Adam Armour is small, scared and entirely unrepentant, and Burns lets him pray anyway. The opening line, "Gude pity me, because I'm little!", is so shamelessly self-excusing that the joke starts at once. Adam calls himself an "elf o' mettle" who can "jink" (dodge) about like a weaver's shuttle, yet he is "scarce as lang's a gude kail-whittle", barely the length of a cabbage knife, and "unco queer", very much out of sorts. The real subject is bawdy and half-hidden behind dialect and a dashed-out word in the final line. Adam and his unnamed "we" have "stang'd" Geordie's "jurr" and hurt her "spleuchan". A spleuchan is a tobacco pouch, and the euphemism is not hard to decode. Now he dare not "show our face / Within the clachan", the village.
The comedy comes from the gap between the form and what is being said. A prayer is meant to be humble, but Adam addresses God like a neighbour who has already heard the gossip: "Thou kens our waefu' case." He also puffs up his predicament. Hiding in "dens and hollows" from constables and soldiers, he is "hunted, as was William Wallace". The national hero is invoked for a man on the run over a sexual escapade. Adam asks for only one favour, to be spared the gallows, "that shamefu' death".
After that, the prayer turns into a string of curses, and mercy turns out to be for Adam alone. "Auld grim black-bearded Geordie" is to be shaken "owre the mouth o' hell" to "hing, an' roar, an' yell". If he "offers to rebel", the short last line shrugs, "Then heave him in." Drunken old Nanse is to have her "doup" (backside) clanged inside Satan's gate and be filled with "brimstone drink, / Red-reekin het". Jock and "hav'rel" (silly, rambling) Jean are to be ferried across the "lake" in an "infernal wherry" and given "a noble curry / Wi' oil of aik". Curry is a word from grooming horses, and "oil of oak" means an oak cudgel. The punishment turns these villagers into animals to be scrubbed down with a stick. Burns gives the whole village a cast of rogues, and Adam relishes every sentence he passes on them.
The form helps the humour. Each stanza rhymes aaabab, with four-beat lines and two short ones. The triple rhyme builds a gallop, and the short lines land like punchlines or pratfalls: "I'm unco queer", "Within the clachan", "Then heave him in". The third stanza has the neatest joke, because its rhyme words run "hollows", "Wallace", "fallows", "gallows". In four lines the sound carries Adam from heroic outlaw to the end of a rope. Burns also loads the hell-curses with thick, chewy sounds, such as "glimmerin blink", "hideous din" and "red-reekin het", so the dialect itself seems to relish the punishments.
The last stanza plays its trick quietly. Adam seems to soften towards the "puir worthless body" herself: she has "suffer'd sair", with "stanged hips, and buttocks bluidy", and has "mischief enough already". That detail lets something uncomfortable slip into the joke, since someone has really been hurt. Adam's sympathy lasts a line or two. Then the gallows he dreaded appears again as a curse for her: may she "wintle in a woody" (dangle in a hangman's rope) if she offends again. The punishment he begged to escape is the one he wishes on the woman he injured.
Burns never steps in to comment, and that is the poem's skill. He lets Adam condemn himself through his own mouth, and the reader sees the selfishness through the pious wording. The self-serving prayer is a trick Burns uses again in "Holy Willie's Prayer", where the speaker is a hypocrite. Here the target is smaller and cruder, a village rascal rather than a church elder. The poem is also a vivid piece of Scots comic writing, quick, rude and full of local colour. It is funny because Adam's prayer is a very human one: forgive me, and send everyone else to hell.