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The influence of the therapist's use of humor in individual, analytically based psychotherapy is explored by Kubie with a wary eye turned toward its effect on the flow of associations and on transference. An impressive list of adverse effects of humor in interpretations is proposed. These include evocation of doubt in the therapist's sincerity (Is he only joking?), enhancing the patient's resistance to insight (strengthening denial and reaction-formation), blocking expression of affect (such as the patient's anger), enhancing self-deprecation, and aiding the therapist in acting out in a masked way countertransference angers, anxieties, or seductive responses. A most telling issue is the genetic role of humor in the patient's early object relations, which must be explored with the patient and known to the therapist before he may judge the effect of his own humorous interventions. Kubie does see a cautious use of humor in the hands of experienced therapists as an aid in incorporating new insights during the working-through phase of therapy, and points to its ego integrative potential. Humor at the termination phase presents fewer hazards, but again may be used defensively in view of impending separation or may prematurely precipitate termination. The therapist's interventions, and especially interpretation, are most powerful tools and must be used with reflective caution. Finally, the use of humor by the therapist is seen as having very little place, if any, in analytically based treatment.