After reading Melville's Bartleby, I fell in love with this short story. Since we've been assigned to read it, which was some time ago, I have found myself reading it just for my own enjoyment. I find this story absolutely ridiculously funny. I can't get enogh from it. I did a little bit of research into some of the small details of the story and here is what I found...
To begin, the initial humor starts in the narrorator, or the lawyer. He uses the phrase "the nature of his avocations" clearly talking about his career. I then proceeded to look up the word avocation to see what it meant and it more or less meant a hobby, second to your vocation, meaning job http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=avocations. Was the narrorator implying that he was not serious about his job? The second thing that caught my eye implementing humor was that he compared himself and praised John Jacob Astor. Astor was a man who was corrupt in his efforts to earn himself money by smuggling drugs and buying foreclosed homes during a great time of stuggle in the nation.
Overall, I found that Melville's great depths of description set most of the humor for me personally. The way that he describes each character is such great detail gives us just enough information about them that in the sequential scenes, the story line becomes funny because of their actions. For example: Turkey says "gentleness is effects of beer- Nippers and I dined together today. You see how gentle I am, sir. Shall I go black his eyes?" In this sentence, he is referring to black Bartleby's eyes. This is funny. Throughout the story, Nippers and Turkey act accordingly to what time of day it is. If it is the morning, Nippers has fuel behind his fire and is very edgy, and for Turkey, he is calm in the morning. In the evening, Turkey is feisty because he is usually drunk and Nippers is calm.