As performed by Michael Edwards

In this humorous short story by Mark Twain, the (obviously educated) protagonist is pranked by a friend who tricked him into asking a certain Simon Wheeler about someone named Leonidas W. Smiley. At the mention of the name, Simon rattles off into a painfully long and awful story about someone else who was named Jim Smiley, until the protagonist gets a chance to escape.

Twain was known for playing with dialects in his stories and I have (badly) switched up accents in the story to represent the monotonous, painful storytelling of Simon Wheeler.

The introduction to the story notes:

This is a story typical of American humor. As William Lyon Phelps says, "The essentially American qualities of common-sense, energy, good-humor, and Philistinism fairly shriek from his [Mark Twain's] pages."

Full text available here.

MP3 Download: The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain