Abstract/Summary

Humour in fiction functions as the salt that enhances taste, and crosses the boundaries of form and genre. It works impalpably in solution, disseminating through characterisation, and as crystalline grains of joke, embedded in its medium. In short fiction, humour’s protean quality has a stronger effect because it is less diluted. A humorous narrative voice will infuse an otherwise serious sequence of events with a comic perspective. Comedy delivers social shame for public enjoyment, and can reveal hidden meaning at the end of the narrative. The pervasive but discreet quality of the comic in short fiction frequently disguises its workings, however, and makes it hard to identify as a convenient set of aesthetic characteristics. We also cannot separate comic short stories from their medium. Short fiction is distinguished from the novel by its transmission in, historically, the magazine and the newspaper. The evolution of comic short stories through twentieth-century book history arrives in the age of the e-reader still linked closely to its medium, which offers digitised commute-length reading.