Much of the sheer enjoyment of frontier humor emerged from the use of outlandish dialect, with purposeful misspellings, mixed metaphors, puns, misquotations and other grammatical comedic turns. Often these stories were set in mining camps, riverboats, frontier towns and camp meetings, where uneducated speech in many accents were heard. This speech became richly comic when playfully exaggerated. Frontier humorists employed comical new words, examples of which include "flabbergasted," "rampageous" and "ring-tailed roarer" (a boaster).
These tales are populated by characters such as Paul Bunyan the giant logger, Mike Fink the riverboat brawler, John Henry the steel-driving African-American and Davy Crockett the frontiersman. All of these characters are eccentric and magnified to far-fetched extremes. The sheer difference in character type enhances the comedy when contrasted with the normal, urban eastern gentleman of the times. Men who boasted of being half-man, half-alligator expressed the boundless energy of the western frontier.
Mike Fink and Davy Crockett were both real people, but they intentionally magnified their abilities as frontiersmen and created larger-than-life caricatures of themselves. Wild and outlandish bragging is an element of frontier humor. The bigger the boast, the better. It's in this vein that we find men bragging that they are half-cougar, half-alligator and all man, that they eat tornadoes for breakfast and that they can out jump, out run, out fight and out brag any other man around. The extravagant exuberance of the brag is a major focus of another major ingredient of frontier humor, the tall tale.
Much of frontier humor involves the theme of a naive easterner conversing with an eccentric rural character who relates a tale that gets taller and taller, stringing together ridiculous situations and outlandish descriptions, while maintaining a straight face as if nothing was out of place in his story. Nearly everything is magnified in the tales of Paul Bunyan, who dug the Great Lakes, logged all the forests out of North Dakota and plowed out Puget Sound and Hood's Canal, according to the stories. Nothing is too big or too much for the tall tale.