Ernest Hemingway started out trying to be funny. On the evidence of his high school compositions, a classmate recalled, “one might have predicted that he would be a writer of humor.” In the Trapeze, the Oak Park and River Forest Township high school weekly newspaper, he made fun of himself, his sister, his friends, and the school itself. Some of these pieces were fashioned after the epistolary subliteracy of Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al (1916). “Well Sue as you are the editor this week I thot as how I would write and tell you about how successful I was with my editorials so you would be cheered up and feel how great a responsibility you have in swaying the public opinions.” He had written “a hot editorial” on “Support the Swimming Team” and expected at least 500 people at the next meet, “and do you know how many guys there was there?” Only one, and he “never read no editorials.” Parody also figured in contributions to the Trapeze; from the beginning, Hemingway understood how to take an elevated, formal pattern and bring it crashing to earth.

In his juvenile fiction, too, he was working for laughs. One of his three published high school stories, “A Matter of Colour,” does nothing but build up to a punch line delivered by and somewhat at the expense of a stolid Swede.