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Being travel writers, we thought we could use the opportunity of July 4th to talk about America outside of its usual confines \u2014 far away from the familiar controversies and politics of the country \u2014 by writing something about the history of Americans traveling abroad. So I set out to do a little research about famous American travelers and I came across Mark Twain. I was surprised to learn that throughout his lifetime, Mark Twain\u2019s best-selling book wasn\u2019t The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/em>, and it wasn\u2019t Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>.<\/p>\n It was his 1869 travelogue, The Innocents Abroad<\/em>.<\/p>\n And I thought \u2014 perfect. Who better to provide observations about Americans abroad than arguably our country\u2019s most legendary comic mind? Who\u2019s more quintessential an American than Mark Twain?<\/p>\n As the tone here slides toward revelation, I\u2019ll spoil the conclusion. The idea that Mark Twain transcends today’s controversies and politics? That was naive. Yes, I knew about the controversy surrounding the language and themes in novels like Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, but in the interest in full disclosure, I thought Twain had survived those cultural battles with reputation intact. When I think of Twain, I think of the man who has his name stamped on a Kennedy Center prize for American humor. The man whose actual bust is given to the most celebrated comedians of the day, people like Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, and Dave Chappelle. I thought The Innocents Abroad<\/em> would give me nothing but pithy, above-the-fray, 19th-century zingers about boorish Americans lost amidst the great world beyond the borders.<\/p>\n I learned my lesson: Twain does not remain above the fray.<\/p>\n As I dug deeper into the book, I found that some of the controversies that have always plagued America \u2014 prejudice, intolerance, racism \u2014 were inflicted too on the rest of the world by America\u2019s most important comic writer. Even as he traveled everywhere but America, Twain packed America\u2019s most enduring problems along for the trip.<\/p>\n To us, that baggage is as important to think about as anything else on July 4th, so we made the decision not to search out a new subject or tell a more flattering tale. After all, we’re only as good as our darkest moments \u2014 though, as you’ll see, there is light at the end.<\/p>\n The clearest way to introduce the content of Twain’s travel tome might be to relay a recent controversy it stirred. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited President Obama in 2009, he reportedly carried with him one book to give the new president: a first edition of The Innocents Abroad<\/em>. The gift was controversial for two reasons, even as reports varied as to whether Netanyahu actually handed it over:<\/p>\n 1.) As one New York Times<\/em> writer<\/a> explained in the midst of the controversy, passages of the book that describe swaths of desolate land in what became current-day Israel are sometimes questionably employed, including by Netanyahu, to \u201cprove that the Arab presence\u2026 was so insignificant\u201d that Palestinians have no claim to the land.<\/p>\n 2.) Mark Twain\u2019s depictions of Arabs and Islam in the book are abhorrent. At the time, one journalist cited<\/a> a particular passage in which Twain describes the Ottoman Emperor as the “representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, [and] superstitious.” In the same passage, he calls the French Emperor the \u201crepresentative of the highest modern civilization, progress, and refinement.\u201d<\/p>\n It seems any defense of Innocents Abroad<\/em> that acknowledges Twain\u2019s prejudice ultimately brings up the same points. One is that Twain exhibited racist attitudes in the book, but he aimed his contempt in all directions. As the NY Times<\/em> wrote in 2009, Twain was \u201cequally scathing about most of the world\u2019s people, including Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n A few examples lend that argument a certain temptation. Twain calls the Portuguese \u201cslow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy\u201d without a second thought. He admits that a sultan\u2019s bigamy \u201cmakes our cheeks burn with shame… in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.\u201d<\/p>\n Another defense of Twain is to say he’s just a comedian, embellishing as a rule, pledging more fealty to laughs than to truth. It\u2019s the same argument used to defend comics judged to cross a line today \u2014 that jokes are jokes<\/a>, and standards have to be different for an artist than for anybody else. As one critic<\/a> put it, Twain was just \u201cstirring these ant hills\u2026 [to] exercise his function as a journalistic humorist.\u201d<\/p>\n But the truth is that as Twain travels the Middle East a more disturbing pattern emerges, one of a writer who finds redeeming qualities in some cultures he encounters and not in others.<\/p>\n Academic Nancy Bakht has that opinion, and in an extremely compelling essay<\/a> she points out many of the ways that Twain reveals a bias against Arabs and Muslims that he doesn’t show against Europeans. She admits that Twain “complains and ridicules everything along the way,” but concludes that “the change in the level of intensity and venom in his description of the Arabs and Turks is undeniable.”<\/p>\n She continues, arguing that his animosity is informed by a history of Western Islamophobia, and, at the time of Twain’s writing, his various barbs would play right into his American audience\u2019s preconceived notions of a \u201cbarbaric\u201d people in an inferior culture. In that case, a defense of Twain as \u201cjust a comedian\u201d is untenable. To put it in context of today\u2019s comedy, you might consider whether Twain was punching up at exalted targets or punching down at people his audience was already taught to despise.<\/p>\n To use a few of Bakht’s examples, when Twain says that in Turkey \u201cthe only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good\u201d or that it\u2019s packed with \u201cweird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans,\u201d does his audience actually interpret it as a joke? Bakht quotes one professor, Douglas Little, in making that particular point:<\/p>\n \u201cTo be sure, some readers of Twain\u2019s account must have marveled at the author\u2019s sarcastic wit, but many more probably put down Innocents Abroad<\/em> with their orientalist images of a Middle East peopled by pirates, prophets, and paupers more sharply focused than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, would the audience of Twain’s time, unlikely to ever visit these faraway lands for themselves, take his descriptions as harmless jokes, exaggerated for effect, or as truths passed down from one of America’s most important pundits? If the current rhetorical landscape is any indication, where even today the wholesale discounting of entire peoples is still seen as effective political strategy, the latter is likely the correct answer.<\/p>\n There’s an interesting parallel to a modern comedian, himself controversial, who’s brought up the same questions, albeit consciously. Dave Chappelle \u2014 2019 recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor \u2014 explained that he left his popular T.V. show for fear that his audience was laughing for the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n From Time Magazine<\/a><\/em>, here’s an anecdote regarding the final season of Chappelle’s Show<\/em>:<\/p>\n The third season hit a big speed bump in November 2004. He was taping a sketch about magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races. The black pixie \u2014 played by Chappelle \u2014 wears blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them. “When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable,” says Chappelle. “As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f______ time out after this. Because my head almost exploded.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, there’s the massive distinction here that Twain, a white man in the 19th century, didn’t concern himself with whether he was reinforcing stereotypes or not. And that he himself likely believed the worst of them right along with the public. But even if you ascribe the very best intentions to Twain, and say he mocked everyone equally in the service of comedy, Chappelle’s concerns reinforce the point of the scholars:<\/p>\n![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/cdn1.tablethotels.com\/media\/ecs\/global\/magazine\/story-images\/070619\/TwainBust.jpg\")
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A Controversial Gift for Obama<\/h3>\n
![\"Abdul](\"https:\/\/cdn1.tablethotels.com\/media\/ecs\/global\/magazine\/story-images\/070619\/AbdulNapoleon.jpg\")
How Do You Critique a Satirist?<\/h3>\n
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Twain In Context<\/h3>\n
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Twain vs. Chappelle<\/h3>\n
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