T. S. Eliot may not seem like an obvious subject for a discussion of humor. Eliot did, of course, write comic verse: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided the basis of one of the highest-grossing Broadway shows in history. But few critics pay the book much attention,and those who discuss the obscene verses Eliot included in letters to friends tend to do so with embarrassment. But even if we set the light verse aside, however, Eliot's work is full of images of laughter and invocations of comic tropes. His varied and flexible deployments of humor as subject matter, rather than as technique, suggest a deep ambivalence about the relationship between laughter and empathy.

Much of Eliot's serious work plays with the idea that laughter can be produced by mutual understanding. Laughter is both an innate human behavior—infants laugh as early as four months, long before they can talk—and a highly social one: as Mahadev L. Apte observes, “familiarity with a cultural code is a prerequisite” for most laughter. As a result of its peculiar status as both innate and contextual, laughter can occasionally provide a bridge between an individual's hidden interiority and their constructed self-presentation. Such revealing laughter is, Eliot suggests, an extraordinary deviation from the more common laughter based on the Hobbesian model of superiority humor—the idea that we laugh when we realize that we are better than someone else. This form of laughter is dominant in his more satirical work, but Eliot's superior humor is not entirely pleasurable even for those unbothered by its frequent misogyny, racism, and class snobbery, because the sense of exceptionality that produces it isolates the person laughing.

As Eliot charts laughter's power to isolate or to connect, he suggests that humor can produce intersubjectivity, mark successes and failures of mutual understanding, and, most importantly, teach the reader selfawareness. Indeed, Eliot suggests that self-awareness is fundamentally linked to humor. As Stephen Helmling notes, Eliot provides a glancing definition of humor in “‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama,” when he argues that acting “is almost a sense of humour (for when any one is conscious of himself as acting, something like a sense of humour is present).”