Orwell the Humorist

Abstract

This chapter examines how Orwell can be considered a humorist, examining not how he analyses humour (which has been explored before) but rather how he himself deploys humour. It begins by looking at how Orwell uses outrageous statements to generate humour in non-fiction before moving to an in-depth case study of the unexpected humour of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), making the argument that the novel is at heart a bitter joke about memory. It will explore how, in his final novel, Orwell used the collective nature of shared jokes and in-jokes to make points about how totalitarianism might be resisted.