ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this handbook. The cohesiveness of the handbook chapters is remarkable. Virtually every chapter could have quoted most of the other chapters. Several chapters would benefit from parallel readings. The conversation analysis (CA) chapter opens with a clear and thought provoking rejection of the category of "humor", at least as a first approach to a text. Glenn and Holt's, Schnurr and Plester's, and Partington's chapters on CA, Discourse Analysis, and Corpus-Assisted Studies also form humor research answer to the Godfather trilogy. Humor is now an accepted topic of inquiry in most of not all areas of linguistics. This is good news for the field of Language and Humor. Humor studies are an intensely interdisciplinary field and so it would be absurd not to encourage the diverse areas of linguistics to interact with one another.
