The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut by Mark Twain

A man meets his Conscience face to face, and decides the world would be a far pleasanter place without it. Mark Twain's 1876 satire "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" turns guilt into a grotesque little houseguest and moral improvement into a spree. Sharp, absurd, and surprisingly modern in its contempt for performative virtue. Originally recorded by Don McDonald in 2018

So there it is. One dead Conscience, a tidy heap of fresh sins, and a man who has never felt better. Twain wrote it in 1876, but the target hasn't moved an inch, all of us still half in love with our own guilt, still mistaking the wince for the virtue. If it made you laugh in the wrong places, good. That was the idea.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, was America's great humorist and its sharpest moral mischief-maker, a former riverboat pilot who turned a frontier wit into some of the most enduring books in the language. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made him famous; his shorter satires made him dangerous. "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," published in 1876, is Twain in miniature, funny, savage, and aimed squarely at the comfortable hypocrisies of his age. He never could resist puncturing a sacred cow, especially a well-fed one. He died in 1910, having promised to go out with Halley's Comet, and did.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.