The mood of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is lighthearted and humorous. The premise of the story is that a man from the East Coast enjoys hearing an absurd story from a California miner named Wheeler so much that he reproduces it in full. The narrator’s enjoyment of the story is somewhat tempered by his frustration with Wheeler’s passionate and regionally-specific storytelling style, but, overall, his introduction to the story is a generous one.
Wheeler’s story also has a lighthearted mood, as he regales the visiting narrator with the story of Smiley, a compulsive gambler who, nevertheless, prizes integrity above all else. Even in the “heaviest” moment in Wheeler’s story (when Smiley realizes that a stranger sabotaged a bet they made by weighing down Smiley's frog, "Dan'l," with quail-shot), the mood is cheerful, as seen in the following passage:
“And he ketched Dan’l by the nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, ‘Why blame my cats if he don’t weigh five pound!’ and turned him upside down and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man—he set the frog down and took out after the feller, but he never ketched him.”
Wheeler is describing a serious moment here, with Smiley realizing that a stranger plied his prized frog with pellets and also conned him out of 40 dollars (a significant amount of money for a working-class miner in the mid-1800s). That said, the mood here is still lighthearted, primarily because of the jovial way in which Wheeler tells the story. He describes the frog burping out pellets and Smiley shouting the phrase “Why blame my cats”—descriptions that render the scene somewhat absurd. Overall, Wheeler’s approach to storytelling is centered on entertaining the listener over a drink and, as such, is not overly concerned with sincerity.
