This chapter introduces the ‘New Humour’ of the end of fin de siècle, with the idea that critics reacted like ‘the British Empire was in danger’. Its texts are shown to engage with ideas of masculinity and empire to push back against popular representations of adventurous manliness. The four authors of this study are introduced: Jerome K. Jerome, Israel Zangwill, Barry Pain, and Robert Barr. It delineates Victorian conceptions of manliness, perceptions of office workers, imperial narratives, and the idea that the works of these four writers parody forms of both imperial and clerkish masculinity, exposing them as pretences and constructs. It shows their lower-middle-class negotiation of gender, and starts the discussion of how to define New Humour, looking at this as a coherent mode and its authors as a distinct unit. It discusses humour’s function in showing the artificiality of social structures, and of London as a space of reinvention. Humour is shown to question ideas of imperial masculinity, positing new versions of being a man, and the importance of humour and of the figure of the urban, lower-middle-class office worker in doing this.