Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things brings together short humorous pieces by Henry Wheeler Shaw, writing as Josh Billings. Its opening sketch follows the narrator visiting a fashionable skating pond, where he watches the skaters and describes an accident with comic exaggeration. The remaining pieces explore a wide range of subjects, including animals, farming, card games, billiards, social customs and the habits of Americans.

Shaw uses deliberately phonetic spelling, exaggerated comparisons and unexpected conclusions to turn ordinary incidents into comedy. Some sections offer mock natural history or absurd practical advice, while others take the form of letters, brief aphorisms, personal anecdotes and a fictional almanac. Discussions of honesty, politeness, love, social rank and happiness combine moral observations with jokes about vanity, pretension and human inconsistency. Rather than following a continuous narrative, the collection presents independent sketches reflecting the language, entertainments and social attitudes of nineteenth-century America.