In this fascinating study, Heidi Hakkarainen analyzes how popular humor functioned as an interpretative framework to help residents of Vienna make sense of the imperial capital's dramatically changing environment between 1857 and 1890. This was an era of wholesale urban renewal, as the newly constructed Ringstrasse and its surroundings reconfigured the city both spatially and structurally. In five thematic chapters, the author examines a variety of discourses about what it meant to be modern, especially modern and Viennese. Employing humor, an empirical primary source that she asserts has not been closely examined as an interpretive tool, the author explores the multiplicities of modernity and demonstrates its contradictions and paradoxes through an investigation of various aspects of the late nineteenth-century quotidian. Hakkarainen also reveals how varied local traditions and nationalities intermingled to produce Vienna's culture and humor.

Liberal thought in the Habsburg monarchy during the 1850s produced innovative economic, educational, and technological change in Vienna by the 1860s. Liberal policies subsequently fueled economic expansion during the so-called Gründerzeit between 1867 and 1873. As Hakkarainen points out, however, Vienna's liberal municipal leaders were less effective in solving social problems and population management in the ever-expanding metropolis, which was by far the largest city in Austria-Hungary.

Popular humor provided an important means of negotiating the newly emerging boundaries of constraint in a modern society. In her analysis, Hakkarainen focuses above all on the three most influential—and long-running—of Vienna's numerous humorous-satirical journals (Witzblätter): Der Figaro, Der Floh, and Kikeriki. Through close readings of both texts and images, the author addresses popular response to the new and ever-changing environment. These magazines provided a forum for a kind of internal debate among members of the middle classes holding diverse views about the management and organization of urban space.

These humor magazines encouraged readers to submit material for publication and paid small amounts for those they accepted. Readers submitted cartoons and jokes under pseudonyms. Cartoons and jokes in Witzblätter targeted the police, city watchmen, and other authority figures. These magazines repeatedly demanded that city council members establish better order in the city, large parts of which were transformed into construction sites during the early years of urban renewal. Witzblätter also encouraged the control and regulation of capitalism, such as the new form of mass transit, the always-overcrowded horse tramways, and later, the suffering tramway horses, which reflected the transport company's greed. As expanding and modernizing Vienna became increasingly unfamiliar to its inhabitants, there was a growing nostalgia for the vanishing premodern Alt-Wien, the old city, which predated the Ringstrasse. The humor magazines also participated in this discourse.

In the book's longest chapter, “Urban Types and Characters” (179–246), Hakkarainen addresses the “urban types and characters” who populated Vienna. Humor magazines associated modernity with femininity, Jewishness, economic inequality, and transnationalism. Linking gender and modernity, the author reminds readers that contemporaneous humor magazines often represented Vienna as a female figure called Vindobona, after the Roman camp around which the city grew. These same magazines represented urban renewal, a very masculine project, as a young woman making herself fashionable through new clothing. At the same time, Witzblätter regularly discussed “modern women,” who were considered somehow threatening to the existing order of society. In an extended discussion of Antisemitism, Hakkarainen points out that Jews were a complex subject in Viennese popular humor. She concludes that humor as a symbolic form of speech offered an effective and powerful medium for aggression against Jews. Incorporating Alison Rose's observation that gender and sexuality were central to Viennese Antisemitism would have enhanced Hakkarainen's discussion of this topic.

The comparative discussion of Viennese modernity vis-à-vis developments in London and Paris is good as far as it goes. Hakkarainen's analysis could have benefited from consulting recent studies of other large cities in Habsburg central Europe, for example, Robert Nemes's and Cathleen Giustino's recent monographs on Budapest and Prague, respectively. The author's readings of some images, such as Vienna's oldest and largest public park, the Prater, might have differed with a more thorough grounding in the park's history. Finally, although Berghahn Books is to be commended for publishing so many—often excellent—monographs by non-native speakers of English, Hakkarainen's arguments about modernity and humor, which are really useful and innovative, would have been easier to follow had the author made greater use of the active voice. Often only a consultation of the chapter notes made clear the voice behind some of the assertions the author was citing.

This book makes an important contribution in demonstrating the deep roots of Vienna's modernist culture outside of the high culture that has heretofore received so much attention. The author's analysis of humor journals’ female readership, which she does by way of their pseudonymous participation in the readers’ columns, is also much appreciated. Hakkarainen's book will be of great interest to gender, Habsburg, Jewish, and urban historians, as well as those interested in Vienna more generally.