Nowhere in fiction is kayfabe more accessibly examined than in Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s jaunt down Heraclitus’ daydream starts with a sobering deception: slaughtering a pig so that everyone believes he is murdered. The entire story thus progresses as an exploration of the human need for show, for the show, for insincerity.

Huck dresses as a girl to extract information; he witnesses the justice of the peace shoot a drunk in cold blood, in full view of the townsfolk, who do nothing in response; the duke and the dauphin parlay a risque scam all the way down the river until they are caught, whence they are ridden out on a rail, tarred and feathered; the kayfabe of the professional gamblers on the shipwrecked steamboat (or is that in Life on the Mississippi? It’s a theme of Twain’s work that keeps popping up); Tom Sawyer’s arrival and choreographing of the release of Jim–

About Jim: that relationship is in and of itself an exploration of insincerity for the sake of survival, of intimacy revealing human truth, interpreting the kayfabe all up and down the shores of Mississippi’s America. The theme Mark Twain may be expressing and developing is that we desperately need insincerity in order to function as human beings. Many of us present ourselves to the world naked but for some threadbare loincloth self-woven, and we know that the same is true for many others. We are ashamed of ourselves, and, as an act of mercy, we allow our neighbors to obscure their own shame. It is a way of sheltering each other from righteous and self-righteous jeremiads.

Sincerity thrusts hard and true, and is necessary, in its time, but costly.

The human longing for insincerity fulfills a need to create a scapegoat, to burden someone of us with accumulated corporate shame in order to annihilate it. Once the deception has become great enough and harmful enough, the crowds unleash a kind of wrath which is out of proportion with respect to the crime. Compare and contrast the shooting of the drunk to the lynching of the duke and dauphin. One also recalls the story, somewhere in real life, of a murderer who was released from prison on a technicality (who told this story?): the townsfolk loved him because he was genial enough, and neighborly, but he had a nasty habit of parking illegally; thus, they tolerated him no longer, meting out justice against him. Once the slate is wiped clean of our collective shame, we can return to the kayfabe, enjoying and cataloging the outrages as they accumulate once again.