Presenting a cultural and interdisciplinary study of humor in Spain from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book examines how humour entered public life, how it attained a legitimacy to communicate ‘serious’ ideas in the Enlightenment and how this set the seed for the key position that humor occupies in society today. Through a range of case studies that run from Goya’s paintings, humor, and gender representations in radio programmes during the first Franco regime, developmentalist cinema of the sixties and seventies, to the transformation of female humor in social media, the book traces the core role that the comical has played in the public sphere. The contributors to this volume represent a wide range of disciplines including gender studies, humour studies and Hispanic studies and offer international perspectives on Spanish laughter.

Antonio Calvo Maturana is Associate Professor of History at the University of Malaga and principal investigator of the international research team ‘Humour and Its Sense: Discourses and Images of the Laughable from the Enlightenment until Today’. His area of expertise is European Cultural History during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular interest in Spain. He is the author of four books, among them: Impostores: sombras en la España de las luces (Cátedra, 2015); ‘Cuando manden los que obedecen’: la clase política e intelectual de la España preliberal, 1780-1808 (2013); ‘Aquel que manda las conciencias’: Iglesia y adoctrinamiento político en la Monarquía Hispánica preconstitucional, 1780-1808 (2012); María Luisa de Parma: reina de España, esclava del mito (2007, 2ª ed. Forthcoming).

“This volume is a fresh and significant contribution not only to the overall field of Hispanic Studies, but to numerous other disciplines such as humor studies, gender studies, journalism and studies in the Enlightenment. The editor and authors have presented an interdisciplinary mosaic that represents more than two centuries of humorous testimony.” • Leticia Villamediana González, University of Warwick