Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of ‘comedy studies’ that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship betw...
The Semi-Complete Guide to Sort of Being a Gentleman
by Esquire Sir Gentleman Brock Laborde
Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use ""Mark Twain"" as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made ""Mark Twain"" the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. And so it remains in ours, because Mark Twain's humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in wh...
Anatomia del desencanto (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures)
by Santiago Morales Rivera
After the failure of the soixante-huitards, the collapse of European communism, and the fall around 1989 of various dictatorships and revolutions in Latin America, the sentimental approach to history is again reaping successes among the humanities and the social and political sciences. In the Hispanic world, this "affective turn" is on its way to repeating another fin de siecle like the one led by the intellectuals of 1898. A century later, in both Spanish and Anglo-Saxon universities, notions s...
Myth of Deliverance (Heritage) (Social History of Canada,, #1981)
by Northrop Frye
In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question which preoccupied him throughout his long and distinguished career - the conception of comedy, particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience. In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Arist...
Sellevision is America's premier shop-at-home channel - until disaster strikes each of its frighteningly telegenic hosts. Tune in as Peggy Jean Smythe goes from poised, popular personality to pill-popping lush haunted by a stalker; watch handsome Max Andrews accidentally expose himself on the air, branding himself unemployable; see Leigh Bushmoore take her true tales of the casting couch in front of the cameras during family hour. SELLEVISION offers all this - plus Princess Diana Key Fobs, fabul...
Winner of the 2016 Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award In God Mocks, Terry Lindvall ventures into the muddy and dangerous realm of religious satire, chronicling its evolution from the biblical wit and humor of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era and the Middle Ages all the way up to the present. He takes the reader on a journey through the work of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment...
An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood's richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes, and many studies have sought to unveil 'the man behind the mask.' Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films - from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator et al.) He weighs the relationship between t...
The Mirror of Laughter presents a theory of humor and laughter by examining their relationship to human behaviors. Kozintsev is especially interested in the relationship between biological and cultural factors that influence behaviors. He divides his work into four chapters, the first of which establishes a theme of the book, focusing on the study of meaning from the perspective of philosophy and psychology, while examining linguistic theories of humor. The second chapter examines biological da...
Making it Work (Social problems & social issues) (Social Problems & Social Issues S.)
by Valerie Jenness
As its double-edged title suggests, Making It Work examines the oldest profession as just that: a service industry with professional sex workers. This reframing of prostitution is done by chronicling the evolution of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the leading organization of the contemporary prostitutes' rights movement. Founded in the early 1970s, a period of intense and far-reaching change in American sexual mores, COYOTE sought from the beginning to claim ownership of the problem of...
She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes 'a cruising mind', lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in - as the title implies - a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, t...
Mental Floss Presents Be Amazing
by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Will Pearson, and Mangesh Hattikudur