The tone of the short story was serious but with some humor to it. Saki deliberately made it this way to accomplish more in the writing. Throughout the story, things that testify for this could be that Cornelius Appin deserved sort of what he got coming to him. Yes, he did succesfully teach the cat to talk, but it backfired. Knowing this he ultimately failed and should have realized that teaching another animal like an elephant probably wasn't the greatest idea. Saki was ultimately trying to teach to learn from mistakes.
In doing this he did add in humor. The last sentence had humor in it when Clovis said,"If he was trying German Irregular verbs on the poor beast... he deserved all he got." Clovis was completely serious when saying this, but also sarcastic at the same time. Another example of humor is when the newspaper was mispelling Appin's name because Appin was messing up when teaching the German. Obviously Saki did this for a purpose, but it's hard to tell if the newspaper was also doing it on purpose.
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