Sitting in the Earth and Laughing

This book is at once a serious guide to that form of human incognuity we call humor and an entertaining embodiment of humor itself. Designed to cross disciplinary boundaries, this "handbook of humor" alternates chapters of serious study with chapters composed of illustrative humorous material. "Serious" chapters include distinctive efforts to understand the reality of comic laughter; the laughter of children, the clown, and the fool; the quality of secular humor within the Jewish tradition; and the vexing question of whether there is such a discrete phenomenon as Christian or theological laughter.