Ripped from the pages of his award-eligible “Funny: The Book,” David Misch presents a some-holds-barred survey of absolutely everything funny that’s ever happened. Beginning in pre-history with the mythological Trickster, this multimedia presentation looks at comedy from Ancient Greece to yesterday morning, from court jesters to Groucho, Plato & Aristotle to Key & Peele. With stops along the way for commedia dell’arte, a French fartist, and how comedy killed Abraham Lincoln, we’ll look at what comedy is, where it comes from and where it’s going (oddly enough, Philadelphia).

Nowadays everyone’s inbox is filled with memes, cartoons and jokes about our continuing political, economic and environmental disasters. And even though each one is another reminder of a horrible situation, we laugh. Why? Because we have to; laughter is critical in terrible times because it reminds us we can still feel joy.

Join David Misch, Mel Brooks, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Silverman, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and Key & Peele to see how comedy has always laughed at tragedy – from the Black Death to the Holocaust to 9/11; how we’re doing it now; and how humor can help get us to tomorrow.

Satire is one of the oldest forms of humor and adding music makes it even more powerful; in early Germanic and Celtic societies, people mocked in song would break out in boils and even commit suicide. Join David Misch as he shows how a dozen hilarious, and pointed, songs mock racism, war, sexism, income inequality and more. Featuring Randy Newman, Weird Al Yankovic, Gilbert & Sullivan, Steve Martin, Amy Schumer, Chuck Berry, Tom Lehrer, Groucho Marx, Key & Peele and “South Park.” (Note: Please do not attend if you are prone to boils.)

Is it possible there’s a connection between Jews and comedy? The answer is: What are you, meshuga? The Jewish sensibility seems part of comedy’s DNA, or maybe it’s comedy that’s got Jewish DNA.

But why? Some say it’s due to Jewish history, though that history is hardly the stuff of merry-making. Still, comedy is one of the best ways to deal with tragedy; Nobel Prizewinning novelist Saul Bellow said “Oppressed people tend to be witty.”

In this multimedia talk, David Misch looks at how Jewish humor comes from a fatalistic sensibility that sees irony everywhere, often expressed by sarcasm. (If a Jew says “Good thinking, Einstein,” it’s not a compliment.) In fact, Jewishness is defined not only by having suffered but by a propensity to continue suffering (How many Jewish grandmothers does it take to change a light-bulb? None: “Don’t bother, I’ll sit in the dark”), as well as the ability to mock their own stereotypes (What’s a Jewish dilemma? Half-price pork).

Silent film star Buster Keaton is recognized as one of the most daring, inventive and hilarious comedians ever. Using copious clips, we’ll look at how Keaton’s art springs from the beginnings of comedy – the mythical Trickster – and how, without dialogue, he employs almost every other element of cinema. From his first (and pretty much last) onscreen smile at age 22 to doing pratfalls at 70, we’ll see both his cinematic ingenuity and almost unbelievable physicality, the reason he became the inspiration for countless contemporary actors and filmmakers, including Jackie Chan, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise.

It’s the Golden Age of satire, with “The Daily Show,” Bill Maher, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert and The Onion shaming the shameless by taking pungent, potent pokes at society’s hypocrisies. But does shaming have any effect? And how do we decide when satire goes too far?

This multimedia talk explores how satire challenges society’s taboos from forbidden farts in Afghanistan to the silencing of a South African puppet, along with Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor, Monty Python, “South Park,” Key & Peele, the Russian Orthodox Church, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Janet Jackson’s right breast, and Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”

Most of all, we’ll see how satire gets people to examine their assumptions. Because, ultimately, satire is less about changing your mind than getting you to think.

Well-known gagsters like Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes all had theories about humor, which means jokes are Really Important, not just a way to make someone snort up their milk. From Henny Youngman’s one-liners to the epically filthy “The Aristocrats,” every joke ever told shows how comedy works, using the same basic components as all art forms: tension-and-resolution, pattern recognition, misdirection and surprise. This multimedia presentation looks at the Rule of 3 (Why are things funnier in threes? Really, why? I mean, why?); whether humor is inherently hostile; how jokes make you smarter; dirty jokes that aren’t dirty; and the Official Funniest Joke In The World.

Since 1920’s “Haunted Spooks,” the genre of horror-comedy has never really, you should excuse the expression, died. Yet humor and horror seem pretty different; one’s a pie in the face, the other’s an axe in the skull. But could there be congruences between funny and fear, snickers and screams, gore and gags, slapstick and slaughter?

Both comedy and horror exploit our paradoxical feelings about helplessness; seeing someone out of control can be hilarious (a clumsy person falling) or horrifying (a clumsy person falling into a snake-pit). Using examples from Freud & Kant to Abbott & Costello, David Misch explores how horror and humor share a mordant view of our relationship to pain; an obsession with the human body and its multifarious fluids; and a subtext of death and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and fart jokes.