ABSTRACT
In view of the close relation of humor to play, and of play to infancy, I have based my argument in this book very largely on babies. Grown-up people are amateurs in laughter; babies are the real thing. If there is any exception to this rule, it is the professional humorists and comedians—people so exceptionally endowed with comic feeling and perception that they keep on laughing or causing laughter a good deal of the time all their lives. Their testimony, if you can find any common element in it, might be almost as valuable as that of the babies. For this reason I have, whenever the occasion offered, discussed the problem of laughter and the comic with men and women of this profession, and I list their answers here.
