This book is the result of almost a decade of research in several related aspects of the linguistics of humor. As such, it is inevitably a composite and the result of a compromise between my desire to cover, on the one hand, as much as possible of the scholarship pertaining to humor research in linguistics and, on the other, my own research interests in the field. The book combines a representative, if not exhaustive, survey of the literature in the linguistics of humor, with critical analyses of the more significant a.pproaches and my own original ventures.