Carpenter examines English cultural values during the years immediately following World War Two and focuses specifically on the 1960's when students from Oxford and Cambridge universities (with others) challenged those values with immensely entertaining satire. Theirs were significant contributions to a tradition of creative ridicule which extends back more than 2,500 years. Of course, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens are among those English authors properly renowned for their comic genius but are not usually thought of primarily as social satirists. Throughout the Age of Victoria and well into the 20th century, the British Empire flourished within a somewhat rigid social order, one which (generally) seemed to lack a sense of humor. By 1960, England had become "a bankrupt, defenseless little country run by a ridiculously elderly prime minister" (Harold Macmillan) when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett introduced "Beyond the Fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival. Out of that developed Private Eye magazine, The Establishment (a men's cabaret featuring satire), and the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. Carpenter devotes substantial attention to Miller, Cooke, Moore, and Bennett as they and others detonated a "boom" of social satire whose reverberations continued through Second City, Monty Python, and Saturday Night Live. Carpenter duly notes the influence of the Goon Show (Millgan, Sellers, et al) as well as American humorists such as Mort Sahl, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, and Tom Lehrer on their English counterparts. Of special interest to me is Carpenter's suggestion that, as England continued its decline among world powers in the 1960s, social satire served as a medication to deaden the pain. At one point, he reminds his reader of Cook's warning that England was then in danger of "sinking giggling into the sea." That has not as yet happened and never will but the image remains vivid nonetheless.