Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Sense of Humor
This may seem a remote opening for a book about humor, but it happens that the problem of humor has always been a special field of play for the irresponsible essay-writer, and the literature that adorns it is no toriously inconsequential. When I told Bernard Shaw that I was writing this book, he advised me to go to a sanitarium. There is no more dangerous literary symptom, he said, than a temptation to write about wit and humor. It indicates the total loss of both. And with a proper emphasis upon the word literary, that is entirely true. But if technical science con tinnes to develop as it has in the last half-century, and men of letters continue not to develop, it will soon be true that there is no more dangerous literary symptom than a temptation to write about any problem of gen eral knowledge. People will take our Plays seriously, but not our Prefaces - not our essays, epigrams, and immortal disquisitions. These they will glance through with an indulgent smile, and then go look the thing up in a laboratory report and find out what the truth is.
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