January 26, 2007

Taking Humor SeriouslyWithout Being Glum

By THOMAS DOHERTY

Stop me if you've heard this one: A humanities professor walks into a bar and begins an act of hermeneutical exegesis. He does not have a parrot on his shoulder. He is not sitting next to a dwarf. The buxom blond bartender does not comment on the lack of a parrot.

Maybe you had to be there.

With a warm-up like that, two comedy acts fresh from the fall's university-press circuit — Stephen E. Kercher's Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America and Paul