What is comedy? Andrew Stott tackles this question through an investigation of comic forms, theories and techniques, tracing the historical definitions of comedy from Aristotle to Chris Morris's Brass Eye via Wilde and Hancock. Rather than attempting to produce a totalising definition of 'the comic', this volume focuses on the significance of comic 'events' through study of various theoretical methodologies, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender theory, and provides case studies of a number of themes, ranging from the drag act to the simplicity of slipping on a banana skin.

Comedy in the Academy --
Plato and Aristotle --
Genre trouble --
Fertility and the 'Élan Vital': Cornford, Bergson, Langer --
Springtime and festival: Frye and Barber --
Carnival and the marketplace: Bakhtin and the new historicism --
Comic identity --
Stereotypes --
Clowns, fools, and folly --
Tricksters --
Wit, camp, and bathos: Congreve, Wilde, Hancock --
Gender and sexuality --
Cross-dressing: As You Like It and Some Like It Hot --
Drag and transvestism --
Marriage --
The body --
Beauty and abjection --
The grotesque --
Slapstick --
The female body --
Politics --
Comedy and the state: Frogs and Brass Eye --
Satire --
'Alternative' comedy: comedians and comedians --
The end of the laughter? Three holocaust comedies --
Laughter --
Christian laughter --
Superiority and incongruity theories --
Relief theory: Freud and Spencer --
Postculturalist laughters.