It is with some irony that in my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I generally do not discuss the quality of the humor in the novel.
Humor is heavily dependent of the mental state of the audience. For example, most people find the comic strip "Family Circus" to be tepid in its humor, but when my daughters were pre-schoolers, they thought it was hilarious and the only strip in the newspaper that was funny.
That having been said, some attempts at humor are more successful with a broader range of persons than others. In my essay, I argue that some people may not appreciate Confederacy's humor because it often uses interpretation concurrence for its comic devices, but in general I do not argue that they do not appreciate the humor because it is not that funny. Here is the buried endnote:
While some readers may dislike Confederacy because they do not appreciate its style of humor, others might dislike it because the comic devices are not always well executed. In this instance, Ignatius reveals unnecessarily that his previous work was written in pencil; the reversal would have been funnier had another character revealed this fact.Some of Toole's attempts at humor are weak, alas, so some of its failures are due to poor execution.
