Evidences of Poe's humorous side have been around for a long time, although most readers, for good reason, do not think of him as a humorist. Part of the reason readers miss Poe’s humor is because he didn’t want them to know what he was up to when he was underscoring the nightmarish aspects of his writing with humorous digs about the moral failings of others. But largely Poe’s humorous side is missed because most of his more overtly humorous stories remain unread; they were never collected and published in book form. And even though some of those who did read them in magazines thought his humorous writing amounted to mere insider jokes, book publishers in his day actually thought Poe wrote fine satire. They only refused to collect and publish his humorous stories because they also thought the referential satire he used was too obscure for most readers ‘to get’.

Apparently that means Poe presumed his readers were as knowledgeable as he was about literary matters and sufficiently up to speed on current events to catch the passing references he made. Regardless, critics have now come to agree that Poe possessed a ripping sense of humor, and those who caught it either admired or hated it depending upon their perspective. Today’s critics generally agree Poe’s comic works serve to reveal his sense of the underlying disorder in man and society. Not a surprising point of view for Poe to hold based upon what we all think we know about him.

One criteria I use in selecting the classic stories I want to adapt for middle school is humor. Most Adapted Classics illustrated stories contain it, if not overt humor like Twain’s, then at least subtle humor of the kind Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe sometimes used. In Poe Illustrated, for instance, all three stories—Thou Art the Man, Hop-Frog, and The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether—contain humor. Granted, the humor Poe used in Hop Frog is entirely elemental. Hop-Frog’s nemeses might all be jokester’s, but they are anything but funny in this story about injustice, cruelty, righteous anger, and revenge.

Still, when illustrated by the deft hand of Mark Johnson-Pencook, the characters and some scenes in Hop-Frog can at least elicit smiles, as this illustration of the annoyed cruel king might. So why not check out Poe Illustrated to see if you can identify the humor underlying the other two Edgar Allan Poe stories. I’ll bet you can!