closer inspection revealed an arc of water descending from the leaves and splashing in the yellow circle of the street light, some ten feet from source to earth, it seemed to us.Jem said Mr. Avery misfigured, Dill said he must drink a gallon a day, and the ensuing contest to determine relative distances and respective prowess only made me feel left out again, as I was untalented in this area.

My students regularly miss this entire passage and I completely enjoy pointing it out to them because it is total early high school humor. It also shows how an author can be funny but almost mask that humor behind formal language. The "closer inspection revea[ing] an arc of water... splashing in the yellow circle of the street light" is an old man peeing off the side of a porch. The boys were obviously impressed by his distance ability. Then, "the ensuing contest to determine relative distances and respective prowess" makes Scout feel left out because she doesn't have an instrument to use in order to participate in the peeing contest that Jem and Dill have as a result.

Another moment of great humor occurs around Christmas time (chapter 9) when Scout begins cussing in an effort to get Atticus to pull her out of school. I can just hear a little girl asking to "pass the damn ham." It makes me chuckle.

In chapter 20, Lee uses the revelation that Mr. Dolphus Raymond actually drinks coke in the bottle and sack he uses to let people think that he's drunk. Here, she uses humor to reveal a truth about human nature. People need explanations for why others do something out of the mainstream of society.

Harper Lee uses these humorous moments to color the storyline even more than it is already. This attracts a variety of readers.

In Chapter 8, Mr. Avery shows his superstitious side and blames the snow on the children's misbehavior. Using some of Miss Maudie's snow as well as their own, Scout and Jem make a snowman in the image of Mr. Avery. 

Jem sloshed water over the mud man and added more dirt. He looked thoughtfully at it for a moment, then he molded a big stomach below the figure’s waistline. Jem glanced at me, his eyes twinkling: “Mr. Avery’s sort of shaped like a snowman, ain’t he?” 

Atticus is impressed and slightly amused when he recognizes the snowman looks like Mr. Avery. But then he asks Jem to change him. Jem uses Miss Maudie's hat and hedge clippers to disguise the Mr. Avery snowman. Mr. Avery later redeemed himself in helping out when Miss Maudie's house caught fire. 

Some other moments of humor are when kids are simply acting like kids. In Chapter 26, Cecil Jacobs gives his report on "Old Hitler" and mispronounces a few words ('prosecutin' instead of "persecuting"). Miss Gates corrects him but there is also a moment of, maybe not humor but, a satirical comment on racism and hypocrisy in Maycomb. Miss Gates criticizes Hitler for persecuting another race but Scout recalls how Miss Gates essentially did the same thing outside the courthouse: 

I heard her say it’s time somebody taught ’em a lesson, they were gettin‘ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an‘ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home—

Much of the humor in the novel comes from Scout's naiveté; she constantly uses words that she does not know the meaning of. In addition, she sometimes overreacts.

One scene that provides considerable comic relief occurs when it snows in Maycomb for the first time in Scout's lifetime. When she wakes up and looks outside, she screams and frightens her father:

The world's endin', Atticus! Please do something—!

The snowfall creates an opportunity for the children to build a snowman. Once they finish, Jem places Miss Maudie's hat on "him," thus creating gender ambiguity. Scout thinks she hears Maudie describe the snowperson to Atticus as a "morphrodite," mishearing and misremembering the term "hermaphrodite."

Scout's tendency to try to act older provides important comic relief when the men go to the jail to try to remove Tom Robinson. Not quite understanding what lynching is, but desperate to defuse an obviously tense situation, Scout starts talking like a lawyer, using terms she heard from her father. Recognizing her classmate Walter's father, she greets him by asking about a legal situation:

Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailments getting along?

After making some small talk about his son and shocking the adults with her boldness, she resumes this tactic, speaking directly to her father:

Well, Atticus, I was just sayin' to Mr. Cuningham that entailments are bad an' all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes . . . that you all'd ride it out together.

This behavior successfully curtails the men's actions. Ashamed, they leave the jail.

There are scattered examples of humor throughout To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is one of the elements that has kept the novel so popular through the years. My favorite examples:

• JEM'S LOST PANTS.  One comes when Jem appears in the street not realizing he is standing in his underwear. He is saved by Dill's quick thinking, contriving a story that they have been playing "strip poker," though it is unlikely that any of the children understand the term.
• MR. AVERY.  Jem, Dill and Scout were witnesses to an event that only happened once, but they were awed by the performance given by Mr. Avery, who was a boarder on the Finches' street. One night they saw Mr. Avery on his porch along with "an arc of water descending from the leaves and splashing in the yellow circle of the street light..." The boys apparently entered into a peeing contest of their own, of which Scout felt "left out again, as I was untalented in this area."

For a novel that deals with human tragedy and the loss of innocence, To Kill a Mockingbird is remarkably humorous. Until the tone shifts in Part II and grows increasingly more serious, it’s hard to open the book to a page without a passage or an anecdote that evokes amusement or a laugh-out-loud response. The novel is often amusing, and sometimes it’s downright funny. Written in the retrospective point of view with the adult Scout telling the story, the humor emanates mostly from two sources: Jem, Scout, and Dill’s adventures growing up in Maycomb before they are exposed to the hatred inherent in racism, and the tone of Scout’s voice as narrator.

