A ten year old and his father walk into a bar.... (Structure)

"I knew Father was quite capable of lingering there till night fall. I knew I might have to bring him hone, blind drunk, down Blarney Lane, with all the old women at their doors, saying: 'Mick Delaney is on it again.' I knew that my mother would be half crazy with anxiety; that next day Father wouldn't go out to work; and before the end of the week she would be running down to the pawn with the clock under her shawl. I could never get over the lonesomeness of the kitchen without a clock." -pg 346-347

The kid in this story spends a lot of time making predictions. He notices patterns that emerge in the people around, especially his father, and then makes predictions out of them. In the very beginning, he relays the pattern of his father's drunk and sober cycle. He recognizes the warning signs and carefully marks them as the funeral progresses. At the quote above, he has just entered the bar with his Father and can already tell the reader exactly what is about to happen. This is probably why we don't see the ending coming. The entire story  is structured with predictions followed by events. We have expected the Father to get drunk since the first page, but the boy is the one who ends up stumbling down the alley cursing at women. A lot of the humor in this story originates from the unexpected nature that comes from the sly structure of the author.