Excerpt from The Sense of Humor<br><br>This may seem a remote opening for a book about humor, but it happens that the problem of humor has always been a special field of play for the irresponsible essay-writer, and the literature that adorns it is no toriously inconsequential. When I told Bernard Shaw that I was writing this book, he advised me to go to a sanitarium. There is no more dangerous literary symptom, he said, than a temptation to write about wit and humor. It indicates the total loss of both. And with a proper emphasis upon the word literary, that is entirely true. But if technical science con tinnes to develop as it has in the last half-century, and men of letters continue not to develop, it will soon be true that there is no more dangerous literary symptom than a temptation to write about any problem of gen eral knowledge. People will take our Plays seriously, but not our Prefaces - not our essays, epigrams, and immortal disquisitions. These they will glance through with an indulgent smile, and then go look the thing up in a laboratory report and find out what the truth is.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.