Applying a new and at first sight unlikely focus to Lawrence's writings – the presence and workings of comedy in them – has, I believe, the power to help clear a now-historical log-jam in Lawrence criticism. His post-Second World War critics inevitably constructed their image of him according to the needs of their age, and those needs have changed: the seductions of the saviour-Lawrence or normative-Lawrence of the 1950s to 1970s are rapidly losing their allure. I am not offering in this essay to contextualise historically the rise and dissemination of this Lawrence: the priest of love, the anti-mechanisation vitalist, the morally intelligent prophet of Life, the exposer of the distorting effects involved in the tyranny of mind over body. Yet, it seems to me, a historiography of Lawrence criticism badly needs to be done. It would, I envisage, relate the normative-Lawrence to the increasing numbers of departments of English after 1945 (and especially in the 1960s); and it would examine the rise of New Criticism and Leavisism as their intellectual vehicles in a period when commitment to older forms of historicism (requiring large research libraries) was gradually falling away. The account would discuss that sense of post-war cultural crisis which the Lawrence of the period was, at some level I suspect, felt to be addressing: industrial and atomic age anxieties; the de-politicised cultural navel-gazing caused by the deadly melodrama of Cold War politics – or, putting the emphasis differently, the fear of a politicising style of literary criticism in a McCarthyite era.