SOURCE: Randall, Neil. “Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling.” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 1 (spring 1987): 173-82.

In the following essay, Randall draws comparisons between the ways that Kinsella and authors Thomas Carlyle and J. R. R. Tolkien approach humor in their works.

In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. “Richter is a man of mirth,” says Carlyle, whose humor is “capricious … quaint … [and] heartfelt” (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms “true humor” because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. “True humor,” he goes on to say, “springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper” (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority...