Arkady Averchenko, “the king of laughter,” as his contemporaries called him, had an amazing ability to recreate the absurdity of the life of the Russian man in the street, easily inventing witty plots and creating a lot of funny positions, dialogues and improvisations. Averchenko’s humor is capable of bringing a smile to the lips of even the most serious reader. The book includes stories relating to different periods of the writer’s work, the cycle “About the Little Ones for the Big Ones,” the story “An Expedition to Western Europe of Satyricists...”, as well as his latest work, the novel “A philanthropist’s joke.”