Abstract

Mark Twain, a mastermind of humor and realism, is seen as a giant in world literature. His humorous satire had great impact on the following men of letters; critics also attached significant importance to it and put forward various interpretations. Noticeably, his humorous satire finds full expression in his famous short story, The Million Pound Bank Note. In it, with humor and satire, he exposed the true features of capitalism. The paper tries to analyze the basic elements which affected Mark Twain's humorous satire, aiming at offering rational analysis of this humorous satire in The Million Pound Bank Note as well as making Twain's works readily understood.

Key Words: The Million Pound Bank Note  humor  satire 

摘 要

马克吐温是著名的幽默大师，和现实主义者，更是世界文学史上一位巨匠。他的幽默讽刺对后辈文人产生了巨大的影响；批评家也高度重视并提出了各种不同的解释。值得注意的是，他的幽默讽刺在他的著名短篇小说的表现：百万英镑。在这，幽默和讽刺，他暴露了资本主义的真面目。本文分析了影响马克吐温的幽默讽刺的基本要素，针对百万英镑中的幽默讽刺的理性分析，这样马克吐温的作品是更容易理解。

关键词：百万英镑  幽默 讽刺

1.Introduction
“Humor is a kind of view of life, it shows the supernormal and supermundane quality. Humorous character is a kind of special style in characters, and has a distant source and a longest ream in the history of culture in the world and their development has a close relationship to history of culture.”(Zhang Yuxiu, Li Kaituo, 2004，p.65)  When we talk about the influence of humor characters to literature, Mark Twain must be the most famous to the world.
Mark Twain, an American author，the mastermind of humor and realism, is seen as a giant in world literature. Because of his remarkable contribution to the American literature, he is called the true father of American literature, and he is also a mirror of America.
He writes a lot of stories and novels with humor and satire, which has become his own features and writing style. He published more than 30 books, hundreds of short stories and essays and gave lecture tours around the world throughout his career. He wrote so many novels to expose some facts of American society. And all these novels are well known to the world such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn，Old Times on the Mississippi，The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and so on..