In The Scarlet Letter, is there any humor in the description of the Custom House? If there is, please list some examples.

There is a
wry, dark humor in the narrator's description of the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne himself
worked there and didn't think much of it. It was a place where people, usually merchants, would
pay customs or taxes on goods they were importing for resale from overseas.

The narrator describes the Custom House as rundown place, dingy and full of cobwebs. He
takes humorous jabs through the Custom House at Salem itself as a faded and no-longer-important
port. Further, his elderly fellow employees are not prone to work very hard or be very
competent, as most got their jobs through connections and not any particular qualifications for
the work. The narrator describes them drily as:

a row of
venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back
against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together,
in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the
occupants of...