Interesting essay on humor, laughter, jokes and some irony. Laughter is a body language while some forms of humor are mainly intellectual; also humor needs an object which laughter does not need. The book makes a simple journey, with ups and downs, of this English writer of Marxist descent, but influenced by the Christian faith, in trying to understand the intricacies of laughter and humor.
Humor can be seen as a consequence of incongruity, but also as a transgression or deviation from the conventional and predictable that helps us to distance ourselves, even if only for moments, from the solemn attitude of life. For Freud, a teacher for Eagleton, humor is a discharge that brings about the temporary cessation of repression that liberates from convention and authority. Humor can also have a moralizing attitude, if people do not approach virtue when they are taught or scolded, perhaps they do when they are ridiculed, with a joke or a comedy. We laugh, but we still do not know why we do it, and for Eagleton only by combining the thesis of incongruity with the theory of discharge could it be explained.