Olivia Hagimont

The Family Dinner or How to Survive Your Loving, Neurotic Family

Family dinners are the perfect opportunity to show a rogue’s gallery of characters with strong personalities, who will, over the course of a meal, offend and wound each other, but come to love each other once again. Family get-togethers, where neuroses take centre stage. Olivia Hagimont’s sense of humour works as a magnifying glass, allowing us to see our own idiosyncrasies in order to be able to put things that hurt us into better perspective, and to start letting go of past events.

Marie Anaut

Humour and Resilience

• How does humour function? What part does it play in our relational dynamics and in the development of defence mechanisms when we are faced with harmful or destructive experiences?

Daniel Sibony

The Meanings of Laughter and Humour

Alfred Sauvy

The Sources of Humour

With a view as encyclopedic as it is malicious, Alfred Sauvy invites us to journey through centuries and cultures in search of that eternal antidote to sadness and pedantry: humor. Faithful to his own voice, the author voluntarily leaves the floor to the humorists and offers us a pivotal reference work that combines erudition with an anthology that is full of alacrity. Alfred Sauvy (1898-1990) was a professor at the Collège de France, created and directed the Institut de Conjoncture, and later the National Institute of Demographic Study. Member of the Economic and Social Council of Paris, he was a longtime representative of France at the United Nations.