Salvatore Attardo is Professor of Linguistics at Texas A&M University - Commerce. He works primarily on the linguistics of humor, and on issues relating to implicatures, irony, and rationality, and more generally on Neo-Gricean pragmatics. He was Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research for ten years. His publications include Linguistic Theories of Humor (De Gruyter, 1994), Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis (De Gruyter, 2001), and, as editor, The Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (Sage, 2014) and The Handbook of Language and Humor (Routledge, 2017).

• Preface List of figures and tables Part I: Humor Studies 1: Humor studies: A few definitions 2: Methodological preliminaries 3: Theories of humor and their levels 4: Incongruity and resolution 5: Semiotics of humor Part II: Humor Competence 6: The semantics of humor 7: The General Theory of Verbal Humor 8: Pragmatics of humor 9: Verbal humor Part III: Humor Performance 10: The performance of humor 11: Conversation analysis: Humor in conversation I 12: Discourse analysis: Humor in conversation II 13: Sociolinguistics of humor Part IV: Applications 14: Humor in literature 15: Humor and translation 16: Humor in the classroom 17: Conclusion Glossary References Index

This elementary book is well structured and presented for readers without prior training in humor studies. Overall, it provides a clear foundation for understanding humor's embedding in linguistic practice, and its distinct (yet overlapping) cognitive, emotional, and physiological/embodied manifestations. As awkward as it can sometimes be to explain a joke, I enjoyed every aspect of this enlightening, eye-opening book.