What makes the humour in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

One source of humor in Pride and
Prejudice is irony. Austen employs both verbal and situational irony. She
starts the novel out with one of her most famous ironic
statements:

It
is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a
wife.

This verbal irony is
humorous because it is not a universal truth that all single wealthy men want wives, yet
it was widely known in Austen's time that mothers of five single daughters acted as
though it were true.

Irony is humorous because of the witty
figures of speech that comprise verbal irony and the amusingly unexpected twists of fate
that comprise situational irony (amusingly unexpected in a comedy, at any rate). Irony
occurs when words have a figurative twist to them so they mean something other than what
they seem to mean or when situations prove to be something other than what is
expected.

Austen develops situational irony in a number of
instances. One thing about Austen's ironic situations is that sadness of varying degrees
accompanies the ironically humorous situations. For instance, we are presented with an
ironically humorous situation when Mary insists on singing loudly and badly at the Sir
William’s gathering but there is also sadness attached to it. In the first place, Mary
is humiliated because her talent is not equal to her
vanity:

Mary
had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given
her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher
degree of excellence than she had
reached.

In the second, Darcy
adds Mary’s behavior to the long and growing list of reasons he presents to Bingley to
dissuade him--successfully--from proposing to Jane. Thus, it is through the addition of
sorrow to humorously ironic situations that Austen develops her themes. Similarly,
Austen employs humorous verbal irony to develop her plot and her
characters.