This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies. They include authors from the Renaissance to the modern period. Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime is reproduced in its integrity and the analysis examines every instance of humor in the text (an absolute first in humor research or literary analysis, for that matter). The complete French text, English translation, and analysis of Allais'story Han Rybeck is also included. Furthermore, a ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor inselect texts is presented. This book will appeal to humor researchers, and to linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and literary theorists interested in humorous texts. Literary scholars will be particularly intersted as the book bridges the gap between literary and linguistic analysis of humor.