Introduction: The variety of humors / Sarah Blacher Cohen --
Toward a definition of Black humor / Max F. Schulz --
Nabokov's black (hole) humor: Lolita and Pale fire / Richard Pearce --
Berger and Barth: the comedy of decomposition / Stanley Trachtenberg --
Take-off the cosmic irony: science-fiction humor and the absurd / David Ketterer --
Detached laughter in the South / C. Hugh Holman --
Cosmic modes in Black America (a ramble through Afro-American humor) / Charles H. Nichols --
Saul Bellow's humane comedy / Allen Guttmann --
The comic anatomy of Portnoy's complaint / Sheldon Grebstein --
The Jewish literary comediennes / Sarah Blacher Cohen --
The satire and moral vision of Mary McCarthy / Wendy Martin --
Ladies in Boston Have their hats on: notes on WASP humor / George Garrett --
College humor and the modern audience / Earl Rovit --
The urban tall tale: frontier humor in a contemporary key / Sanford Pinsker --
Prolegomena to the study of fictional Dreck / Philip Stevick --
Camp, cruelty, colloquialism / Ruby Cohn --
Fresh air: humor in contemporary American poetry / John Vernon --
Contemporary American humor: a selected checklist of criticism.
