There is a view of Huckleberry Finn that it is not mainly a humorous book, that instead it is an epic enterprise of high seriousness. In Eliot's opinion, for example, Huckleberry Finn resonates with seriousness because of the River, which "is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination . . . never wholly charitable; it changes its pace, it shifts its channel" (Eliot 332). It saves Huckleberry Finn from being "only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending" (332), and it "makes the book a great book" (Eliot 334). Yet it is impossible to ignore the fact that humor is embedded into the pattern of ideas of the text and is the very means by which these ideas are articulated. As Stallman puts it, "Nothing is not parodied" in Huckleberry Finn (385), and the evidence of the text is that this includes everything from dainty manners to adventure stories to slavery rhetoric, whether pro or con.
The humor in Huckleberry Finn begins with language, which also functions as a method of moving the narrative and establishing and refining character. Twain's deliberate use of multiple dialects immediately captures each character's distinctiveness, and the dialects reinforce the verisimilitude of the characters' behavior--all in the context of humor. That occurs from the very opening of the novel, in which Huck as narrator explains why he is telling this story. The tone is conversational, ungrammatical, and filled with malapropisms, but it draws the reader in because it provides a portrait of Huck's youthful social anarchy. He cannot be tamed, even by the bible:
After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him; because I don't take stock in dead people (Clemens 7).
Other characters are figures of fun precisely...