How might one analyze the comic persona that Thurber creates in his piece "University Days" from his autobiography My Life and Hard Times? To what...

James Thurber creates a memorable comic persona in the
“University Days” section of his autobiographical work My Life and Hard
Times. This persona contributes to the humor and effectiveness of the book in
various ways, including the following:

• The
  section opens with the persona mocking himself (as well as his botany instructor)
  because the persona cannot see plant cells through a microscope. The persona thus
  appeals to us by showing that he has a good sense of humor about himself as well as
  about other people. His humor is not simply sarcastic or condescending: he can make
  himself the butt of humor as much as he can make other people his comic targets.
  Ironically, he may not be able to see very well through a microscope, but his perception
  of comical circumstances and situations is excellent.


• The
  persona shows himself capable of comic understatement, as when he says, referring to his
  exasperated instructor,

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his scenes with me had taken a great deal out of
him.

• The persona
  also shows his capacity for inventive language.  Thus, instead of merely saying once
  more that all he saw through the microscope was a milky blurriness, he refers to “the
  familiar lacteal opacity.” He thus implies his love of words and his talent for avoiding
  monotonous, repetitious phrasing.


• A similar love of
  clever phrasing is revealed in his description of the botanist’s “eyebrows high in
  hope,” which effectively uses the alliteration of h’s and
  the assonance of long i and long o
  sounds, implying the narrator’s comic playfulness and suggesting that
  half the fun of reading this chapter will be seeing not only
  what the narrator describes but
  how he describes things, people, and
  events.


• The persona also shows his ability to create
  amusing stories, as in the anecdote about the football player who cannot think of the
  word “train” despite numerous obvious hints. Here as before, the humor is understated
  and restrained; half the fun, in fact, lies in the fact that the narrator is not
  obviously straining to be funny.  He pretends, instead, simply to report what happens.
  Every so often, however, he will slip in a sarcastic evaluation of his own, as when he
  says of the football player,

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While he was not dumber than an ox, he was not
any smarter.

• As in
  the example just quoted, the narrator will sometimes take a familiar phrase and have
  some fun with it.  Another example of this technique occurs when he says, concerning his
  habit of bumping into things in the
  gymnasium:

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I could take it, but I couldn’t dish it
out.

By making himself the
butt of so much of his humor, the narrator quickly wins our affection. He is not a
pretentious snob only capable of mocking others; he is perfectly at ease in mocking
himself.