and a source of delight. But as the deviant one who
defies authority and mocks convention, he is the
‘‘bad boy’’ and an object of ridicule.
In assessing Nash’s place in literature, we
could note how closely his work matches a
standard definition of humor such as C. Hugh
Holman’s: ‘‘Humor implies a sympathetic recog-
nition of human values and deals with the foibles
and incongruities of human nature, good—
naturedly exhibited,’’ or we could observe the
degree to which his work confirms the work of
scholars in the social sciences studying humor.
The first approach fails to take into account
almost thirty years of research into the nature
of humor and laughter. Among social scientists
and increasingly among literary critics, the move
is ‘‘away from universal theories based on a sin-
gle and too-simple definition of what all humor
is, toward well-focused questions about aspects
of humor.’’ The latter approach, it seems, offers
greater potential for understanding the complex-
ity and multifarious nature of humor, including
humorous poetry.
In the present examination, we have seen
how Nash’s humorous work is characterized by
concerns with ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad.’’ The persona
through which Nash speaks is a divided figure
who like historical and literary poet-fools com-
bines ‘‘good’’ (expressing folk wisdom) and ‘‘bad’’
(subverting the regular rules of rhyme and meter)
in a single figure, the poet-fool. Likewise, Nash’s
typical method of presentation often focuses on
problems of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad.’’ From a point of
indifference, poised objectively between ‘‘good’’
and ‘‘bad,’’ the poet-fool then pairs incongruous
objects for the purpose of exposing the relativity
of moral distinctions. In these two characteristic
aspects of Nash’s humor, we can observe other
parallels to points established by recent humor
research and summarized by Paul Lewis.
Lewis points out, first of all, that ‘‘humorous
experiences originate in the perception of an
incongruity: a pairing of ideas, images or events
that are not ordinarily joined and do not seem
to make sense together’’ (Lewis 8). The starting
point for many of Nash’s humorous poems, as we
have seen, is an incongruous pairing of objects or
ideas: infant/drunk, candy/liquor, activity/inac-
tivity, bigness/smallness.
Secondly, Lewis points out that ‘‘in most
cases humor appreciation is based on a two-
stage process of first perceiving an incongruity
and then resolving it’’ (Lewis 9). In the poetry of
Ogden Nash, resolution is achieved by means of
the single concept through which each incongru-
ous element is perceived. While readers may at
first be perplexed by the incongruity of a drunk
and an infant, the confusion is resolved by not-
ing how much alike they are when they walk.
Third, ‘‘humor is a playful, not a serious,
response to the incongruous’’ (Lewis 11). The
incongruities that Nash points out to us are
neither frightening, nor so complex that we are
unable to solve the riddle of the poem. The poet-
fool’s playful antics, the deliberate mocking of
poetry’s rules of meter and rhyme, for example,
remind the reader that the commonsensical wis-
dom of the speaker is offered in fun.
Fourth, Lewis remarks that ‘‘the perception
of an incongruity is subjective, relying as it does
on the state of the perceiver’s knowledge, expect-
ations, values and norms’’ (Lewis 11). As Lewis’
comments suggest, the appreciation of Nash’s
humor depends upon a set of shared values
between speaker and audience. Nash’s great pop-
ularity for nearly four decades from the early 1930s
to the early 1970s suggests that large audiences
identified with the values expressed by Nash’s
persona. The explanation may be that the value
shared, that which allowsthe audience to perceive
the incongruity as humorous, is often the fact of
being human. Nash’s ‘‘The Hippopotamus’’ illus-
trates how the perception of incongruity may be
subjective depending upon one’s perspective:
Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim
I wonder how we look to him.
Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.
Finally, Lewis writes that ‘‘because the pre-
sentation of a particular image or idea as a fitting
subject for humor is based on value judgments,
the creation and use of humor is an exercise of
power: a force in controlling our responses to
unexpected and dangerous happenings, a way
of shaping the responses and attitudes of others’’
(Lewis 13). As we have already seen, Nash
repeatedly exposes the relativity of values by
blurring the supposedly clear lines demarcating
good and bad, an action that has consequences
both morally and aesthetically. By defining the
limits of acceptable behavior, the poet-fool
exerts a powerful influence in defining both a
standard of morality and a criterion of art.The Hippopotamus