ABSTRACT
Many literary and subliterary works are humorous or have a substantial amount of humor in them. We have, for example, humorous novels, humorous plays (comedies), humorous poetry, humorous comic strips, and humorous greeting cards. It deals with everything from medieval carnivals to the nature of comedy and what it is that makes characters "humorous." To a certain degree, a post Renaissance view of laughter has been the one that has dominated our thinking about humor and humorous literary works. Comedies have been with us for a long time and because comedy and humor play such a large role in literature— conceived broadly to cover texts such as plays, poems, novels, and popular genres— literary scholars have written a considerable amount about humor. And senexes still roam the halls of academe, interfering in the lives of assistant professors, but that is another matter—for the alienist rather than the literary scholar.
