Humor is different for everyone. Some love puns, others hate them. Some love sarcasm, others see it as rude, dishonest, and annoying. Most forms of entertainment include humor nowadays, but they’re all in different flavors. The two poems are the same. “When I was one-and-twenty” uses self deprecation as humor, while “Cinderella” uses the idiocy of some characters as humor.
“When I was one-and-twenty” as a bitter sort of humor, with the author poking fun at her former self’s foolishness. The first two verses of the poem talks about how people have warned her to not fall in love with somebody at only 21 years old, because at that age, people probably don’t know what they want. The final line: “And oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true” has the author laughing at herself for foolishly thinking that she would be an exception, as she is now “two-and-twenty” now, having given her heart out to somebody and was only rewarded with pain. This poem can be humorous in older people, because most of them like to look back at their former self’s decisions and laugh. Self depreciational humor is something everybody can appreciate.
“Cinderella” instead shows us the foolishness of some people and laughs at them. The obvious quotes would be “...but her big toe got in the way so she simply sliced it off and put on the slipper.” This referring to the foolish stepsister who was so desperate to impress the prince that she (quite nonchalantly) cut her big toe off to be with him. This is humorous because of the fact that the sister is foolish enough to actually believe the ploy to be “worth it”, not looking forward enough to consider the fact that maybe the prince would find out as soon as he noticed her big toe was missing. This was quickly followed up with the
