Buchwald warns that the trick of being funny is trying not to figure out why something is funny. Buchwald describes a small group of people who wants to know the DNA of humor and claims that that's a deadly quest. Buchwald states that humorists themselves don't know what makes people laugh. Further, he's afraid that if they did know, they wouldn't be funny anymore. But despite this confession that humorists are in the dark about humor, Buchwald nevertheless feels that humorists provide an important function in society. Nobody else has been able to solve the world's problems, and Buchwald feels that it's time we gave humorists a shot. Buchwald describes humor as the most socially acceptable form of hostility -- and it doesn't kill people, though it may occasionally break them up