Download or read book French Laughter written by W. D. Redfern and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-02-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humor, Walter Redfern's book treats major French writers from the 18th to the 20th centuries as humorists, including Diderot, Rousseau, Sade, Huysmans, Flaubert, Beckett, and Tournier. He considers irony, hyperbole, wordplay, jokes, dialogue, humor as philosophical speculation, and plagiarism.