Barcelona presents four case studies of the humorous mechanisms of jokes and anecdotes. The interpretation of these genres requires - as has been pointed out by a number of humor theorists like Attardo (1990) and Raskin (1985) - complex inferential work on the part of the hearer. Barcelona wonders how it is possible that listeners often arrive at the intended humorous reading of a joke or anecdote at "lightning speed." For him, this feat cannot be explained on the basis of Gricean maxims alone (or their variants in the discourse world of humor). Adopting a conception of metonymy that is inspired by Radden and Kövecses (1999), Barcelona proposes that in many if not all cases the inferential work is facilitated by pre-existing metonymic connections in a cognitive frame or domain or by pre-existing metaphorical connections across frames. Metonymies thus help achieve the frame adjustment (cf. Attardo 1990; Raskin 1985) that is necessary in order to grasp the punch line of a joke or anecdote. Barcelona shows that the value of metonymy for pragmatic inferencing can be appreciated only if one discards the traditional view of conceptual metonymy as a purely referential phenomenon. As to the question whether pragmatic inferencing can be reduced entirely to metonymic reasoning, Barcelona is not willing to commit himself to a wholly affirmative answer, but he certainly thinks that metonymically based inferencing plays an essential role in utterance interpretation. (Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg)