James Thurber's "Courtship through the Ages" and Mark Twain's "The Damned Human Race" both use satire and humor to make a point about human beings by comparing them to animals. Thurber discusses how the male half of the species must take great pains to interest the female half and he commiserates with animals and insects of all kinds using a lighthearted humor. Twain's comparison is much darker. He concludes that man is not the highest form of animal on earth and that the reverse of Darwinism is true: Man has actually descended from animals because he possesses negative characteristics and stoops to lows that animals would not. Both essays use humor to juxtapose animals and humans, but Thurber's tone and "evidence" are much less serious than Twain's. The difference in tone of both essays can be accounted for in the purpose of each. Twain intends to disparage the cruelties of the human race, but Thurber intends to laugh at them.

             Both essays begin with assuring the reader that scientific evidence has been used to bolster the author's argument. Thurber explains that he has used the encyclopedia to glean information about the courtship habits of animals ranging from spiders to peacocks. He explains, "I have been reading the sad and absorbing story in Volume 6 (Cole to Dama) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this volume you can learn all about cricket, cotton, costume designing, crocodiles, crown jewels, and Coleridge, but none of these subjects is so interesting as the Courtship of Animals, which recounts the sorrowful lengths to which all males must go to arouse the interest of a lady" (9). Thurber's tongue-in-cheek assessment of this information as a "sad and absorbing story" and his claim that it is more interesting than stories even of crown jewels is part of his trademark style of understatement and humor.

             Thurber's account is both historical and current and gives examples of the foibles of males of many species in their attempts to attract the females.