All three of the “three men” are hypochondriacs. Here, Jerome deploys hyperbole to humorously describe J.'s exaggerated panic as he self-diagnoses with various diseases. In this passage, J. is performing the 19th-century equivalent of using Web MD to diagnose a medical issue, convincing himself he’s deathly ill:
[I] read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
J. is not a doctor, but the medical tome he’s reading makes him certain that he’s dying of several things at once. The reader immediately sees the hyperbole in J.'s over-the-top reactions to his amateur doctoring. As he reads about diseases, he convinces himself that he has all of them. These range from “ague” to “cholera,” with "severe complications." The use of medical language adds to the humor here. Terms like "acute stage" and "modified form" give a false sense of expertise to his self-assessment. The exaggeration reaches its peak when J. humorously notes that the only condition he does not have is "housemaid’s knee.” This implies that he has diagnosed himself with every other known illness. What makes this even more ridiculous is that he recounts it entirely seriously; it's funny, but he doesn't appear to know that.
As the "three men" decide what to pack, J. tells an anecdote about the time he made the ill-fated decision to deliver some incredibly stinky cheese for a friend. He combines verbal irony and hyperbole to amplify the comic effect of this tall tale, where his good intentions end in disaster:
I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned a corner.
The reader can feel the verbal irony in J.'s tongue-in-cheek description of the cab's speed, referring to it as a "shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built." Steamrollers are deliberately slow, so the language he’s using is contradictory for comic effect. This ironic statement speaks to the infuriatingly sluggish pace of the cab, which is the opposite of what J. had hoped for in order to save time.
The hyperbole of the passage further emphasizes the slow and cumbersome nature of the cheese trip; it's not just the "steam-roller" which is slow. J. goes as far as to say that rather than being pulled by a healthy horse, the cab was "dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist"—a sleepwalker. Everything about the journey is humorously, maddeningly time-consuming. Jerome adds insult to injury in his depiction of J.'s frustration by throwing in a simile, saying that the mood of the scene was "merry as a funeral bell." As few things are less merry than funeral bells, this simile only exaggerates the irony of the cab’s dismal progress.
In this passage, Jerome uses hyperbole to highlight J.'s exaggerated response to the idea of forgetting his toothbrush while packing for the boat-trip:
My tooth-brush is a thing that haunts me when I’m travelling, and makes my life a misery. I dream that I haven’t packed it, and wake up in a cold perspiration, and get out of bed and hunt for it. And, in the morning, I pack it before I have used it, and have to unpack again to get it, and it is always the last thing I turn out of the bag; and then I repack and forget it, and have to rush upstairs for it at the last moment and carry it to the railway station wrapped up in my pocket-handkerchief.
The hyperbole in this passage shows J.'s exaggerated response to a relatively minor problem: potentially forgetting his toothbrush. Although it would be easy to replace and he has no reason to be terrified, he’s hilariously frightened of failing to pack it. The language he uses here, saying that the possibility "haunts me," "makes my life a misery," and that he has a tendency to "wake up in a cold perspiration," amplifies the silliness of the situation. Because it appears at an early point in the novel, this passage helps the reader to understand an important aspect of J.'s character. It’s hard not to see him as frivolous and perhaps overly fastidious after this passage. The humor in this quotation is not just about the idea of forgetting a small item. It arises from the contrast between J.’s hypochondriacal words and the mundane nature of the potential problem.
