Courtesy The New York Review of Books, here is a (free) review by Mary Beard of two recent books:
Isn't It Funny?
By Mary Beard
Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like
sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at
the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically
specific.
Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt, Norton, 141 pp., $15.95
Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 by John R. Clarke, University of California Press, 322 pp., $55.00
