Glued together by dispair

I'm not sure if anyone else in this class reads embarassing children books, regaurdless I will be the first to confess-- I have read all thirteen or so of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events books. In doing so have found a lot of similarites between them and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. They both have a humorous morbidity to them that I picked up on in the first paragraph when Salman Rushdie describes the city as being "sad" so sad that the city had forgotten its name. He describes the fish in the "mournful sea" located by the sad city as "glumfish" these glum fish "were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue". This is so pathetically sad that you can't help but smile when you read it, I know I did, but the part that actually made my burst out a little squelch of a joyous giggle was when Salman Rushdie describes the shacks that the poor live in...

"The poor lived in tumbledown shacks made of old cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting, and these shacks were glued together by despair. And then there were the super-poor, who had no homes at all."
(p18)

I can't quite put a finger on what makes this so funny, maybe it is how he writes so nonchalent about people living in cardboard shacks that are glued together by dispair, I'm not sure.