It's an academic book of literary criticism, but I think it's a rather outstanding academic book of literary criticism. So, yes: not for the common reader. As for the uncommon among you, what makes it worthwhile is its study of those who have thought very, very, very intensely about comedy, humor, laughter, and jokes: Henry Fielding, Søren Kierkegaard, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Meredith, and Sigmund Freud—rather than simplify the comic spirit, these thinkers revel in comedy's complexities, contradictions, repetitions, and confusions, hence the labyrinth of the title. Keep in mind that this ever-expanding, ever-imploding, mirrored approach to comic literature actually seems to have been entirely abandoned in the 21st century, unless you consider the television show "Arrested Development", which feels like a direct descendant of the 19th-century British comedy epic (down to the detached narrator)—in this time of lifehacks, short cuts, formulas, and analytics, it simply seems out of fashion to call something overwhelmingly complex and then leave it at that. But Simon makes a strong case that comedy isn't clean and that most attempts to explain and simplify it are actually insulting to the breadth and depth of comedy's complex and unknowable powers*—Kierkegaard, like the others, spent decades thinking about comedy and he came to believe that comedy was almost as important as God. So what seems closer to the truth? That comedy is bafflingly complex, ultimately unknowable and capable of producing some confoundingly powerful effects? Or that comedy must obey the rule of threes in order to be effectively funny? In the light of this book, stuff like the latter just seems woefully petty. Five stars.

*"Anyone who enters a university library looking for simple answers to basic questions about comedy and laughter finds a labyrinth of contradictory explanation and a morass of terminology from which there is no escape. Like the reader of Tom Jones or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, he wanders through an almost perfect symmetry of binary oppositions, of mirrored and inverted arguments, and of flawed and unreliable guides. Virtually everything that could be said about the subject has been said—every position, its counterposition, and their synthesis. Between Meredith’s essay 'The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,' first delivered in 1877, and the present, critics have argued that comedy is a force for civilization (Meredith) and a force of nature against the repressions of civilization (Freud, Santayana); that the comic corrects aberrant behavior (Bergson) and that the comic does not correct aberrant behavior (Smith); that comedy celebrates what is (Scott) and that it celebrates what should be (Feibleman); that it represents detachment from life (Bergson) and that it represents engagement with life (Burke); that it is an irrational attitude (Sypher), a rational attitude (Swabey), and a force both rational and irrational (Gurewitch); that it is politically left (Feibleman) and politically right (Cook); that it affirms freedom (Kaul, McFadden) and that it denies freedom (Girard); that it shows the victory of the individual (Torrance) and that it shows the victory of society over the individual (Bergson, Duncan); that its subject is carnival (Santayana) and that its subject is everyday life (Kaul); that it requires self-consciousness (Burke) and that it requires a lack of self-consciousness (Mack). Who speaks the truth in this discourse? For most Anglo-American literary critics in this period comedy is a positive subject—the integration of society (Frye), the elan vital of biological life (Langer), the victory of civilization (Meredith). For most European critics, however, comedy is much more negative and unpleasant, a sense of constantly being off balance (Pirandello), an adjustment to painful situations that cannot be avoided (Freud), existence in boundary situations (Plessner).

There is virtually no agreement."