Humor, Psyche, and Society collects twelve essays by Arthur Asa Berger, who over his career has produced not only several books of academic analysis of comic material but also multiple works of fiction. In his final essay in this collection, Berger says that altogether he has published more than seventy-five books and over one hundred articles. His dissertation on Al Capp's comic strip L'il Abner (1964) was published as a book in 1969 and reprinted more than once, the last time in 1994. He has been in the humor studies game for a long time. Seven of the twelve essays are edited reprints. The other chapters are “major revisions of previously published articles or new material written for this book” (xxiii), phrasing that does not make clear which of the other five essays are new. Overall, the work has a dated quality. Moreover, its analytical value is limited.The introduction summarizes the chapters to come, but the big reveal is that the forty-five techniques of humor, “elicited from a long content-analysis” (xi), that he outlined in a 1976 article has remained the foundation for all his subsequent work on comic material because they enable a “focus on the structural/semiotic components of humor.” The forty-five-technique analysis that Berger says anchors all his work on humor echoes the kind of detailed analysis made famous in a 1962 essay on a Baudelaire poem by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss. A certain level of information about humor can be gleaned from such a structural approach, similar to Vladimir Propp's analyses of fairy tales, published in English in1958, which Berger acknowledges, though he notes he had not read Propp before compiling his list (91).Berger claims his list covers all examples of humor for all time in all places—thus implicitly suggesting it is a grammar or deep structure of joke techniques. The techniques as heuristic have a tendency to drift into the semantic oppositions of the early structuralism epitomized by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, a problem particularly on display in the chapters that analyze one episode each of the sit-coms Cheers and Frasier, as well as in the chapter that tackles Jewish humor. Berger finds items from his list of techniques and also finds semantic oppositions in a given text. That data is then used to make claims and build interpretations. This very particular foundation results in a narrow analysis of comic artifacts, narrowness exacerbated by the fact that the examples provided are almost all jokes. Because Berger overwhelmingly relies on his list of techniques to analyze jokes, he does not say much anywhere about cultural contexts.Almost inevitably, there is an arbitrary feel to the list: why forty-five? One might add “allegory,” “mock heroic,” and “surprise,” for example. “Incongruity” and “aggression” do not appear. In Chapter 10, “Deconstructing a Russian Joke,” this arbitrariness shows up in a different way. The joke that Berger supposedly deconstructs reveals a cultural moment: the joke “reflects” the cynicism that Russians feel about the Communist Party. Yet the joke is not a satire (that is a technique here); rather Berger calls it “a biting indictment” (93). In his analysis of an Israeli joke in chapter 5, Berger also claims satire as a technique. Nevertheless, in his account of the British TV show Little Britain, he suggests that the show as a whole is a satire (not simply a technique), and he briefly elaborates satire as a mode using Northrop Frye's typology.Berger in his second chapter offers what reads like a definition of humor: a specific kind of “information” (9) structured by incongruity and surprise (his word is “suddenness”). In a table, he describes various theories of humor—including those of Hobbes, Bergson, Freud—as versions of incongruity. When he suggests that suddenness is a form of incongruity, he clearly indicates that this feature operates as the core attribute of humor.However, the fundamental claims come in chapter 5, “A Global Perspective on Humor”: “I am arguing, then, that the techniques of humor are universal and more or less timeless” (38). (Not sure what “more or less timeless” means.) Berger can make this statement because Greek and Roman comedies, Shakespeare's comedies, modern comedies, and absurdist comedies supposedly all use the same techniques. Berger hedges on the universality of his transcendental techniques when he admits that cultural differences in what is funny can be about content or subject, although he also claims that it is the pattern or selection of techniques that account for those differences. Moreover, he does admit that he is only talking about the Western cultural tradition, and he walks back the claim of timelessness in a number of places.The empirical evidence for the universality of his typology of techniques also does not compel confidence: jokes from people around the world—people he knows— who sent him jokes “about other people in their country, hoping that … would lead me to obtain ‘typical’ jokes” (39). The scare quotes