Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s own daughter would privately wish

that her father would write ‘serious books’

so stinkers who wrote him off as lowbrow

would see how brilliant he actually was.

Trying to explain the rules of baseball

to King Arthur’s Court is a comedy skit,

not too different than my trying to sell a poem

about Urkel to the Denver Quarterly.

Of course, co-hosting a radio show

for two years to mock the Boston Red Sox

wasn’t exactly Huckleberry Finn.

It wasn’t even Cher’s ‘Tug It, BoSox.’

Comedies don’t win Oscars, nor do they win

Employee of the Month at El Pollo Loco

in Houston. For having a book with the word

Pudd’nhead in the title, Twain was dead serious.