Holy Huckleberry! There’s Video Footage of Mark Twain!

Rumor has it that Mark Twain tried to make duck face for this photograph, but he mistimed his facial expression. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It makes sense that there’s video footage of Mark Twain (even though I didn’t know about it until a couple days ago).  He was friends with Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, and if you put those three together, anything is possible. 

The video (found at the Internet Archive… I promise you won’t get Rick rolled!) is a little over a minute long, but I despise spoilers, so I won’t tell you what happens in it. However, I don’t mind telling you what doesn’t happen. 

• Mark Twain doesn’t get whacked in the crotch.
• Mark Twain doesn’t play air guitar in his underwear. 
• Mark Twain doesn’t go face to face with the camera and pucker his lips. 
• There aren’t any cats jumping crazily out of nowhere to mess things up. 
• There aren’t any creepy looking girls climbing out of wells and crawling toward the viewers. 

By today’s standards, the video footage is kind of dull, but it’s Mark Twain! 

***** 

The video reminds me that Mark Twain used to hang out with Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison (but not at the same time… I don’t think).   Hanging out with Edison, Twain, and Tesla at the same time would have been cool (and impossible), but I would have been the odd man out.  I probably would have needed Twain to explain everything that Edison and Tesla were saying, and I would have been the guinea pig (once Twain got tired of the gig) in Tesla’s experiments. 

The only contribution I could have made to their conversations would have been something like:

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.  Don’t hit that switch yet.  I said don’t hit that… AAAaaarrrrgh!  I TOLD YOU NOT TO HIT THAT SWITCH YET!”

I don’t think the other three guys would have been interested in what I had to say.

*****

My grandfather’s favorite author was Mark Twain, and one of the few books I kept when I got rid of most of my collection is a 1953 edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that used to belong to him.  It’s kind of beat up, but I think it’s cool that my grandfather used to read that copy before I was born.  At least I think it was his.  If I’m wrong about that, I don’t want to know. 

I’m pretty sure that my grandfather didn’t get to see this video, unless it could have been viewed at a Mark Twain museum decades ago.  I live in a time when I can move my fingers on a screen and watch a video of Mark Twain.  Twain, Tesla, and Edison probably would have thought that was impressive.

***** 

One thing (out of many) that I respect about Mark Twain was that he wrote two books about kids (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) without making me cringe.  I’m not a fan of kids that are supposed to be (or think they’re) cool, but Tom Sawyer is probably the the coolest fictional kid ever, way cooler than Holden Caulfield.  I respect O. Henry a lot too, but I despised that kid in “The Ransom of Red Chief,” and that was just a short story (yes, I know we’re supposed to despise the kid).  In reality, no kid is cool (they just think they are), but Tom Sawyer is as close to cool as a kid can get. 

It probably takes a cool guy to write about a cool kid, so I’m guessing that Mark Twain was a cool guy, and I’m glad there’s video footage of him. 

Man, I hope this footage doesn’t turn out to be a hoax.

Related articles

• Mark Twain Looking Pretty Cool in a Silent Film From 1909 (theatlantic.com)