The main humor in the novel arises from the slippage or gap between Don Quixote's "mad" or not quite sane vision of the world and the down-to-earth reality of what the world is. Don Quixote, an older man, has read so many chivalric romances about the noble deeds of knights errant that he has been influenced to imagine himself a knight out of a romance.
Of course, he isn't a knight. Readers and many of the people in the novel watching him behave strangely laugh at the mistakes he makes. For instance, he mistakes windmills for giants and tilts at them (tries to fight them off) despite the pleas of his "squire" that he not do this crazy thing. He also imagines a peasant woman as his lady love, renaming her Dulcinea, and he imagines a local inn as a castle. We laugh and cry with Don Quixote as he tries to bring a touch of the magical and the noble into a world that isn't interested.
Don Quixote has a high level of violence. Cervantes used the novel to critique violence, but readers must decide if the violence is humorous in the way of exaggerated cartoon violence or merely appalling. In either case, Quixote is constantly getting beaten up for his misguided efforts to right both real and imagined wrongs.
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