Cover -- Licence and Use -- Title Page -- Copyright Notice -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Humour or Laughter? -- 2. The Origins and Evolution of Humour -- 2.1 The Emergence of Humour -- 2.2 The Benefits of Humour -- 2.3 Is Humour an Emotion? -- 3. The Earliest Philosophies of Humour -- 3.1 Plato -- 3.2 Aristotle -- 3.3 Cicero -- 4. Superiority Theories of Humour -- 4.1 Rene Descartes: The Benefits of Ridicule -- 4.2 Thomas Hobbes: Sudden Glory -- 4.3 Henri Bergson: The Mechanical Encrusted on the Living -- 4.4 Humour as a Game -- 4.5 Roger Scruton: Attentive Demolition -- 5. Incongruity Theory -- 5.1 Frances Hutcheson and James Beattie -- 5.2 Immanuel Kant: Transformations into Nothing -- 5.3 Arthur Schopenhauer: Pleasure in the Defeat of Reason -- 5.4 Søren Kierkegaard -- 5.5 Problems with Incongruity Theory -- 5.6 So Where Does that Leave Us? -- 6. Relief Theories -- 6.1 Herbert Spencer: Nervous Energy -- 6.2 Sigmund Freud: The Unconscious -- 6.3 Freud and Play -- 6.4 Mikhail Bakhtin: Carnival -- 7. Humour and Ethics -- 7.1 John Morreall: On the Positive and Negative Ethics of Humour -- 7.2 Ethnic Humour -- 7.3 Christie Davis -- 7.4 Walsall People Are Stupid -- 7.5 Ted Cohen: Just Joking -- 8. Humour and Religion -- 8.1 Humour and Christianity -- 8.2 Holy Fools -- 8.3 Judaism and Humour -- 8.4 Humour and Buddhism -- 9. Postmodernism and Humour -- 9.1 John A. McClure: The Comically Cosmic -- 9.2 Humour as Philosophy -- 9.3 Susan Purdie: Joking and the Unstable Self -- 9.4 The Laugh of the Medusa -- 10. Laughter and the Limits of Understanding -- Humour and the Human Predicament -- 11. Bibliography -- A Note on the Author -- Humanities Insights.