Seminar, four hours. Designed for College Honors students. Application of venerable humanist insights and social scientific thinking to contemporary social phenomenon of human laughter and humor. While Aristotle and Hobbes thought humor was bad for society, Locke and Bahktin would have disputed them for different reasons. Integration of their ideas and ideas of evolutionary anthropology and linguistics, as well as social and biological science, to critically evaluate how social scientists investigate mass media political satire of today. Letter grading.