Abstract

Humour is a funny thing. Everyone knows what humour is but no-one knows exactly how it works. This book addresses the question 'What is humour?' Consulting a dictionary on this question reveals an uninformative circle of definitions that goes from 'humour', to 'amusement', to 'funny' and back to 'humour'. Hence the book starts by untangling this circle of definitions to avoid being tied in conceptual knots. The remainder of the book is then free to lucidly provide a new theory of humour which draws on cutting-edge research in psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. Humour is important to people and so then are philosophical questions about humour. This book provides an understanding of what our sense of humour reveals about us and elucidates joking matters from the dinner table to the comedy club.