An Essay on Laughter

What laughter is, where it comes from and what it is for: tickling, play, wit, irony and the social uses of ridicule, examined by a psychologist working before Freud's book on jokes. James Sully was professor at University College London and wrote this in 1902. He is best on children's laughter, which he had watched systematically. Fifty-six plates after Hogarth and Rowlandson, from Southwark Fair to a ball at Scarborough, catch the same comedy of manners Sully finds in the laugh.