Read David Shaw on Massey. Part 2, "A great deal of Hood's wit is apparently purposeless; the natural result of his habit of instantly detecting the oddest coincidences in the world, and spying out some point of likeness and affinity in the remotest opposites—extremes always chancing to meet in his mind as in his life. Yet it was not without a purpose if it served to supply the waiting mouths that turned to him for bread. He was no diner-out, whose flashes of manufactured merriment lighted up the tables of the rich and great with laughing-gas. But his happy whimsicalities, his graceless puns past all pardon, were carefully booked and sent to market to supply his own dinner-table; his own "good things" were duly exchanged for the world's. "


His drawings after puns are in a traditional British 19th century mode but remind me of the way that Raymond Roussel fused puns and misheard words into narratives never before created. Always fascinated by an artist's recourse to cliches, I do appreciate Hood's pun pictures as ways to new compositions and unusual formats.