Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.

Vibrantly bringing to life the frenetic, constantly changing mood of Germany and Europe between the wars, Berlin in Lights is a fascinating collection of diaries written by German aristocrat Harry Kessler, a diplomat and publisher who moved easily among the world of art, politics, and society. Kessler's diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people from Einstein, Josephine Baker, and Bertolt Brecht to Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide, to name a few. Recording firsthand the agonizing collapse and death of Weimar Germany and the arrival of the Nazis, as well as the artistic and cultural movements that flourished then, his diaries beautifully encapsulate the tumultuous years between the two world wars. Book jacket.