 What is the role of humor in the story?
The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. When the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Two months later your time, one second later by us. Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. You'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. "One, they learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them. "Two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale . "Three, they've a great sense of humor. Can't say I care for that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ. "Four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis. People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers. It was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them and that's fatal in chess. Of course it's a screwy situation, playing chess with something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes an inch and a half long and long white whiskers. He was called—well, we called him Charley, and he was the ethnologist, ambassador, contact man, or whatever you like to call him, who came back with us. Yes, life and soul of the party, old Charley ... Same as a fifty thousand mile fall, I suppose; same as escape; twenty-four thousand miles an hour.
 It showed that things amusing to some can be dangerous for others
 Dark humor was a favorite of Matt's and defined his storytelling  It showed that things amusing to some can be dangerous for others  It was a set-up to a complicated joke  Jokes are the only thing that kept the crew life