ABSTRACT
The reader, if he is still there, has now considered all the general forms of adult play. Our science, in this formal sense, is finished. But there are certain materials, or themes, which predominate significantly in laughter. Grown-up people have their playthings just as children do. They have their playthings of the moment, their “topics of comedy,” about which everybody for a time is brimful and bursting with laughter, and all a jest need do is open the tap and let them laugh. And they have certain perennial natural subject matters of hilarity, like insults and sexual allusions, which prevail so universally that any one of them may seem, on a quick view, to be almost a definition of the comic.
