Colin McEnroe Show: The Modernist Leanings Of Mark Twain's Autobiography

We didn't really plan to talk to Garry Trudeau and about Mark Twain on the same day, but, as a couple, they make sense.

Each of them has the same dual reputation as an unflagging humorist and a consummate storyteller. It goes a little deeper than that. There's a way in which each man holds comedy, as a lantern held aloft, while he willingly ventures deeper into the darker caves of self. Another great writer of both comic and serious inclinations, Robertson Davies, wrote "Never be deceived by a humorist, for, if he is any good, he is a deeply serious man moved by a quirk of temperament to speak a certain kind of truth in the form of jokes,. Everybody can laugh at the jokes. The trick is to understand them."

Trudeau and Twain share a third gift -- the perfect ear for the rhythms of their contemporaries' peech. It would be tough to think of two greater masters of American dialogue.

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