around “typical” highlight the problem: what is meant by “typical”? And, of course, that problem is embedded in the bigger one of explaining something called “humor” and something else called “mirthful laughter” by examining only one class of comic artifacts: jokes. The randomness and small sample size mean that any generalization must be limited in its explanatory power. Moreover, the jokes are all presented in English, which elides translation issues, not only for the jokes he collects but also for those Greek and Roman jokes he mentions.Berger states: “On the basis of this brief survey, … we can see that jokes (and by extension other humorous texts) generate mirthful laughter, weak smiles, side-splitting laughter or various other kinds of responses because there are techniques that are operating in them that strike people as funny” (44). The claim is a tautology: jokes generate laughter or smiles because they employ funny techniques. And what about the throwaway parenthetical claiming that “other humorous texts” besides jokes can also be explained the same way? That is a mighty big claim in itself, especially since the essay and most other essays in the collection only offer jokes as evidence.Though Berger grounds his methodology in a set of ostensibly timeless techniques based on content analysis that functions in quasistructuralist fashion, in several places he undercuts that fundamental position. Thus, what he calls elements or “jokemes” (10)—the smallest part of a comic artifact—are functionally cultural codes, which is why jokes do not easily translate. He also admits that “humor” (n.b. not jokes) based on language, idiom, and cultural allusion is “most difficult for people in other countries to get” (44).The chapter on Jewish jokes also moves past mere technique. Such jokes are about “Jewish cultural sensibility” (20), but Berger does not speculate on how a non-Jewish audience might consume such jokes. Apparently, only Jews will laugh because no one else has knowledge of the cultural codes that create the sensibility. If one's horizon of expectation does not include the stereotype of the cheap Jew, for example, the joke employing that stereotype falls flat. Berger provides only minimal information about Jewish sensibility, again suggesting the limit of the forty-five-technique analysis: that list allows for a dissection of jokes for a basic content-level analysis but tells us nothing about how the joke might be received.Finally, when analyzing comic artifacts more complicated than jokes, Berger steps outside his timeless technique method each time. Thus, in the essay on Cheers, he adds “culture codes” as a final analytical category, as though that rubric does not encompass all the other ones. In this category, Berger again admits that “humor” (i.e., all comic artifacts) depends on audiences possessing cultural codes, which means that someone will not “get” the joke, or worse, will misunderstand it with “aberrant decoding,” a phrase borrowed from Umberto Eco: “viewers must bring a great deal of prior information to the text” (28). The problem is dramatized in an anecdote Berger shares: “At a lecture I gave at Kinko University in Japan in May 2008, I used this joke [which targeted Soviet-style economic plans] and found that the students couldn't see anything funny about it. That shows how it takes a certain background and understanding of language and culture to understand humor” (xxi). Similarly, in the essay on Frasier, Berger begins by noting that the main characters are defined by “fixations” (66). Next, the essay on Little Britain, begins with the differences between the comic sensibilities of American and British culture. The category of “identity humor” supposedly explains most of the show, but this claim again leads to discussion about character obsessions (á la Molière's idée fixe concept), which turns out to be the real comic motor powering the show.Overall, the collection rates as both curious and disappointing. Curious for the very personal, essentially autobiographical essays it contains (chapters 1, 6, and 12), and disappointing in its narrow and repetitive approach. Its inconsistent editing does not help—not only are there multiple missteps at the sentence level, but most egregiously, an entire paragraph is repeated in the space of six pages (79, 86).The essays read like lecture notes for an undergraduate class: they are short and pithy, and instead of offering in-depth explorations of a few artifacts, he gives many examples that he relies on to make generalized points. The essays could be parts of a primer, though the collection also seems intended as a gateway to entice folks to read other books by Berger. The essays’ theoretical claims are broad, while generous use of jokes makes the presentation more entertaining than dauntingly ponderous. However, even employed as a primer, the collection would probably be most useful for the way its claims would surely stir challenges from students, initiating discussion and debate rather than informing their own interpretations.