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, in this work, avoids this catastrophe by quoting mainly from contemporary American humor. This is not an anthology in that selections have been made with a view to making a point rather than covering the field. The purpose of Eastman's fabled work is to make the reader laugh. Since his early school days, it has seemed to him that textbooks are wrongly written in that they are conducted in a way which ignores the natural operation of the mind. As a result, the opinion is universal, and under the circumstances a fact, that in order to learn anything you have to study. Since this introduction to humor is itself near to writing a textbook, Eastman uses the very text he constructs to illustrate the manner in which textbooks should be written. Examination and classification of the kinds of humorous experience upon the basis of a theory is a science. As such, this work offers a fair chance to illustrate a method of instruction. However, the distinction between a good joke and a bad one will not prevent the reader from making bad jokes nor enable one to make good ones. There is an artistic and playful element that simply cannot be taught. Enjoyment of Laughter presents a total view of the science of laughter and draws upon some of the great American humorists to do so.

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 Humor-A 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