885 speech, he said good speakers "have learned their art by long observation and slowly compacted experience."

What they know, Twain explained, is "that the best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one, but the counterfeit value of it; they know that that speech is most worth listening to which has been carefully prepared in private and tried on a plaster cast, or an empty chair...."

Indeed, though his speeches often sounded spontaneous, Twain's talks were carefully calculated to entertain his audience and to entertain it well. That was certainly true of the very funny talk he gave to friends assembled for his 70th birthday party in 1905.

The aging humorist said that everyone mist grow old in his own way. "I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time," he said, sounding as ornery as contemporary humorist P.J. O'Rourke. "I have no other restriction as regards smoking," he claimed, except this one: "As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep ... and never to refrain when awake."

Rogers' approach to humor was similarly low-key and ironic. "All I know is what I read in the newspapers," he would modestly claim at the beginning of his radio program and his speeches. A friend of presidents and confidant of such powerful Washington figures as John Nance Garner of Texas, speaker of the House and later vice president under FDR, Rogers often knew what was happening in Washington well ahead of the papers.

It was the razor-sharp clarity Rogers brought to his summing up of what he read and heard -- and his skepticism about the intentions of politicians -- that the public learned to love. In 1928, on his radio program, he anticipated the Great Depression that would arrive the next year: "No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting so pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problems whatever, except some day to have to pay for them," he warned. "But we are certainly not thinking about that this early."