This book is the result of almost a decade of research in several related aspects of the linguistics of humor. As such, it is inevitably a composite and the result of a compromise between my desire to cover, on the one hand, as much as possible of the scholarship pertaining to humor research in linguistics and, on the other, my own research interests in the field. The book combines a representative, if not exhaustive, survey of the literature in the linguistics of humor, with critical analyses of the more significant approaches and my own original ventures. For the most part, I hope I have provided enough indications to indicate which is which. No chapter is anyone of those three things exclusively, but the beginning of the book clearly tends towards the survey, the middle towards the critique, and the end towards original work.