Kevin McIlvoy: Laughter and the Laws of Nature (July 2006)

What makes fiction successfully, and complexly, funny?  Reflecting on comedy’s foundation in the tragic and on laughter as an embodied response, McIlvoy draws on writing about the comic by Henri Bergson, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Kerr and F.H. Buckley, and focuses on comic strategies at work in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman.