Comedy and Social Science

Humor as a topic of research has received a considerable amount of attention, but as a methodology has been severely neglected. If humor is a fundamental aspect of human experience and our understanding of what it is to be human, then to ignore the humorous as an analytical attitude, or the comic as a mode of representation, is at the very least to reject a potentially insightful methodological approach. To fail to admit of the presence or utility of the humorous, the comic, and the ludic in the human activity we call "research" is to undermine research itself. This book seeks to make a serious case for the place of humour as a methodology for the social sciences.