Editorial: The Handbook of Humour Research—Psychological, Cultural and Social Perspectives

This chapter is the editorial of the Handbook of Humour Research. It introduces the topic from various interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and focuses in particular on psychological, cultural and social insights. A brief introduction to the topic and state-of-the-art is given, the aims clarified and the contributions of the book presented. The parts and chapters are briefly introduced. After all, humour is an essentially human phenomenon and, as such, enables people to distance themselves from everything and everyone, and thus also from themselves, in order to take full control of themselves.