Alfie Bown is author of The Playstation Dreamworld (2017) and Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (2015). He is editor of Everyday Analysis and writes for The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other publications.

• List of FiguresPreface and AcknowledgmentsNote on the TextIntroduction: Laughter’s Doubleness1. Laughter as Liberation2. Laughter and Control3. Laughter as Event4. Laughter and AnxietyConclusionBibliographyIndex

I read In the Event of Laughter with real pleasure. It is smart and confident, but also ruminative and genuinely philosophical, and balances a distinct central thesis with many diverse case studies. The notion that there is something penny-pinching and parsimonious about existing accounts of 'the event' ('a rare and unusual occurrence, something that occasionally interrupts the trajectory of things'), and that rather, wouldn't we be better off thinking about how it happens all the time?, is a very sympathetic one; and it's an inspired twist to locate it in the act of laughter. The book will certainly have readers in the growing area of comedy and laughter studies, as it is a combative (though courteous) shakeup of that field.