It claims to be one of the few books to examine comedy from a philosophical perspective (even Aristotle, as far as we know, avoided it.) If you count literary criticism, that's certainly not true. What I'll say is it's one of the few books I've run into that tries to distinguish comedy as a high art form, analyzing plays, novels, jokes, paintings, and movies along the way; it seeks to identify comic works that achieve the sublime (as in sublimating innocuous laughter towards a higher, noteworthy aesthetic effect) which according to her definition would even exclude works like "The Simpsons" (memorable jokes, like fireworks, that always lead back to the status quo.) Whether or not that interests you, I suppose, is your business. But I will say her argument that our current comedy rarely does anything new, and in fact, steals liberally from past comedic innovations (see "Arrested Development's" similarities to commedia dell'arte, or even Charlie Kaufman's similarities to 20th-century existentialists like Kafka) is a rather damning one. That said, the main criticism I have of this extremely interesting, wonderfully accessible meditation on high comedy (tell an aspiring comedian that you consider comedy to be an art form and they'll consider you cuckoo, believe me) is, sure, that's all well and good, but is Samuel Beckett really all that much of a knee-slapper? Maybe not. In fact, Beckett sounds like he might be downright irritating. Yes, I may just be ridiculing something I'm too unsophisticated to understand, but it's not my fault I wasn't born into money, or into a culture that doesn't consider literature to be an impractical, time-wasting luxury.* Five stars.
*"All people are 'thrown' into a concrete social universe. The human genetic endowment is programmed for social life, but there is nothing in the genetic endowment which would encode a newborn for this or that particular, concrete social environment into which he or she is thrown. Philosophically speaking, there are two initial a priories in human life: a social a priori (the world into which each is thrown) and a genetic a priori (the inherited endowments of the thrown being herself). Since there is no initial connection between the two, and since only the experience of any single person can forge this connection, it is philosophically correct to speak of two a priories, given that they are prior to experience for all human newborns. To use a term coined by Hannah Arendt, this is the condition of human natality. In the process of socialization those two a priories must come together; they must dovetail in order for the individual person even to survive. But—and this is my hypothesis—the two a priories cannot be entirely dovetailed; there remains a tension between them. To use another kind of metaphor, an unbridgeable abyss remains between the two a priories. I call this existential tension and an existential abyss. According to the conception of laughing and crying presented here, both of these are reactions to the impossibility of a real jump over the abyss; laughing and crying are responses to the failure of any complete dovetailing between the social and the genetic a priori."