Those who enjoy humor ranging from the sentimental to the ridiculous have long embraced Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for such readers attest, as do Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (2013), that Sterne keeps his promise to arouse laughter that will help them to “fence against” ineluctable pain. As Madeleine Descargues- Grant and many other scholars attest, among the most memorable sources of laughter in Sterne's work stands Tristram's father Walter, the bungling philosopher of systems who stumbles in unbuttoned trousers to his son's christening, hoping to secure the infant's future with “Trismegistus,” a name, Walter asserts, that will guarantee the boy's greatness (4: 384; 1: 57). Equally entertaining, Tristram's Uncle Toby, the gentle ex-captain of artillery, plays boldly at war games but trembles in innocence before seductive Widow Wadman and tenderly refrains from hurting a bothersome fly (6: 556; 8: 715; 3:191). Most readers will also admit to chuckling heartily over Tristram's bawdy at the expense of an oversexed abbess (7: 606), and over Parson Yorick's hot-chestnut prank at the expense of the pompous old fornicator Phutatorius (4: 378); and such readers may laugh all the more freely with license granted by both Tristram and Sterne (1: Dedication to Pitt, 9; 8: 716).

Yet, as Richard A. Lanham explains, critics have long debated the meaning of Sterne's humor. In the ludicrous but short-lived clashes between the Shandys, all described in the following chapters, many mid-twentieth-century scholars see moral instruction, a reflection of the need for reasonable heads to join generous hearts in Christian living, an expression of faith in humanity's capacity for goodness in response to pain. Some critics from the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries have echoed these moral themes. For instance, J. T. Parnell finds in Sterne's humor a commitment to Anglican values and an expression of “fideistic skepticism” in response to philosophical systems woven from pride, and Ryan Stark speaks of Sterne advancing “the Christian faith” in a “decidedly odd way” by exposing “gloomy religionists everywhere.”