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This work is devoted to the 'realm of the comic', which is 'as extensive as the domain of tragedy' and more so, ranging 'from joking which reviles to humour which reconciles' (p. 5); it consists of fifteen studies of varying range, which, grouped in three divisions ('Borderline Problems of Joking', 'Jest becomes Earnest' and 'Between Horror and Laughter'), have yet 'unpretentiously though firmly rejected every attempt at orderly arrangement' (p. 90). They include penetrating monographs, such as that on the 'Intimacies of Jewish Jokes' (the depreciatory tendencies of which Reik attributes to the influence of the need for punishment), brilliant notes, in one of which, for example, slips of the tongue occurring in jokes are regarded as 'a bridge between failure and achievement in function', and short essays, some of them only loosely connected with the author's theme, but linking on to other earlier work of his, and completing and expanding the lines of thought there developed. Thus, for instance, the chapter on 'Bawdy Jokes in Goethe's Faust', a title which fails to cover the paper's wide range of thought—I cannot conceal my feeling that the author's fear that even an analytically trained mind will hesitate to follow him here without reserve is not altogether without foundation—is a contribution to the psychological interpretation of Goethe's art which proves to be closely connected with Reik's earlier account of Goethe's relationship to Friederike Brion (Imago, Bd. XV, 1929). So too the noble chapter written in memory of Arthur Schnitzler takes us back to a study of Reik's published more than twenty years ago; the present contribution proceeds from the work and personality of the