Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It’s a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English. They aren’t writing about life that’s essentially ludicrous; they are writing about life that’s essentially serious, but their eye falls on areas where serious hopes are mocked by some ironic turn of fate—“the strange incongruity,” as Stephen Leacock put it, “between our aspiration and our achievement.”
