Laughter: Notes on a Passion, by Anca Parvulescu.  MIT University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010,  212 pp.

Despite its generalizing title, this is essentially a study of what certain 20th-century (mostly French) thinkers and authors had to say about laughter. The book is divided into an introduction followed by five chapters. The introduction comes as close to stating the author's thesis as she ever does in the book. I feel the thesis is flawed (when not incoherent), so will discuss it later in this review. The first of the five chapters, “The Civilizing of Laughter,” is a breathless overview of pre-20th-century views of artists, such as Charles Le Brun, Giambattista Delia, Porta, and Charles Bell, the novelist Fanny Burney, as well as Erasmus, Lord Chesterfield and Thomas Hobbes. The purpose of the chapter is to argue that laughter was considered unseemly in one way or another before the twentieth century (this chapter opens and closes with Waiting for Godot). Chapter 2 is devoted to a number of meditations on laughter in Black American culture, centering on a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and his Baudelaire-inspired essay, “An Extravagance of Laughter.” Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and