I feel these two readings could be described as jokes due to the hilarious and or ironic circumstances that their main characters find themselves in.
In "Jumping Frog", our interviewer spent a substantial amount of time with an elderly man, Simon Wheeler, discussing a man named Jim Smiley, a real man, rather than Leonidas W. Smiley, whose existance, ironically, turned out to be questionable. In fact, Mr. Ward, the gentleman that requested our main character to interview Simon may have only been trying to waste his time.
In "Roman Fever" two elder women that were once very close and intimate as children lost their husbands around the same time. They manage to cross paths in a lavish hotel in Rome with their daughters and sit on a balcony to
