Amazon.com description: Product Description: Since Aristotle critics have struggled to distinguish between laughter in comedy and laughter in everyday life. In the theatre, distance breaks the aggressive spell of laughter, the audience laughs without hurting anyone, and laughter becomes an aesthetic experience. But comedy, more than tragedy, seems bound to the customs and social mores of the time that it satirizes: what is humorous to an audience in one society is no laughing matter in another. This book examines the shifting boundaries of comedy: in music, where it is elusive, or in dialect poetry where it may seem trivial; or in the laughter of the "other", as in Yiddish comic theatre or in Jewish mainstream comedy. Other essays treat comedy in the work of a single author or single tradition.