The refreshing thing? This book does not contain one single joke, and never strains for a laugh, in that cloying, tweedy way you're usually forced to endure in these sorts of things. What it is instead is a rather dry survey of the philosophy of laughter in the 20th century. You'll have to get past a long introduction focusing on the physicality, mechanics, and early philosophy of the laughter response before you get to chapters focusing on laughter and the Black experience, laughter and avant-garde philosophy, laughter and feminism, and laughter and the cinema. Pretty interesting, right? A view of the 20th century through the strict lens of laughter?—that's why I thought this academic work deserved a shoutout. And it's not at all a difficult read, to boot. The hangup is, you spend a great deal of time asking yourself: What's the point? Why this lens? She notes that laughter is a sort of "violent mystery" that deserves more exploration—in my lifetime alone I feel there was a seismic shift in general attitudes towards laughter, for better or for worse—but her somewhat scattershot "notebook" only seems to offer a prism of smaller insights at the expense of overarching ones. The story, as I'm forced to deduce, is one of serious thinkers attempting to grapple with the implications of a seizing, interruptive, highly contagious force: Is it the spark of a revolution? Is it an oppressive balm? Is it a vestige of human purity? Or is it a corruption? Of course, the answer is all of those things and more. But Parvulescu seems to have her thumb on "revolution" which, given the depiction of laughter as an immense, distorting, elusive, God-given power, in the end feels lamely reductive. Three stars.