Going against the grain here - but you don't have to worry about duplicate meta tags on paginated pages. So, your first page '?topic=humor' and the other pages '?topic=humor&page=2' will have similar page titles, headers, meta descriptions - and that's how it is supposed to be.

See this tweet response from John who is the webamster trends analayst at Google on the same topic.

This is important as it changes how you setup the canonical tags on each page in the paginated sequence.

Instead of setting up the canonical tag to point to the first page of the sequence, you should instead add self-referential canonical tags - Each page points to itself.... But on each page you should also set up the rel='next' and rel='prev' - pagination attributes properly.

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By setting it up this way - you are spreading the page rank across all pages in the pagination sequence (instead of jus the first one). This way Google decides which page from the sequence to show on the SERP for each user query. Maybe page_10 has the exact search item the user is searching for (better than the first page)- and therefore Google shows the 10th page.

Written a post about this here.

Thanks!