Topic
Humor in this collection is understood as a faculty with philosophical weight rather than a social lubricant. Twain's secret-source-of-humor-is-sorrow is the foundational claim: comedy is not the absence of pain but its transformation. Twain on humor as mankind's greatest blessing is the statement that earns the most agreement from readers who have found this to be literally true in dark periods. Bacon on humor as compensation for what we are not gives it a psychological function: it compensates for the gap between the self we are and the self we wished to be. Beecher's wagon-without-springs applies the absence test: the person who cannot find anything funny has removed the suspension system from their transit through a road full of potholes. Franklin's age-and-judgment sequence positions wit at thirty — the middle stage between the will of youth and the judgment of maturity. Voltaire's witty-saying-proves-nothing is the philosophical limit: humor illuminates but does not demonstrate. The collection argues that humor is truth told at an angle — true enough to land, oblique enough to be bearable.
A good book ought to be bound in edible covers.