Enjoyment of Laughter

Humor at its best is a somewhat fluid and transitory element, but most books about it are illustrated with hardened old jokes from the comic papers, or classic witticisms jerked out of their context

Max Eastman

1: Fun and Funny; 2: Babies and Grown-Ups; 3: Why We Laugh Like Human Beings; 1: The Importance of Not Being Earnest; 2: The Gift of Being Tickled; 3: Infant Laughter; 4: Do Babies Feel Derisive?; 5: Adult Laughter; 6: Eddie Cantor on the Auction Block; 4: Varieties of Humorous Experience; 11: Witty Jokes and Ludicrous Perceptions; 12: The Definition of Wit; 13: That Nonsense Must Be Plausible; 14: Funny Things and People; 15: Funny Pictures; 16: Poetic Humor; 17: Comical Figures of Speech; 18: Two Kinds of Comic Action; 19: A Mote on Comic Styles; 20: Poetic and Pictorial Humor with a Point: Cartoons; 21: That Rich Jokes Are Both Witty and Ludicrous; 5: Having Fun With Language; 22: Atrocious Puns; 23: Witty Puns; 24: Poetic Puns; 25: The Fun of Distorted Words; 26: That Bad Grammar Is Good Fun; 6: Laughing at Too-Much and Not-Enough; 27: Exaggeration; 28: Exaggeration as a Weapon: Caricature, Burlesque and Parody; 29: The American Blend of HumorA Digression; 30: Understatement; 31: Understatement as a Weapon; Irony; 32: Sarcasm and the Irony of Fate; 7: The Prevailing Topics of Laughter; 33: Playthings of the Moment; 34: Matrimony and Other Painful Pleasures; 35: Satire and Sympathetic Humor; 36: Degrees of Biting; 37: Slapstick and Aggressive Humor; 38: Risqué and Ribald Jokes: Freud's Theory; 39: About Nonsense and about Children: Freud's Theory Some More; 40: That Comicality Is Mot Release: Freud's Theory Still; 41: The Furtive Snicker and the Rabelaisian Laugh; 42: Why Truth Is Humorous; 8: How to Tell Good Jokes from Bad; 43: To Diagram a Joke; 44: The Ten Commandments of the Comic Arts; Supplementary; Some Humorists on Humor; Notes