PREFACE
W e were pleased and challenged when Oryx editors suggested that we write an encyclopedia of humor. When we shared the good news with friends and colleagues, they responded with opposite sets of assumptions. One group asked such questions as "How can you find out about all those sitcoms?" and "With the turnover in stand-up comedians, won't it be obsolete before you're done?" The other group smiled skeptically as if the concepts of humor and encyclopedia were incompatible; surely there isn't enough information about jokes to fill an encyclopedia.

To the friends who expected us to focus only on comedy performers, we explained that would be like writing an encyclopedia about food and commenting only on what chefs prepared and served. And to those who didn't think there was enough information for an encyclopedia, we said, "Wait and see!"

During the 25 years that we have been working with humor studies, we have found that, while most people think humor is important, they each have their own relatively narrow definition. For example, as English teachers, we were attracted to humor studies because we wanted to make our grammar lessons more interesting. We suspected that students could learn as much about language by working with deviant as with standardized sentences, and so, to us, humor meant language play. In 1982, when we invited the public to come to our first April Fools' Day humor conference at Arizona State University, we expected the participants to be people who worked with language in departments of communication, English, and perhaps drama and theater. We were pleasantly surprised when, in addition to language scholars, people came from medicine, art, business, philosophy, anthropology, history, political science, social work, sociology, education, performance, and the physical sciences.

Since then, we have been learning that humor means different things to different people. Many disagreements over the purpose of humor, its appropriateness, its effectiveness, and even what humor is, can be traced to people's differing definitions and expectations. By pulling together an overview of humor studies and treating a wide range of humor-related subjects, we hope to show that humor cuts across many aspects of life, and it is to be expected that architects, for example, will view humor differently from lawyers, or children, or stand-up comedians. It is also to be expected that circumstantial and individual experiences and differences will influence the way individuals respond to various kinds of humor. We recently heard about a group of citizens suing the National Science Foundation and a researcher for wasting taxpayers' dollars. The researcher had been awarded a grant to study psychological underpinnings of laughter. If the individuals who instigated the lawsuit had read this encyclopedia, we think they wouldn't have been so quick to assume that the researcher was on a fool's errand.

As we have worked in humor studies, we've felt like those tourists who come to Arizona and start hiking down into the Grand Canyon. The further into it they get, the bigger it seems to grow. We hope something similar will happen to our readers, whom we envision as intellectually curious people wanting to get more pleasure and understanding from their listening to, and reading of, public media, as well as from interacting with friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We also hope it will aid those who communicate with the public (journalists, humor consultants, public speakers, writers, advertisers, comedy performers, and health care workers) to reach a fuller understanding of their respective crafts. And because we want to encourage a new generation of humor scholars, we hope that our encyclopedia will find its way into high school and college libraries and will inspire students to write research papers on humor-related topics as alternatives to such grim subjects as abortion, capital punishment, drug abuse, and environmental problems.

Organization
Organizing our materials to illustrate the broad scope of humor studies while still tying related information together was challenging, and we made many arbitrary decisions. The 98 entries that we settled on could have been divided into as few as 80 or as many as 1,000. As readers will see, subtopics are included within many of the entries such as those on particular genres and particular kinds of writers or performers. We do not have separate entries for individuals and specific works because that kind of information can be found on the Internet and in encyclopedias and dictionaries already in print. Also, the grouping of various kinds of performers and creators proved to be efficient because the individual cases illustrate the patterns and the trends and connections that have significance beyond the individual examples. This means that readers looking for information about specific individuals, events, genres, and theories will need to use the subject index.

The overall focus of the Encyclopedia is on 20th-century American humor, with historical and international information being included only when it resonates in contemporary America. In literature, for example, we did not feel it appropriate to ignore Mark Twain, while the entries on humor in classical music and art, genres that are worldwide in nature, would have been woefully incomplete if we had looked only at Americans. We tried to begin each entry with a definition and then to include the standard information about the subject, followed by descriptions of controversies and recent theories and ideas. The books listed under "Further reading" were chosen for their currency as well as for their contents. Since we restricted ourselves to only two or three suggestions, readers wanting to do research on a particular topic would be well advised to skim through the bibliography on pages 311 - 331, which lists books about humor. Examples of actual humor in books and other media are not included in the bibliography because we include such information within the entries...