The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humor.
In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humorlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Valles and la blague; exaggeration in Valles and Cd'eline (Mort a credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Meteores).
Five interleaved "riffs" on laughter, dreams, black humor, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humor outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

Albert Londres (1884-1932) was a much-translated French investigative journalist, distinguished by the application of humour to serious reporting. His journalistic coverage was extremely wide (Europe, Soviet Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, South America), as were his themes: war, revolution, racism, prison and asylum conditions, the slave trade, colonialism, sport. This study compares and contrasts Londres with other globetrotting reporters from France, Britain and the USA who deal courageously and innovatively with history in the making. The approach is historical, sociological and rhetorical. The author investigates the shifting borderline between journalism and literature and critically examines the numerous cliches about, and by, journalists.

First published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Includes the full French text, accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.