History Creator / MarkTwain

* EvilCannotComprehendGood: At times Leopold seems to genuinely not understand why so many people oppose what he's doing in the Congo and is baffled and outraged that they continue to criticize him even though he's a king and therefore AboveGoodAndEvil. He also cliams at one point that the missionaries who initially exposed him only did so to get revenge on him for not allowing them to trade in the Congo; the possibility that they might genuinely believe what he's doing is wrong seems to be at best secondary in Leopold's mind.

* InsaneTrollLogic: used repeatedly when he wants to justify everything he has done or [[NeverMyFault put the blame in others]], including the victims themselves if needed.

* MegaMicrobes: Of the "protagonist is shrunk" variety. Oddly enough, microbes don't ''look'' like microbes to each other -- they look the same as humans look to each other, for [[RiddleFOrTheAges reasons never explained]].

* CardCarryingVillain: Even most cartoon supervillains would think Leopold is too extreme.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'', Clemens is a founding member of the original [[WeirdTradeUnion Guild of Calamitous Intent]] (along with Col. Lloyd Venture, [[WorldsStrongestMan Eugen Sandow]], Creator/OscarWilde, Creator/AleisterCrowley and even Literature/{{Fantomas}}) sometime near the turn of the century (before Wilde's death). Oddly, the Guild's enemies included Samuel's real-life friend UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla, who may or may not have split from the group for their handling of the [[ArtifactOfDoom the ORB]].

* GenreAdultery: Notable for its lack of humor compared to Twain's other works; when it was first published as a serialized novel in ''Harper's Magazine'', it was published anonymously at Twain's request so that people wouldn't expect it to be funny.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'', Clemens is a founding member of the original [[WeirdTradeUnion Guild of Calamitous Intent]] (along with Col. Venture, [[WorldsStrongestMan Eugen Sandow]], Creator/OscarWilde, Creator/AleisterCrowley and even Literature/{{Fantomas}}) sometime near the turn of the century (before Wilde's death). Oddly, the Guild's enemies included Samuel's real-life friend UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla, who may or may not have split from the group for their handling of the [[ArtifactOfDoom the ORB]].

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'', Clemens is a founding member of the original [[WeirdTradeUnion Guild of Calamitous Intent]] (along with Col. Venture, [[LoinCloth Eugen Sandow]], Creator/OscarWilde, Creator/AleisterCrowley and even Literature/{{Fantomas}}) sometime near the turn of the century (before Wilde's death). Oddly, the Guild's enemies included Samuel's real-life friend UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla, who may or may not have split from the group for their handling of the [[ArtifactOfDoom the ORB]].

Twain was also a walking contradiction, and prided himself on it. He was from a slave state and (briefly) joined the Confederate Army, but was an abolitionist. He was anti-imperialism and crusaded for the poor, but himself was into {{Get Rich Quick Scheme}}s, obsessed with being rich, and befriended the very capitalists he derided, such as Andrew Carnegie. (When told by a friend, "Old Carnegie's money is all tainted!", he replied, "Yes, it is. 'Taint yours and 'taint mine.") He was also best-buddies with UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla, helped UsefulNotes/UlyssesSGrant to write and market his autobiography (which was a huge best-seller) and befriended a young half-American Boer War veteran named [[UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] during a lecture tour.

Twain was also a walking contradiction, and prided himself on it. He was from a slave state and (briefly) joined the Confederate Army, but was an abolitionist. He was anti-imperialism and crusaded for the poor, but himself was into {{Get Rich Quick Scheme}}s, obsessed with being rich, and befriended the very capitalists he derided, such as Andrew Carnegie. (When told by a friend, "Old Carnegie's money is all tainted!", he replied, "Yes, it is. 'Taint yours and 'taint mine.") He was also best-buddies with UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla and befriended a young half-American Boer War veteran named [[UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill]] during a lecture tour.

