"This is a timely and important book. It offers a nuanced yet rigorous negotiation between the philosophical discourse on laughter, psychoanalytic theory of jokes and the comic, and the contribution of silent comedies to our understanding of the comic. Trahair is equally at home in all three of these fields and their specific modes of interpretation." — Ewa PÂonowska Ziarek, coeditor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis