Humor Theme Analysis

One of the most striking characteristics of Walter Mitty’s fantasies is their silliness. The fantasies may be heroic, but only melodramatically, cartoonishly so; from the fountain pen Mitty uses to replace a piston to the beautiful woman who materializes in his arms, they contain events and elements that couldn’t possibly happen in reality, and read like exaggerated parodies of action movies or adventure stories. Like a child playing pretend, Mitty makes a pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound effect for machines from airships to flamethrowers, and his vision of the machines is hazy beyond “complicated” dials and wires. His characters shout out nonsensical jargon: “Coreopsis is setting in,” says the imaginary Dr. Renshaw, giving the surgical patient’s condition the name of a daisylike flower. In some ways, Thurber’s humor undermines Mitty even further; he is so pathetically far from having the skills he dreams of excelling in that his fantasies don’t even make sense. Yet the real Mitty is also capable of wordplay—“toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum?” he muses at one point, free-associating with the items on his shopping list—and his real life can be darkly ridiculous too (“Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-it’s-name,” Mrs. Mitty will often say). For that matter, Mitty and his wife are such cartoons of the proverbial henpecked husband and nagging wife that their real selves are hardly more dimensional than the characters Mitty imagines, which means that a less tongue-in-cheek rendition of his macho fantasies could come off as self-pitying or misogynistic. Mitty’s secret life is what gives him depth—and the lighthearted, humorous tone of his fantasies is what makes both sides of his character sympathetic.