Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton—with humor and dry wit—reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body. Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same "truths," Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis—associated with Jean Laplanche—to develop a more "playful" analytic for literary studies.