Nobody ever sees the joke in Holmes's poem. We are told that the lines were "so queer, so very queer" that their author laughed "as I would die," but the verses themselves never appear. All we get is the wreckage they leave behind: a servant with a split waistband and a poet too alarmed by his own wit to risk writing anything funny again. That absence is the poem's cleverest move, because it makes the real target of the humor the speaker himself.
The self-portrait is wonderfully pompous. He wrote his lines "in wondrous merry mood" and expected, "as usual," that people would call them "exceeding good." The phrase "as usual" gives him away at once, since he assumes praise as his due. He then protests, "in the general way, / A sober man am I," like someone apologizing for a lapse in dignity while plainly enjoying it. Even his treatment of the servant is a small act of self-flattery. It is "kind" of this man "of the mighty limb" to obey "a slender man like me." The contrast in size sets up the later physical comedy, and it also shows the speaker's inflated sense of his own importance.
The poem's form is the old ballad quatrain, with lines that alternate between eight and six syllables and a rhyme scheme in which only the second and fourth lines rhyme (*mood/good*, *die/I*, *him/limb*, *way/pay*). It is a plain, bouncy, nursery-song rhythm, and Holmes uses it to deadpan effect. The steady tune makes the speaker sound reasonable while the events grow more absurd. The rhymes often carry the jokes. *Him* and *limb* set the servant's bulk against the poet's slimness, and *within* and *grin* hurry us straight into the laughter.
The most carefully built passage is the middle, where the servant reads the poem line by line. Holmes counts us through it, "the first line," "the next," "the third," "the fourth," "the fifth," "the sixth," and each number brings a bigger reaction. First there is a grin, then a grin that "shot from ear to ear." Next comes "a chuckling noise," then a roar, and finally a waistband that splits and five buttons that fly off before the man "tumbled in a fit." The semicolons make each stage land like a step on a staircase, and the exaggeration borrows the logic of the tall tale. Every line is slightly more impossible than the one before, yet the narrator reports it in the flat voice of a witness.
There is also a pun that is easy to miss. When the poet sends his pages "to the printer" and adds "There'll be the devil to pay," he calls it "a trifling jest." The phrase works as an ordinary figure of speech, and it also plays on the "printer's devil," the old name for a printing-house apprentice. He is pleased with himself even while he makes the joke, so the humor is already tangled up with his vanity before the servant opens the paper.
The ending completes the trick. For "ten days and nights" the poet keeps anxious watch over "that wretched man," which sounds like concern but also like proof of his own power. His final resolution, "I never dare to write / As funny as I can," is the real punchline. It pretends to be a humble warning, but it is really a boast, because he is saying his wit is dangerous. The reader laughs at the servant's collapse and then at the man who tells the story so proudly.
That double layer is what makes the poem worth reading. Holmes, an American poet who wrote a good deal of light, comic verse, turns a joke into a joke about joking, and the title fits both sides of it. The servant's fit is "ridiculous" in the sense of being absurdly funny, but the speaker's conceit is ridiculous in the older sense of deserving ridicule. The poem works because it never needs to prove the poet is funny. It only needs to show how badly he wants us to think so.