As a comedy, the tone of “The Ransom of Red Chief,” is a lighthearted and humorous one. This comes across from the beginning of the story, as Sam sets the scene:
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
The first humorous tonal element here is the way that Sam notes the irony of the town being called “Summit” when it was “as flat as a flannel-cake.” This moment establishes that things in this town are not as they seem, but not in a spooky or unsettling way—Sam’s comparison of the town to a flat flannel-cake is funny and lighthearted. Similarly, Sam’s description of the town as “undeleterious” (or unthreatening) and full of “peasantry” (or unsophisticated people) may at first seem earnestly judgmental or scathing, but the image he then includes of all the townspeople clustered around a celebratory maypole again communicates that he is being more silly than serious.
Sam’s lighthearted tone throughout the story is one of the reasons that some of the heavier moments—such as Sam and Bill kidnapping a 10-year-old child (Johnny), Ebenezer refusing to take Johnny back unless Sam and Bill pay him, and Johnny clinging to his captors’ legs so that he doesn’t have to return to his presumably abusive father—don’t feel overly emotional. O. Henry is communicating important messages about how children prefer caregivers who grant them empathy and time for play, but he does this without making the message too serious or heavy-handed.
