This slender volume, curiously titled and playfully jacketed, suggests a new way to think about humor. Humor is rather like a frog, E. B. White once said. It can be dissected, but it dies in the process. Fortunately, the author manages to avoid that pitfall even if many of the jokes that punctuate the book are strained and puerile.

Paulos argues that humor and mathematics share certain elements: playfulness, elegance, and economy of presentation. Certainly, for those familiar with the delight of riddle solving, the intellectual play of mathematics is fun in much the same way that humor is. Even some of the techniques of humor may be found in the logical techniques of mathematical proofs. Reductio ad absurdum, the presentation of a premise that is carried to the point of absurdity is a typical example. Iteration, simply adding “1” to previous integers, is another: it is, for mathematics, important in much the same sense that redundancy is for humor.