At Whom Are We Laughing?: Humor in Romance Language Literatures

They say that laughter is a purely human phenomenon, so exclusively ours that we brook no intruders-except, of course, for the laughing hyena, the laughing jackass (officially known as the kookaburra bird of Australia), laughing matters, laughing gas, or the perennial laughing stock. But what is humor, that funny thing so varied in its colors and tones, so encompassing in its themes, so different from time to time and place to place? And when we poke fun, at whom are we really laughing? At Whom Are We Laughing?: Humor in Romance Language Literatures is the selective product of a multi-national gathering of scholars sponsored by Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, to explore humor across the centuries in the literatures of Italy, France, Romania, the Iberian peninsula and its diaspora. The volume contains thirty-one scholarly and interpretative papers on diverse aspects of their wit, provocative aspects that are, for the most part, little known to the general reader. Precisely because of its scope and diversity, its appeal should extend beyond academia into the libraries of the intellectually curious, be they English speakers or not, be they specialists in humanities, psychology, society and culture, or merely interested amateurs who frequent the many new humor societies and clubs that abound in the world of today.

Zenia Sacks DaSilva, Professor of Spanish at Hofstra University, is a well-known writer of many textbooks on Spanish language, literature and cultural history and the editor of two other volumes of essays, Don Quixote: The First 400 Years and The Hispanic Connection: Spanish and Spanish American Literature in the Arts of the World. Gregory M. Pell is Associate Professor of Italian at Hofstra University, where he focuses on cinema, modern and contemporary poetry and narrative, and translation. He is the author of Memorial Space, Poetic Time (Troubador Italian Studies, 2005), a monograph on the poetry of Eugenio Montale.