He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

Leacock’s line is a compact example of his parody of melodramatic adventure and romance writing. The repeated “flung himself” accelerates the action to the point of absurdity, while the punchline—riding “madly off in all directions”—collapses heroic decisiveness into physical impossibility. The humor comes from exposing how stock phrases of breathless narration can be mechanically piled up without regard to logic. Read this way, the sentence satirizes not the character’s emotions but the conventions of “dashing” storytelling itself, turning a familiar image of escape or pursuit into a joke about incoherent, overcooked prose.