Enjoyment of Laughter

by Max Eastman

Humor at its best is a somewhat fluid and transitory element, but most books about it are illustrated with hardened old jokes from the comic papers, or classic witticisms jerked out of their context. Max Eastman, in this work, avoids this catastrophe by quoting mainly from contemporary American humor. This is not an anthology in that selections have been made with a view to making a point rather thancovering the field.The purpose of Eastman's fabled work is to make the reader laugh. Since his early school days, it has seemed to him that textbooks are wrongly written in that they are conducted in a way which ignores the natural operation of the mind. As a result, the opinion is universal, and under the circumstances a fact, that in order to learn anything you have to study. Since this introduction to humor is itself near to writing a textbook, Eastman uses the very text he constructs to illustrate the manner in which textbooks should be written.Examination and classification of the kinds of humorous experience upon the basis of a theory is a science. As such, this work offers a fair chance to illustrate a method of instruction. However, the distinction between a good joke and a bad one will not prevent the reader from making bad jokes nor enable one to make good ones. There is an artistic and playful element that simply cannot be taught. Enjoyment of Laughter presents a total view of the science of laughter and draws upon some of the great American humorists to do so.Max Eastman (1883-1969) was an American writer, patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and was best known for his views as well as his rejection of the ideas of socialism and communism. He wrote numerous controversial critiquesof contemporary literature authors as well as many books including Seven Kinds of Goodness, Love and My Journey through an Epoch, and Enjoyment of Living.William Fry is Emeritus Associate Clinical Professor at Stanford University, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

367 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. In later life, however, his views turned sharply, and he became an advocate of free market economics and an anti-Communist.

A prolific writer, Eastman published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as the scientific method, humor, Freudian psychology and Soviet culture. He composed five volumes of poetry, a novel and translated into English some of the work of Alexander Pushkin. For the Modern Library, he edited and abridged Marx' Das Kapital.

Reviews

[Melissa M]

referenced in Anatomy of an Illness...

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "Enjoyment of Laughter" intentionally breaks down many, if not, all forms of joke telling. First published in 1936, Max Eastman, the author, pulls examples from the old great joke tellers, i.e., WC Fields, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain to metaphorically describe the deep mechanics of why we laugh. Here's a point quoted from Immanuel Kant, which sounds like a Seinfeld episode; Kant --"who maintained that nothing is what we laugh at, the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." The book is right brain reading. If the left brain trickles in too much you miss the point and the laughs.