In Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, many social institutions are made fun of. He can find humor in situations that most people regard to be serious. Mark Twain uses satire to attack institutions and ideas in his novel. He makes fun of religion, mob-mentality, and slavery. Churchgoers are some of the victims of satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
             Religion is a prime target of Twain's satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He makes fun of religion in an attempt to make hypocrites follow their religion better. When Huck is told about the Grangerford and Shepherdson feud, he is told that during church "The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall"(Twain 106). This shows the reader that these churchgoers are hypocritical enough to listen to a sermon about brotherly love while thinking about killing other people within the church.
             The way people can act when they are part of a mob is satirized in the novel. Twain attacks mob-mentality in the scene in which Sherburn kills the drunk person in the town. A group of people gathers, and someone yells "Sherburn ought to be lynched"(Twain 140), and everybody gets all excited and marches to hang Sherburn. Twain shows how false the mob-mentality is when Sherburn threatens them with his firearm. They all run off, showing how cowardly the people were when they didn't feel the safety of the group. Twain's purpose in satirizing mob-mentality is to stop people from taking part in a pointless mob.
             Twain satirizes the idea of slavery a lot in this novel. Huck is portrayed as a fairly moral person, yet at first, he does not see anything wrong with slavery because of the influence his society has had on him. Twain's goal in satirizing slavery is to make people aware of how wrong slavery is. He uses the argument between Huck and Jim about speaking French to do this, specifically when Jim asks ...