The Comic Spirit, Boccaccio to Thomas Mann: Giovanni Boccaccio, Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, Israel Zangwill, Thomas Mann

To a discerning man looking out upon the world, the varieties of human absurdity must appear endless. Seeing the many forms of vanity and hypocrisy; self-deception; unconscious violation of proper, sensible behavior; and all sides the laughable incongruity between saying and doing -- observing these things a man may respond in a number of ways. He may be indifferent, contemptuous, amused, or indignant. Or he may think of himself as sharing like other men in the weakness that his intelligence perceives, and so end in a mood of tolerance. The following essays offer examples of this way of seeing common weakness -- the way of viewing the ludicrous sympathetically. -- From introduction.