SOURCE: Bryant, John. “Poe's Ape of UnReason: Humor, Ritual, and Culture.” Nineteenth Century Literature 51, no. 1 (June 1996): 16-52.

In the following essay, Bryant traces Poe's literary relationship to humor through short fiction and contrasts it with Herman Melville's comic attitude in The Confidence-Man.

Poe's humor: the rubric seems to deny reality. To be sure, the writer knew how to use laughter throughout all of the varied genres of his canon: there is the hoaxing in “A Loss of Breath” and “Hans Pfaal,” the reduction to absurdity of penny-dreadful writing in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” the satire of village life in “The Devil in the Belfry,” and even the burlesquing of the detective story, his own invention, in “Thou Art the Man.” But these and other “Grotesques” are like inflictions upon readers. Nowhere in Poe do we find the good-natured, integrative, redemptive, or transcendent urgings of amiable humor...