As a source of humor, Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi's work titled Basairu'l-Hukama wa Dhakhair al-Kudama(al-Basair wa al-Dhakhair)

Muslim men of letters started to produce works in the field of classical Arabic humor from a very early date, and huge corpus was created as well as modest compilations. While some of these works dealt with humorous figures and themes independently, another part preferred to sprinkle the relevant material between different information passages. Abu Hayyân al-Tawhîdî's work al-Basair wa al-dhakhair, which was chosen as the subject of study, is an encyclopedic compilation that contains rich material in different categories such as religion, ahbâr, memoirs, literature, philology and humor. In our study, inspired by the tradition created by the works that prepared the formation of the history of Arabic humor; al-Basair wa al-dhakhair, which has become an im-portant source for the following ages with its richness in language, style and content, has been examined in terms of humorous figure and theme diversity, and some deter-minations and evaluations have been made accompanied by anecdotal examples.