If not for humor, where would we be? Paul Johnson has explored the tricky realm of it and has put together a book presenting characters of humor over the centuries. While not exactly the book I had expected, the author has many entries of note.
Beginning with the English painter William Hogarth, Johnson offers up a series of writers, other artists and actual comedians to describe humor during the last three hundred years. Description is the key word here as commenting about humor and experiencing it are two very different things. It's difficult to gauge the laughs one might find in Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson or Toulouse-Lautrec without seeing their works in front of you. Johnson is better when offering up comedic lines from Benjamin Franklin, say, or Noël Coward. These read well.
One gets the impression that Paul Johnson is a very funny man and his introduction is terrific. My only wish is that the rest of the book followed suit with more humor in its content.