I’ve already written about Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First” in this post, which is chock full of interesting stuff, but now I have three more takes on it to share with you.
There are a lot of books on comedy out there that try to explain how and why things are funny. Everything from how-to manuals to Freud and Bergson. I’ve shied away from them, especially the latter, which tend to be dry, over-intellectual and, well, not funny. (I dare you to read “Theories of Humor” on Wikipedia!) But I was eager to read Steve Kaplan’s book because I knew Steve back in the 80s when he ran the Manhattan Punchline Theatre. I took a workshop he led at our NYC rehearsal loft and he directed one short piece that had come out of one of my physical comedy classes.

My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin