This essay defines humor, distinguishes between referential and verbal humor, discusses humor and semantics, humor and pragmatics (especially Gricean insights, relevance-theoretic approaches to humor, humor as non-bona-fide-communication, the informativeness approach to jokes, and the two-stage procssing of humor), humor and conversation analysis, the sociolinguistics of humor, computational humor and cognitive linguistic and humor. It becomes clear that the field of humor research is definitely taking a pragmatic perspective and that significant findings can be expected in the future.