Stand-up comedy as we know it today can be traced back to the late 1800s. It evolved from the types of collaborative comic sketches seen in minstrel shows and burlesque during the 19th century. A newspaper columnist named Charles Farrar Browne is considered by historians to have been particularly innovative in performing solo comedic monologues on stage. Beginning in the early 1860s, Browne travelled around North America telling humorous stories in character as his alter ego, Artemus Ward.
It was at one of those shows that Browne met an unknown writer who would soon become a well-known name. In December 1863, Samuel Clemens, shortly after adopting the pen name Mark Twain, became friendly with Browne when the two of them crossed paths in Virginia City, Nevada. Browne eventually asked Twain to submit a short story for him to include in a book he was working on. The resulting story, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” wasn’t finished in time to cut, but Browne submitted it to The New York Saturday Press, where it was published in 1865 to immediate acclaim.
By 1866, Twain would hit the road himself for his first speaking tour entitled “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” These engagements consisted of him telling the audience humorous stories about his time as a newspaper reporter in Hawaii. Twain’s on-stage persona was inspired by the deadpan delivery he’d seen Browne use a few years prior at his own live performances. The tour was highly profitable for Twain, and he’d go on to perform this same comedic lecture over 100 times.
Twain would continue to travel with new material for many years. He even went on a world tour of sorts in the 1890s, making stops in Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. It would prove to be the most extended tour of his career, and he reportedly only did it because he’d lost a lot of money from making bad investments over the years. Regardless of the circumstances, these tours ultimately made Twain a pioneer in a field that would only become known as stand-up comedy following his death in 1910.
Twain also never forgot the impact that Charles Browne had on him and on the comedy world, telling The Albany Evening Post after his mentor’s death that Browne was “America’s greatest humorist, not manufactured or bogus, but a born humorist.”
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