There’s a great short essay by Mark Twain in which he recounts how he made the mistake of putting an electric burglar alarm in his house outside Hartford, Connecticut. At first he was satisfied that he was up to date and completely in the vanguard of contemporary technology. Twain loved gadgets. He was one of the first American writers to use a typewriter and he absolutely adored the telephone.
Accordingly, when the alarm salesmen descended upon him,Twain was easily convinced that he should spend profligately to protect his house from burglars.
I won’t spoil the essay by disclosing what happens for if you haven’t read it you are in for a treat. But I will say that at a certain point in the essay even the burglars laugh at Twain.
And that, it seems to me, is one of the salient features of true comedy. In fact, this might be a motto of sorts: "Are the burglars laughing?"
Twain is at his best when he pokes fun at human vanity. He can have a good laugh at himself just as he can go after the corrupt senators in Washington or the sleazy confidence men who ride up and down the Mississippi.
Now I happen to think it’s funny when I walk into the wrong classroom and start teaching a class. And I think it’s even funnier when the real professor shows up and I have the raw temerity to tell him he’s late.
My general view is that we are losing the principle of the laughing burglars in America right now. We have far too many talking heads and politicians running around without the ability to laugh at themselves.
Ann Coulter needs a sense of humor. God knows Paris Hilton does. The Vice President? Well, maybe it’s too late for Dick Cheney. But I like to think of the Veep having a good laugh at himself. I have a hard time imagining what might occasion a bit of rueful self-mirth from Dick Cheney. Maybe he would laugh if he discovered a long train of toilet tissue was stuck to his shoe and following him. And he would quip: "Look, I really do have a paper trail! Call the National Archives! Thank the Lord!”
I think it was Camus who said that both death and colors are impossible to describe. I’ll add Ann Coulter’s sense of humor to that list.
In the meantime, in case you thought I’d forgotten the subject: the advent of the "iPhone" is good news for burglars. By this I mean street burglars, "pick-pockets" for there’s nothing better than a vast population of pedestrians walking and browsing the internet while simultaneously ignoring their wallets. As Twain has already pointed out, there’s nothing like a new technology to make a burglar laugh.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Twain is always a treat, and your anecdote about telling the professor he’s late…
Priceless.
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