Looking back, Scout is often amused by her childhood and the culture in which she grew up. As she narrates the novel, she shares her amusement in anecdotes and a tone of voice that reflect her pleasure in remembering them. Sometimes humor is found in exaggeration or understatement as she describes herself and her experiences; some passages in the novel are gently satirical in describing the culture of Maycomb. Most of the humor is found in Scout’s recalling the numerous challenges she and Jem presented to their father when they were children. As Miss Maudie teases Atticus while looking at Jem and Scout’s “morphodite” snowman, “Atticus, you’ll never raise them!” Atticus does raise them, and very well, but his job, according to Scout, wasn’t easy.

During their summers together in Maycomb, Jem, Scout, and Dill spend their days playing while Calpurnia keeps an eye on them. Cal can’t watch them every minute, though, and left to their own devices, they create some of the funniest incidents in the novel. Rolling downhill in a tire on the sidewalk in front of the Finch house is a favorite pastime—until Scout is crammed inside the tire, it goes out of control, and she is deposited, head spinning and knees shaking, in the front yard of the fearful Radley house where the even more frightening Boo Radley lives.

The children’s early obsession with Boo is innocent and naïve, and their conception of him is hilarious, one that could only be born in the creativity of a child’s imagination. Scout remembers Jem’s “reasonable” description of Boo, as delivered to Dill:

Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

Never doubting the accuracy of Jem’s description, Dill immediately wants to see Boo for himself. If Dill wanted to “get himself killed,” Jem advises, “all he had to do was go up and knock on the [Radleys'] front door.”

The children’s growing obsession with Boo leads to other humorous incidents, two of which get them into trouble with Atticus, who has told them to leave Boo alone. They “play Boo Radley,” acting out the gossip they have heard about him and his parents. They embellish the stories about Boo, creating quite a script to perform with stage props pilfered from the Finch household. Scout recalls that “[o]ne day we were so busy playing Chapter XXV, Book II of One Man’s Family, we did not see Atticus standing on the sidewalk looking at us, slapping a rolled magazine against his knee.” Atticus’s irritation is obvious, but it does not deter them.

Jem, Scout, and Dill are soon in trouble again when Atticus sees Jem trying to deliver a note to Boo by attaching it to the end of a fishing pole and shoving it through a shutter on the Radley house. Scout recalls that Jem’s plan to make sure Atticus didn’t catch him in the act seemed foolproof. Scout and Dill would stand guard, and if Atticus were sighted, Dill would ring a bell in warning. Dill, as Scout remembers, was armed with her mother’s silver dinner-bell, and when Jem’s plan went awry, “I saw Dill ringing the bell with all his might in Atticus’s face.” In the tone of Scout’s voice as she relates these childhood antics, readers can hear the amusement that infuses much of the novel.

Scout’s amusement is also evident when she relates memories of her skirmishes with Calpurnia, some of her battles with Alexandra, and her relationship with school. Especially entertaining is Scout’s campaign to avoid going to school, one phase of which was cussing: “I was proceeding on the dim theory, aside from the innate attractiveness of such words, that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up from school he wouldn’t make me go.” Scout’s asking her Uncle Jack “to pass the damn ham, please” at Christmas dinner may be one of the funniest passages in the book.

The culture of Maycomb, Alabama, is also reviewed in a humorous tone from time to time. For instance, Scout relates that when Atticus began practicing law, his first two clients were Haverfords, “in Maycomb County, a name synonymous with jackass.” After killing a blacksmith over a horse and being “imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses,” the Haverfords rejected Atticus’s advice to take a plea and “insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody.” It wasn’t.

Scout also touches humorously on the culture of Maycomb when she describes how her first-grade class reacted when their new teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, informed them she was from Winston County in North Alabama:

The class murmured apprehensively, should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region. (When Alabama seceded from the Union on January 11, 1861, Winston County seceded from Alabama, and every child in Maycomb County knew it.) North Alabama was full of Liquor Interests, Big Mules, steel companies, Republicans, professors, and other persons of no background.

Rural Maycomb County obviously had no use for its cousin to the north. What it did value, Scout recalls, was its own history and a large variety of Maycomb County’s agricultural products, both of which were celebrated in a school pageant written by Mrs. Grace Merriweather. Given “Mrs. Merriweather’s imagination and the supply of children” to dress in meat and vegetable costumes, the pageant would have been impressive, Scout remembers, had she not fallen asleep in her ham costume, missed her cue, and woke up just in time to race on stage and ruin Mrs. Merriweather’s grand finale with the state flag.

Scout’s description of the pageant is the last instance of humor in To Kill A Mockingbird, for it takes place immediately before Bob Ewell’s savage attack on Jem and Scout and the moving conclusion of the novel. The end of the pageant must have been hilarious, though, because after Scout’s disastrous debut as a ham, “Judge Taylor went out behind the auditorium and stood there slapping his knees so hard Mrs. Taylor brought him a glass of water and one of his pills.” The little girl dressed up as a ham certainly didn’t think the incident was funny, but through the retrospective point of view, Scout as narrator enjoys remembering it. It is through these anecdotes and Scout’s amusing retrospective assessments of Maycomb that the novel is often very humorous and irresistibly charming.