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This short book of eight chapters is divided into three sections. In a preface the author accurately evaluates the first two chapters as 'a very general introduction to the subject of humor'. He describes the second section as 'a group of four chapters which have little apparent interrelationship (except that they are all about humor in one way or another)'. Thus the author has allotted more than two thirds of his book to preliminary remarks which are not particularly helpful in the understanding of the last two chapters, 'the raison d'être of the book'. The first of these, Background for Theory, indicates by its title that we are still being prepared for his theories on humor, to be found in the last chapter, Humor's Anatomy. Here, finally, Dr. Fry approaches humor from a wide variety of disciplines. It is one example of 'the function of the paradoxes of abstraction in communication' which is also present in 'implicit' communication, mental illness, psychotherapy, and culture. It is a form of play, from which it is differentiated by having a climax—the punchline in jokes. The author views humor as structured in the paradoxes in communication of implicit and explicit as well as the real and the unreal.