The Strange Intelligence of Laughter

Humor is usually treated as the least serious of subjects. Stephen Leacock turns that prejudice into his first target.

In this sly and wide-ranging book, a pun becomes a miniature philosophy of language, a parody becomes criticism with a grin, and a comic character becomes a test of our assumptions about identity, authority, class, and common sense. Leacock’s originality lies in his ability to make laughter reveal the hidden logic of ordinary life.

His theory also behaves like its subject. It moves through anecdote, literary criticism, historical observation, and sudden comic reversals. Each example unsettles a familiar hierarchy: the solemn may be absurd, the ridiculous may be wise, and the smallest verbal mistake may expose a larger social truth.

Why does some laughter liberate while other laughter wounds? Why can comedy sometimes tell the truth faster than an argument? And what happens when laughter approaches grief, death, and the sublime?

Part literary anatomy, part social x-ray, Humor and Humanity invites readers to examine the intelligence concealed inside a joke. They may come for the laughter. They may leave wondering what their laughter reveals about the world—and about themselves.