Introduction / Harry Levin -- On Pirandello's humorism / Dante Della Terza -- Humor in the Ulster saga / John V. Kelleher -- Gloomy Chaucer / Morton W. Bloomfield -- Marlowe's Schadenfreude: Barabas as comic hero / Erich Segal -- Swift's "Rules of raillery" / John M. Bullitt -- De Quincey: humor and the drugs / Jean-Jacques Mayoux -- Dickens and Gogol: energies of the word / Donald Fanger -- Victorian harlequin: the function of humor in Thackeray's critical and miscellaneous prose / Robert Kiely -- Transcendental antics / Joel Porte -- "A man's voice speaking": a continuum in American humor / Walter Blair -- Titanic toast / Bruce Jackson -- "Negro everyman" and his humor / Roger Rosenblatt -- Edge of laughter: some modern fiction and the grotesque / W.M. Frohock -- Jewish humor and the domestication of myth / Robert Alter -- Humor noir and black humor / Mathew Winston.