ABSTRACT
Why do people laugh? What does our laughter tell us about ourselves and others? These questions have interested some of our greatest minds, and thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hobbes, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, Bateson-and one might go on endlesslyhave offered a variety of different answers to them. In this examination of humor I will deal with two basic topics: fi rst, comic devices or techniques of comedy found in humorous texts such as jokes (that is, what makes us laugh) and second, what these texts reveal about the cultural, social, and political arrangements in the societies in which they are found (see Douglas 1975: 90-114). I will begin by dealing with a number of the basic theories of humor, under which the ideas of a number of different thinkers can be subsumed.
