Irony In O. Henry's The Ransom Of Red Chief

You never know what two desperate men would do to get some money… even if it means kidnapping a psychotic ten-year-old who’s looking for a good time. When Sam and Bill, two ‘criminals’, kidnap young Johnny Dorset for ransom money, they are met with the most unexpected scenario and end up paying for this kid to leave them. “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry is a hilarious high level tall tale that uses ironic situations and clever hyperboles to show that sometimes your original ideas don’t always go according to plan.
Irony is a highly used element in any comedy. So, O. Henry uses this to his advantage by surprising the reader with his unexpected plot twists and turns. For example, the kidnappers are afraid of the kid instead of the other

way around, like it should be. “Bill turns and sees the boy, and loses his complexion and sits down plump on the ground and begins to pluck aimlessly at grass.” (Henry 10) Bill has been terrified of this kid from the very start… Which is amusing, because Johnny is just a simple ‘harmless’ 10 year old. Another example of irony used for giggles and chuckles is how Sam and Bill end up paying for Johnny’s father to take Johnny away from them. “... Bill was counting out two hundred and fifty dollars into Dorset’s hand.” (Henry 11) Sam and Bill stole Johnny strictly to try and obtain $2,000 for ransom money, but hysterically enough, they had to pay to get that kid away from them instead. That wasn’t apart of their initial idea, but then again, things don’t always go according to plan.
Hyperboles are exaggerated speech or sayings.

They can be quite witty and funny whenever used in the right scenarios, and O. Henry uses them perfectly in his context. Sam had just be awoken by, “a series of awful screams” from Bill, who was being “attacked” by Johnny. Johnny was just trying to give Bill his punishment, which he deemed the night before as ‘to be scalped’, hince why the boy was trying to rip Bill’s hair off in the middle of the night. “I got the knife away from the kid and made him lie down again, but, from that moment, Bill’s spirit was broken.” (Henry 4) Spirits can’t literally be broken, so it’s clearly an exaggerated phrase. But, it’s used in such a clever way that it makes the audience giggle. Another smart use of hyperboles is shown in (Henry 6), when Sam caught a misbehaving Johnny after he had thrown a rock at Bill. “I went out and caught that boy and shook him until his freckles rattled.” Well, obviously freckles can’t rattle… It’s showing that he shook that boy quite violently, and it give the audience quite an amusing mental picture if they actually tried to imagine that particular scenario. Bill giving up and losing his spirit wasn’t apart of the original idea, neither was having to physically shake the boy to behave either... But sometimes things happen without reason, right? Sam and Bill seem to be going through a lot of unwanted changes while they try to stick to their primary plan. But even then, it shows that you can't just expect everything go run smoothly.
Sometimes things don't always go as expected, but even then you have to make the most out of what you're given… Or you can make an extremely clever and amusing comedy with the same scenarios, just like O. Henry did in “A Randoms for Read Chief.” He used hilarious irony with cleverly placed hyperboles to create a high-level comedy within his audience. His message, throughout the passage, is that sometimes your beginning ideas don't always go according to

plan.