What is the significance of Dickens's humour?Great Expectations

His ideas
were those of the inchoate and insular liberalism of the ‘thirties. His unique force in
literature he was to owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost
entirely to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his power
over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed human
fun.

So writes one biographer
of Charles Dickens who composed some of his humorous characterizations for the purpose
of comedic relief from the melancholy tale of orphans, defeated old women, abused
children, and ragged convicts.  In addition, he wrote humorous sketches as entertainment
for his monthly audiences such as Mr. Jaggers's little clerk, Wemmick, with his mouth
like a "post office," a delightful character who talks to the plants at Newgate Prison,
and who sets off a cannon for his Aged Parent.  The ridiculous Belinda Pocket, consumed
in her book of titles, whose servants have a banquet in the kitchen and whose maid must
dive over her in order to rescue her children from certain death, provides much humor,
as well.  Yet, while this comedy is entertaining, it also serves a purpose for Dickens,
the social reformer.  His sketches of Mrs. Pocket and the pompous and envious Uncle
Pumblechook, for example, satirize the rising middle class of Industrial England that
envied and aspired to what Dickens considered a frivolous
aristocracy.

From Dickens, the tragedy of human life is
revealed to readers in the novel's most farcical elements. The scene, for instance, of
Miss Havisham walking about the table on which a wedding feast has laidso many sad years
ago serves in its parody of a cake and bride and toady guests to point out the injustice
of the criminal aristocrat who has swindled the decadent aristocrat while at the same
time it points to the sycophantic and avaricious relatives who come in the hopes that
Miss Havisham will die and leave them their inheritance.  By defying accepted rules of
writing narratives with his delightful, sentimental, and satiric humor, Dickens
transcended the limited sphere of the Victorian novel.  As one of his biographers has
written,

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[Dickens] produced books to be enshrined
henceforth in the inmost hearts of all sorts and conditions of his countrymen, [while at
the same time] he had definitely enlarged the boundaries of English humour and English
fiction.