READERSVOICE.COM aims to give a few samples from interesting out of print books. Humour by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock, was published in 1935. The book gives a good understanding of how humor works.

Mr Leacock wrote that humour depended on incongruity. The contrast between how a thing is, and how it ought to be. He said we can appreciate this by remembering that a broken umbrella looks “funny.”

He starts off by talking about incongruity in words.

He gives examples of misused or surprising verbal forms: She sang some… and exasperated the piano with quotations from the operas.

A rejected lover, in a wild frenzy of emotion “leaped upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions”.

There were also incongruities in logic, which include blunders: 

“If you had been here this morning to see the empty pews you would have been ashamed of yourselves for stopping away.”

An order has been made that “the last carriage shall not be attached to railway trains, as it is always subject to unpleasant shocks and oscillation.”

“The only thing to prevent what’s past is to put a stop to it before it happens.”

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