Irish poet who was
asked to say a prayer when out in a curragh on Galway Bay during a
furious gale, and who astonished the boat's crew by beginning: "Of
man's first disobedience and the fruit." Even in _The Playboy_ it is
the humours of the inappropriate that make Christy Mahon's narrative
of how he slew his da comic. One remembers the sentence in which he
first lets the secret of his deed slip out:

CHRISTY: Don't strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday
was a week, for doing the like of that.

PEGEEN (_in blank amazement_): Is it killed your father?

CHRISTY (_subsiding_): With the help of God I did surely, and
that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul.

There you have incongruity to a point that shocks an ordinary
Christian like a blasphemy. And Christy's reflection, as he finds that
the supposed murder has made him a hero--"I'm thinking this night
wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone
by"--tickles us because it brings a new and incongruous standard to
the measurement of moral values. De Quincey's essay, "On Murder
considered as one of the Fine Arts," owes its reputation for humour to
the same kind of unexpectedness in its table of values. At least,
that passage in which the lecturer of the essay describes the warning
he gave to a new servant whom he suspected of dabbling in murder plays
a delightful topsy-turvy game with our everyday moral world:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes
to think very little of robbing; and from robbing he comes
next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to
incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward
path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has
dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he
thought little of at the time.

Humour is largely a matter of new proportions and unexpected elements.
And it visits the gaol as readily as the music-hall, and attends us in
our hearse no less than in our perambulator. Self-murder is not in
itself a funny subject, but who can remain solemn over the case of the
man who put an end to his life because he got tired of all the
buttoning and unbuttoning. Similarly, detestable a crime as we may
think cannibalism, we cannot help smiling when a traveller notes, as a
recent traveller in West Africa did, that human flesh never gives the
eater indigestion as the flesh of be