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It is not clear whether the author intends his book to be regarded as a light or a serious contribution to the subject, but much speaks in favour of the former assumption. The treatment is extremely discursive and indeed consists mainly of quotations from general literature, no discrimination being made between popular journalists and serious students of æsthetics. The bibliographical value itself of the book, however, is severely—and for a scientific work vitally—impaired by the fact that the author's reading appears to be confined to one language. He keeps throughout to the surface of the subject and avoids raising any deep or intimate psychological problems. In the chapter on laughter and tickling, for instance, there is no reference to the erotic aspects of the latter phenomenon.
There is a very sketchy account of Freud's views, but the author does not appear to have made any serious study of them. He dismisses them with arguments such as the following. In treating of tendency wit Freud considers only the repressed motives and ignores the 'higher' functions of wit. '"Experience is a good schoolmaster, but the school-fees are somewhat heavy" is both good wit and good sense: it has a poignant sense of truth, contains no hostile stab, and has no relish of the indecent' (p. 193). Many people would rank the remark as an epigram rather than as a witticism, but in so far as it may give rise to amusement or laughter it is surely because of the implied resentment against the hardness of fate and the pleasure of being able to degrade the idea of it to the level of a trafficking pedagogue, much as the Jews sometimes did with their Jahve. The author admits, none the less, that the emphasis laid by Freud on release of repression is a significant contribution to the subject.
The summary of the book, consisting of one-eighth of the whole, is as discursive as the rest, so that it is very difficult to ascertain what conclusions the author actually reaches. His final sen