Bringing together twenty-five years of research on the sequential organization of laughter in everyday talk, Phillip Glenn analyzes recordings and transcripts to indicate the finely-detailed coordination of human laughter. He demonstrates that its occurrence, relative to talk and other activities, reveals much about its emergent meaning and effects. The book considers laughter's significant role in how people display, respond to, and revise identities and relationships.

Why Is God Laughing?: The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism

In this refreshing new take on spirituality, bestselling author Deepak Chopra uses a fictional tale of a comedian and his unlikely mentor to show us a path back to hope, joy, and even enlightenment—with a lot of laughter along the way.

A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. The first in-depth study of Hughes’s  personal papers published after his death, The Laughter of Foxes, is here offered in a newly revised second edition. An intimate yet critical survey of Hughes’s work, The Laughter of Foxes is penned by an acclaimed scholar and one of Hughes’ closest friends.

From Thomas Hobbes' fear of the power of laughter to the compulsory, packaged "fun" of the contemporary mass media, Billig takes the reader on a stimulating tour of the strange world of humour. Both a significant work of scholarship and a novel contribution to the understanding of the humourous, this is a seriously engaging book' - David Inglis, University of Aberdeen

This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good. In developing a critique of humour the author proposes a social theory that places humour - in the form of ridicule - as central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning.

Historically, theories of humour reflect wider visions of politics, morality and aesthetics. For example, Bergson argued that humour contains an element of cruelty while Freud suggested that we deceive ourselves about the true nature of our laughter. Billig discusses these and other theories, while using the topic of humour to throw light on the perennial social problems of regulation, control and emancipation.