To Kill a Mockingbird Analysis

One-Pager # 2 Part

Harper Lee uses a surprisingly substantial amount of humor in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. However, she does not attack the reader with obviously funny one-liners all through the book. Lee uses a rather subtle humor throughout, which can sometimes be hard to understand. The bulk of the humor comes from a child, Scout Finch, who often makes mistakes that make us laugh. Her childish naivety is funny in the sense that she isn’t worldly, and thus frequently makes fairly hysterical blunders, or muses about comic things. The reader has to be savvy in order to pick up on much of what is meant to be funny.
In chapter eight of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch and her brother, Jem, build a snowman for the first time in their lives. After completing their masterpiece, they realize that they had created an almost identical caricature of their neighbor, Mr. Avery. Scout overhears her father, Atticus, and their close neighbor, Miss Maudie, talking about the snowman, but doesn’t understand much of what is said. Later, when the snowman had melted, Miss Maudie tells Scout and Jem to clean it up and Scout says, confident in her vocabulary, “‘You mean the Morphodite?...Shoot, we can rake him up in a jiffy’” (84). Miss Maudie gets a kick out of it, but the reader is left to discern why that was funny. Obviously Scout made a mistake, but do we know what? Harper Lee doesn’t directly tell us. After close contemplation, the reader realizes that the adults had said hermaphrodite, and Scout, being a child, heard Morphodite. So there you have it. Funny, but subtle. Harper Lee isn’t going to feed us the humor. It might be less funny if she did. She wants us to realize the wit in Scout’s misconceptions for ourselves. Making the reader work a bit, eh? Well, we can follow easily enough if we understand her style and comedy techniques.
Should humor be disguised? Harper Lee seems to hide it within wordy text. However, we as readers should recognize that the perspective of a child is rather enhanced by the sheer wonder they extract from everyday events. Scout recounts a thrill she, Jem, and their friend Dill got when they observed Mr. Avery embarking on an exciting task. “At first we saw nothing, but a kudzu-covered front porch, but a closer inspection revealed an arc of water descending from the leaves and splashing in the yellow circle of the street light, some ten feet from source to earth, it seemed to us” (57). Hmm. Do we know straight off what they all observed? Harper Lee uses imagery and colorful description to “cover up” the plain face of it all. We are not to let it remain a mystery. By analyzing the words, the reader quickly identifies the unknown occurrence as peeing, an occupation that has entertained audiences for centuries with its strangely comic qualities. Lee wanted her novel to be enjoyable and funny, but she’s not going to spell it out for us. A bold approach with humor—leaving it up to the reader to decide whether or not it is going to be a successful one.
Harper Lee is not the only author to write using subtle humor. Jane Austen is widely known for having humor that may be hard to catch. We Americans may cast this off as British Humor, but if that be the case, then Harper Lee followed in suite. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the character of Mr. Bennet uses frequent restrained humor, delicate in ways that the reader and even characters around him tend not to grasp. Mr. Bennet takes pleasure in teasing his ninny-of-a-wife, saying “I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least” (Austen 7). Bravo, Mr. Bennet! You have succeeded in confusing not only your wife, but your modern audience as well! Austen’s humor in this particular scene makes fun of Mrs. Bennet quite cleverly through Mr. Bennet.
Harper Lee exercises this technique as well as not. When Scout tests her newfound vocabulary, asking her father to “pass the damn ham, please” (90), the humor is evident. However, a stronger use of it can come in faint, but effective ways, as Harper Lee demonstrates throughout her novel.