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When the editorial assistant for Dialogue informed me of this book, I was immediately intrigued: How was a booklength philosophical treatment of bullshit even conscionable?Who would do such a thing? And how could one trump Frankfurt's 1986 essay [Raritan 6 (1986) 81-100], which I remember having read with delight, if not complete agreement? But then she told me the author was Harry Frankfurt and the book was "short, about the size of a prayer book", and I knew. Frankfurt has reformatted his twenty-page essay, once free for the xeroxing, by the single copy, for personal use, by dedicated scholars, into a sixty-some-odd-page hardcovered stocking-stuffer (Bah! Humbug! -of which more below), word-count unaltered, now for only ten dollars US! What kind of bullshit is that? But seriously folks, Frankfurt's essay is ever thought-provoking and apropos, especially now, with George W. & Co. in charge south of the border and with the antics of our own

Laughter and pleasure are generally presumed to be intimately connected with one another and one recent writer, John Morreall, advances the strong thesis that a pleasant psychological shift is a causally necessary condition for laughter.