Finally, Fielding mocked Colley Cibber’s pretentious autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740).  Fielding not only despised Cibber’s pretensions to fame and virtue, but also Cibber’s inability to see himself for who Fielding truly thought he was.  Now, Fielding’s style may be compared to Cibber’s—for example, Martin Battestin’s valuable study of Fielding as the writer of ‘moral fiction,’ suggests that Fielding held up as sacred ‘virtuous’ characters and saw as utterly despicable ‘ridiculous’ characters, the implication being that Fielding presents a one-sided view of life in Joseph Andrews and other novels.  One aspect, though, of Fielding’s fiction is that he definitely is able to laugh at himself as well as at others.  For an example of self-referential humor in Joseph Andrews, the narrator claims inclusion in the heroic tradition with the epic description of the fight between Adams, Joseph, and hunting dogs.  He claims that he does not use an epic simile to describe Joseph, his own hero, because there is none appropriate to Joseph’s heroism, and also because an epic simile would break up the action, which is supposed to be rapid.  Fielding interrupts the plot in order to explain that he does not want to interrupt the plot.  Fielding is using the convention of epic distance in order to break from tradition, acknowledging his debt to literary tradition.  Fielding recognizes that he often is overly pedantic, and therefore mocks the pedantries in which he indulges.  This is Fielding’s basic response in Joseph Andrews to Cibber in his Apology: get over yourself, and learn how to have a laugh at your own expense.
To summarize, at least three elements suggest that Joseph Andrews participates in the novel as a grand game: Joseph Andrews mocks the man who cannot laugh (pace Cibber’s ‘novel as biographic fact’), it calls for thought about what the author is trying to say (pace Richardson’s ‘novel as study of interiority’), and it calls for high artistic purpose (pace Defoe’s ‘novel as travel curio’).  These three elements of Joseph Andrews as ‘novel of play’ all in some way address humorously the attempts at the novel Fielding acknowledged to have come before Joseph Andrews.  An understanding of ‘humor,’ then, is necessary.
For discussing the humor of Joseph Andrews, I turn to terms discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.  The source of the novel genre is the “serio-comical” works of literature, which are united in that they participate in “carnivalistic folklore”.  There are three characteristics of “carnival,” and the third of theses characteristic of the serio-comic carnival is that it is “multi-styled and heterovoiced”.  This is, perhaps, the most important element for the comedy of Joseph Andrews as a conscious exploration of the novel genre, because, as Bakhtin puts it, “to the pure genres (epic, tragedy) parody is organically alien; to the carnavalized genres, it is, on the contrary, organically inherent”.  Another important element of comedy is its public nature: “the main arena for carnival acts was the square and the streets adjoining it”.  In Joseph Andrews Fielding brings the humor of parody into the public square, not in town, but in the English countryside, following after Cervantes’s famous hero.
