This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century.

Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period:
* Antiquity and the Middle Ages
* The Renaissance
* Restoration to Romanticism
* The Industrial Age
* The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North.

As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.

Magda Romanska is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy at Emerson College, Boston, USA, Dramaturg for Boston Lyric Opera, and research Associate at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Alan Ackerman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he also holds a joint-appointment in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. He is the editor of Arthur Miller's Broken Glass (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2011) and since 2005 has served as Editor of the journal Modern Drama.

CHAPTER 1: ANTIQUITY AND MIDDLE AGES
INTODUCTION
1) Plato. “The Basis of comedy is malice”
2) Aristotle on the Origins and Function of Comedy
a. Poetics, Chapters 3–5
b. “Wittiness, buffoonery, and boorishness.”
c. “On the qualities of character that are moderate.”
d. Tractatus Coislinianus
3) Horace. “Remarks on Comedy.”
4) Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory
5) Evanthius. On Drama
6) Donatus. On Comedy
7) Hrotsvita of Gandersheim. Prologue to the comedies
8) Dante Alighieri. On Eloquence in the vernacular
9) John of Garland, Dante, John Lydgate: Definitions of Comedy
10) John of Salisbury, Honorius of Autun, Liuprand of Cremona: Attitudes to the Comic Theater

CHAPTER II: RENAISSANCE (1500–1640)
INTRODUCTION
1) Erasmus. from Collected Works of Erasmus
2) Trissino, Gian Giorgio. from “Division VI: Comedy.”
3) Elyot, Sir Thomas. from “XII: The Second and third decay of leaning.”
4) Udall, Nicholas. Prologue to Ralph Roster Doister in Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies
5) Wilson, Thomas. “Of Delighting the Hearers and Stirring Them to Laughter”
6) Gascoigne. Prologue to The Glasse of Governement
7) Gosson, Stephen. The School of Abuse: containing a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, etc.
8) Sidney, Sir Philip. “Comedy,” “Tragicomedy,” The Nature of Laughter.” In The Defence of Poesie.
9) Jonson, Ben. from Every Man Out of his Humour.
10) Guarini, Battista. from Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry

CHAPTER III: RESTORATION TO ROMANTICISM (1660–1815)
INTRODUCTION
1) Butler, Samuel. Characters and Passages from Notebooks
2) Molière. Preface to Tartuffe
3) Congreve, William. Dedication to The Double-Dealer. In The Complete Plays of William Congreve
4) Dryden, John. Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay
5) Dryden, John. “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.”
6) Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. “The Freedom of Wit and Humour.” In Sensus communis: An essay on the freedom of wit and humour. In a letter to a friend
7) Blackmore, Richard. Essay upon Wit
8) Fielding, Henry. Selections from the preface to Joseph Andrews
9) Johnson, Samuel. “The Difficulty of Defining Comedy.” In The Rambler
10) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “The French Theatre: Comedy: Molière and His Successors.”
11) Goldsmith, Oliver. “A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy.”
12) Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment
13) Richter, Jean Paul. “On the Ridiculous.”
14) Hazlitt, William. “On Wit and Humour.”
15) Lamb, Charles. “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.”

CHAPTER IV: VICTORIAN ERA (1837–1910)
INTRODUCTION
1) Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
2) Thackery, W. M.
3) Baudelaire, Charles. “On the Essence of Laughter.”
4) Meredith, George. An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit
5) Shaw, Bernard. “Meredith on Comedy.”
6) Twain, Mark. “How to Tell a Story”
7) Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.”
8) Freud, Sigmund. “Wit and the Various Forms of the Comic.”
9) Shaw, Bernard. Preface to Major Barbara

CHAPTER V: TWENTIETH CENTURY TO PRESENT
INTRODUCTION
1) Woolf, Virginia. “Pure English.”
2) Rourke, Constance. American Humor: a Study of the National Character
3) Burke, Kenneth. “Comic Correctives.”
4) Brecht, Bertolt. “On Hegelian Dialectics.”
5) Durrenmatt, Friedrich. Problems of the Theatre
6) Frye, Northrop. “Comic Fictional Modes.”
7) Pirandello, Luigi. “The Art of Humor.”
8) Derrida, Jacques. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.”
9) Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Rabelais in the History of Laughter.”
10) Langer, Susanne. “The Comic Rhythm,”
11) Sontag, Susan. “Notes on 'Camp,'”
12) Alinsky, Saul
13) Girard, Rene. “Perilous Balance: a Comic Hypothesis.”
14) Mast, Gerald. “Comic Films-Categories and Definitions.”
15) Kundera, Milan. from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
16) Cavell, Stanley. from Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.
17) Eco, Umberto. “The Frames of Comic Freedom.”
18) Apte, Mahadev L. “Sexual Inequality in Humor.”
19) Hutcheon, Linda. from A Theory of Parody
20) Bataille, Georges. “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears.”
21) Levi, Primo. “Ritual and Laughter”.
22) Jenkins, Henry. “Agee, Mast, and the Classical Tradition” and “Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.”
23) Critchley, Simon. from On Humour
24) North, Michael. from Machine-Age Comedy
25) Nussbaum, Martha (2013). “Tragic and Comic Festivals.”
Index