His early years as a writer was out West, especially in Carson City and San Francisco. It was during his period in San Francisco where he met some of the more colorful personalities that would find their way into his stories, especially Emperor Norton (who showed up as the King in ''Huckleberry Finn''.)[[note]]Twain later regretted upon hearing Norton's death in 1880 that he never got a chance to work on a biography for the Emperor of the United States.[[/note]]

* TheGildedAge: This is the TropeNamer. The age lasted roughly 1865-1900. Clemens and his co-writer, Charles Dudley Warner, condemned the then present-day age of degeneration, vice, and materialism as a false, corrupted GoldenAge.

* Creastor/MattFraction and Steven Sanders' comic, ''ComicBook/TheFiveFistsOfScience'', features Twain and his real life friend UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla fighting an [[HistoricalVillainUpgrade evil]] UsefulNotes/ThomasEdison.

Boston, Massachusetts, November 1869. A short, thin man wearing a cheap suit, an [[FieryRedhead unkempt mop of red hair]], a long red mustache, and brandishing a [[CigarChomper smelly cigar]], ambles up the staircase at 124 Tremont Street to the second story headquarters of Ticknor & Fields, a publishing firm. Settling into the office of William Dean Howells, a junior partner of the firm, he lets fly a ravishing quip, referencing a favorable review of his latest work, ''Literature/TheInnocentsAbroad'', in a magazine published by the firm. [[ChocolateBaby "When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white"]].

* ADateWithRosiePalms: "If you must gamble your lives sexually, don't play a lone hand too much."

* ThePlan: A stranger was snubbed a the town that claims to be "incorruptible." He desires vengeance and drops off a sack of gold worth about $40,000 and leaves it in front of one family's house that said it was for the man who gave him some life-changing advice and $20. If that person wishes to claim the reward, he need only give the local Reverend a copy of that advice, the real advice is inside sack. As expected by the stranger ''every'' prominent person claimed he was the good Samaritan. At the reading, every one who submitted their claim is humiliated, and the sack only had lead in it. Further rubbing salt in the wound when an interesting development happens with the readers of the claims who kept one of their friend's from being read, so they wouldn't be shamed too. The stranger then comes forward and buys the sack for the $40,000 and the "honest" couple are filled with immense guilt over the whole thing.

His early works were humorous (and Clemens in his Twain persona is one of the most famous {{Deadpan Snarker}}s there is), but he became a bit of a StrawNihilist later in life when his favorite daughter, Susan, caught meningitis, went mad and died at 24[[note]]in her delirium she composed an amazing 47-page prose poem, partly addressed to the long-dead opera singer Maria Malibran, whom vocal student Susan considered kind of a role model[[/note]] his wife died of heart failure, and his middle daughter Jean drowned in the bathtub on Christmas morning after suffering an epileptic seizure. And let's not forget losing most of his fortune to business investments that went bad, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. Despite it all, Twain always seemed to come back from tragedy, becoming more and more of a hero to people who viewed him as a survivor. In addition, Twain [[ReplacementGoldfish dealt with the deaths of his daughters]] by what he called "collecting" girls age 10 through 16, whom he called "Angel Fish", to be their unofficial grandfather, taking them to concerts, the theatre, and to his own house for card games, billiards, and reading. (His surviving daughter Clara did not approve, and was more than a little jealous of the attention he gave them. The letters between Clemens and the girls can be found in the book ''[[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820334987/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0820334987&linkCode=as2&tag=vicastingcom-20 Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens-Angelfish Correspondence]]''.) Despite what you may be thinking, there is no evidence these relationships were in any way inappropriate, and it was Clemens's way of dealing with the grief of tragically losing his own daughters.

* ''Literature/FenimoreCoopersLiteraryOffences''

* NeverMyFault: He is able to find justifications for any of the atrocities he has committed or allowed, putting the blame on the people who denounce them as he considers they are nothing more than shameless spies who have no right to criticize anything a king appointed by God does. Or even blaming the helpless victims, such as when he says widows must be overworked and overtaxed too as "there is nothing much left, now, but widows" and "business is business".

