A Funny Man

This chapter is a poem, not a story or a play — it is written in verse, arranged in six stanzas of four lines each, and its author, Natalie Joan, is named at the very end of the text. It belongs to a unit called "Wit and Humour," and unlike the story and the play in the same unit, it has no separate narrator describing events from the outside: the whole poem is spoken by a single first-person voice, someone who meets the funny man "one day" while "walking down this street."

Each stanza is four lines long, and every stanza follows the same rhyme pattern: the first and third lines do not need to rhyme, but the second and fourth lines always do (for example, street and feet in the opening stanza). This pattern, sometimes written as ABCB, gives the poem a light, sing-song rhythm suited to its silly subject.

The poem is really a single small scene, almost like a tiny play captured in rhyme: it includes direct speech from both the funny man and the speaker, moves through a short sequence of actions, and ends on an unexplained, slightly mysterious note rather than a neat moral. Nothing in the poem tells us who the funny man is or why he dresses and behaves as he does — the humour comes entirely from describing his odd behaviour with a completely straight face.

Stanza 1: A "funny kind of man" comes walking down the speaker's street, wearing a shoe on his head and hats on his feet — the very first detail reverses where clothing normally goes.

Stanza 2: He raises the shoe (as if it were a hat) and smiles politely at the speaker. His manners are good, even though the speaker has never seen "such a funny sounding sight" before — a phrase that mixes together the ideas of sound and sight.

Stanza 3: He speaks for the first time, grandly offering to "present Your Highness with a rose." But what he actually produces and holds out to her nose is a currant bun, not a rose at all.

Stanza 4: The speaker staggers back against the wall in surprise and answers with her own joke, saying she has never known "a rose with such a funny looking smell" — continuing the poem's habit of mixing up the senses.

Stanza 5: Without any explanation, the man begins to sing a song and then sits down on the ground, producing, in the speaker's words, "such a funny feeling sound."

Stanza 6: The speaker finally asks the question the whole poem has been building toward: why does he wear two hats upon his feet? He gives no answer at all — he simply turns around and "hopped home on his head," leaving the mystery exactly as unexplained as it started.

The funny man is defined by a contrast: everything about his appearance and behaviour is topsy-turvy, yet his manner is genuinely polite throughout. He smiles, he "raises" his shoe as a greeting the way a person might raise a hat, and he addresses the speaker grandly as "Your Highness." The poem never suggests he means any harm or is trying to be strange on purpose — he behaves as though wearing hats on his feet and offering a currant bun as a rose were the most natural things in the world.

The speaker is just as interesting in her own, smaller way. Rather than reacting with fear or real offence, she replies to his absurd gestures with absurd replies of her own — answering his "rose" with a joke about its "funny looking smell," and later calling him "my friend" even while demanding to know why he dresses the way he does. Her tone throughout is amused rather than alarmed, which is exactly what allows the poem to stay light and funny rather than becoming unsettling.

Neither character is given a name, an age, or a reason for being where they are. This lack of detail is deliberate: it keeps the whole encounter feeling like a small, self-contained piece of nonsense rather than a story that needs explaining.

The poem's first and simplest joke is reversal: clothes worn on the wrong parts of the body. A shoe belongs on a foot, not a head; hats belong on heads, not feet. This single reversal, introduced in the very first stanza, sets the rule for everything odd that follows, including the final image of the man hopping home on his head, which reverses the usual way of walking entirely.

A second joke is the gift that is not what it claims to be. The man announces a rose with great formality, but hands over a currant bun instead. The humour depends on the gap between the grand language he uses and the very ordinary object he actually produces.

A third device, repeated three times across the poem, is mixing up the senses: a "funny sounding sight," a "funny looking smell," and a "funny feeling sound." Each phrase pairs a word from one sense with a word from a different one, which makes the descriptions themselves sound slightly wrong or topsy-turvy, matching the man's own topsy-turvy appearance.

Finally, the poem's last joke is a withheld answer. After building the whole poem toward one direct question — why does he wear two hats on his feet? — the man simply turns and hops away. The humour of the ending comes from how completely it refuses to explain anything, leaving the reader with exactly as much nonsense as they started with.

The poem uses clear alliteration in two of its most memorable phrases: "sounding sight" and "hopped home," where neighbouring words begin with matching sounds. Alliteration here does double duty — it makes the lines pleasant to say aloud, and it draws extra attention to exactly the moments the poem wants to be funniest.

The poem also uses inversion, changing the normal word order of a sentence to fit the rhyme and rhythm. The line "But never had I seen before / Such a funny sounding sight" places "never" first and delays the main action, which is not how this sentence would be spoken in ordinary conversation — poets often do this to keep a steady rhythm or to land a rhyme in the right place.

Running through the whole poem is the repetition of the word "funny" itself: a funny kind of man, a funny sounding sight, a funny looking smell, a funny feeling sound. Repeating the same word across different, mismatched phrases reinforces the poem's single comic idea — that everything about this encounter is slightly, harmlessly wrong — without ever needing to state a moral directly.

Finally, the poem includes direct speech from both characters, set inside the verse with quotation marks, which gives it some of the immediacy of a short scene even though it is written as a poem rather than a play.

The poem's clearest theme is that humour does not always need a point. There is no lesson here about why the man behaves as he does, and no moment where his strangeness is explained, corrected or punished. The poem is content to simply describe his behaviour and enjoy it, which fits the unit's title, "Wit and Humour," in its purest form: comedy for its own sake.

Alongside this is a gentler theme about politeness and strangeness coexisting. The man's good manners (smiling, a respectful greeting, calling the speaker "Your Highness") are never undermined by how odd he looks or acts. The poem seems to suggest that being unusual and being considerate are not opposites — a person can be both at once.

Finally, the speaker's own warmth, calling him "my friend" rather than treating him with suspicion, models a kind of generous response to difference. Instead of being frightened or dismissive of someone who behaves very differently from everyone else, she is amused, curious and ultimately friendly — which is perhaps the quiet, underlying point of a poem that otherwise refuses to state any point at all.