Turning from words to things…

Mr Leacock writes of Mark Twain apparently with the eye of innocence of the westerner, travelling to Europe and commenting on the sights: …the previous ideas of the significance of such things are dissolved in the prism of this mode of thought, and break into their contrasting and incongruous elements. A knight in armor becomes a man in hardware, a monk pictured in a stained-glass window with uplifted eyes is “trying to think of a word.”

He writes of Dickens’s characters: Funny characters are made so by presenting, whether we are conscious of it or not, the same destructive contrasts and incongruities that are the basis of humour itself. Here is Mr Pickwick … with a highly scientific desire for information contrasted with an utter inability to measure its truth … Here is Mr. Micawber with the brisk decisiveness of competence, the manners of the firm, reliable man of business concealing the utter incompetence within…Thus the denunciation of indiscriminate foreign charities conducted by people who neglect their duties at home is effected through the humour of Mrs Jellaby (Bleak House) sitting in her untidy house and writing reams of letters about the natives of Borioboolagha, while her neglected children fall up and down stairs…

See Humour by Stephen Leacock, for an excellent analysis of the topic. He was a humor writer much admired by people like comedian Jack Benny and humorist Robert Benchley. Humour was published 1935, by John Lane, The Bodley Head, London.