* BalefulPolymorph: The novel starts with the protagonist being turned into a cholera germ.

!! ''The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' (1867)
* RamblingOldManMonologue: The whole story is this.
* ShaggyDogStory

!! ''The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract'' (1870)
* CurseRelay: {{Parodied}}. Everyone who received the titular contract and attempted to receive the money for it eventually died of exhaustion, tired of [[KafkaKomedy Kafka-esque struggle]] with [[VastBureaucracy bureaucracy]]. The protagonist manages to evade the fate of his predecessors by just giving up on the contract and handing it to another person.

The son of Missouri slave owners (though an abolitionist himself), he dropped out of school at age twelve and spent his formative years working as a printer's apprentice, before becoming a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and later a newspaper reporter in the Nevada Territory. His early fame was as a humorist and satirical newspaper writer, before he broke into the American literary landscape as an author and essayist. His "speaking engagements" were essentially [[UrExample what would be called]] "standup comedy" these days; one young man during one of his performances said that if Twain got any funnier, he would DieLaughing. He was so skilled at [[DeadpanSnarker Deadpan Comedy]] and at working a crowd, that at the start of one performance he said absolutely nothing for a few minutes, just looking knowingly at the audience, and the crowd was eventually roaring in laughter.

* Creator/NeilGaiman's comic, ''ComicBook/TheSandman'', in the issue "Three Septembers and a January" [[spoiler: Creator/EmperorNorton makes Twain the Official Teller of Stories for the United States.]]

* CovertPervert: He was shocked, '''''shocked''''' at the topless natives in UsefulNotes/{{Hawaii}}. So much he covered his eyes with his hands -- but left room to peek through them, naturally.[[note]]This is a recycled joke he'd made about Can Can Dancers. Keep in mind, those girls did ''not'' wear underwear when they were doing those high kicks.[[/note]]

** SceneryGorn: As is his description of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_lake Mono Lake]] in California, which he called a "lifeless, treeless, hideous desert... the loneliest place on earth".

* TakeThat: Mark Twain owned a house in Fredonia, New York where he was accosted by members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union for his public drinking and smoking. This was his response on their belief in their moral superiority.

* AnAesop: The story slams home that people willingly ignore the obvious because it doesn't fit in with their world view. How so? By having a congregation of war-mongers march on right to war after an angel tells them not to.
* IgnoredEpiphany: The angel explains to people what their prayer for victory entails-the mass death of the enemy, plus massive untold suffering. [[spoiler:However, they're unmoved, simply declaring him a lunatic.]]
* PatrioticFervor: The people are so caught up in patriotic feelings the implication of the prayers for victory (i.e. wishing death and suffering on the enemy) simply doesn't occur to him.
* PrayerOfMalice: The angel points out that this is the subtext of people's victory prayer. By wishing for this, logically they're wishing that the enemy suffer everything war brings.

* TakeThat: A book-long one to Christian Science in general and its founder Mary Baker Eddy in particular. Clemens did have some belief that mental healing worked, but felt Christian Science went too far in its claims for this, and viewed the money-making of its leadership as corrupt hypocrisy. After all, his character in the book reasons, if nothing exists but mind, an imaginary check should do just fine-money wouldn't be an issue.

* FingerprintingAir: As the title character basically invents fingerprinting in the course of the story, this qualifies.

* SurferDude: Twain encounters some in the [[UsefulNotes/{{Hawaii}} Sandwich Islands]]. Yes, they [[OlderThanTheyThink existed in the 1860s]]. [[invoked]]
-->In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.

His early years as a writer was out West, especially in Carson City and San Francisco. It was during his period in San Francisco where he met some of the more colorful personalities that would find their way into his stories, especially Emperor Norton (who showed up as the King in ''Huckleberry Finn''.)[[note]]Twain later regretted upon hearing Norton's death in 1880 that he never got a chance to work on biography for the Emperor of the United States.[[/note]]