Download or read book Ethics in Comedy written by Steven A. Benko and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.
Download or read book Comedy written by Henri Bergson and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Bergson — Laughter George Meredith — An Essay on Comedy Introduction & Appendix on The Meanings of Comedy by Wylie Sypher Laughter is a mystery—a mystery which defines man. Brought together in this volume are two classic studies of the nature of laughter and comedy. The great French philosopher Henri Bergson develops, in "Laughter," a profound psychological and philisophic theory of the main springs of comedy—a theory closely related to the doctrine of the élan vital. In his "Essay on Comedy," the English novelist George Meredith discusses the varieties of the comic experience and the social and moral function of comedy. Together these two major theories go far toward clarifying the mystery of laughter. Wylie Sypher, in his richly documented supplementary essay, places the views of Bergson and Meredith in a large context of speculation on the nature of comedy. The essay reviews important statements of such thinkers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Baudelaire, Freud, Cornford, and others. It serves to give further significance to Bergson and Meredith and to the meaning of comedy itself.
Download or read book The Brand New Catastrophe written by Mike Scalise and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A very funny [memoir] about the frailties of the flesh, the absurdities of modern medicine, and how to stay sane amid it all” (Dave Eggers). Raucous family memoir meets medical adventure in this “winning literary debut” that explores the public and private theaters of illness (The New York Times Book Review). After a pituitary tumor bursts in Mike Scalise’s brain (diagnosed, by of all people a physician named Dr. Sunshine), it leaves him with a hole in head, and the hormone disorder acromegaly at age twenty-four. He also faces the exasperating challenge of navigating a new, alien world of illness maintenance among family, friends, and spouse. However, it’s his mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, who becomes a complicated model as she competes with her son for the status of “best sick person.” “Captur[ing] all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to survive it (Kirkus Reviews), “Mike Scalise’s startling and slyly hilarious memoir is a heartfelt reminder of how astonishing, how terrifying, how absurd it is to be a body. An essential book for those who’ve lived through catastrophe, or only imagined it” (Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine).
Download or read book Maeve in America written by Maeve Higgins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins Maeve Higgins was a bestselling author and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more and found herself in New York City. Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a smart, funny, and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but sometimes hits the ceiling and the inimitable city that helped make her who she is. Here are stories of not being able to afford a dress for the ball, of learning to live with yourself while you’re still figuring out how to love yourself, of the true significance of realizing what sort of shelter dog you would be. Self-aware and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection is also a fearless exploration of the awkward questions in life, such as: Is clapping too loudly at a gig a good enough reason to break up with somebody? Is it ever really possible to leave home? “Maeve Higgins is hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.” —Phoebe Robinson
Download or read book Madness Masks and Laughter written by Rupert D. V. Glasgow and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Laughter written by Henri Bergson and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Comedy written by George Meredith and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Essay on comedy written by B. WALWYN and published by . This book was released on 1782 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Idiot s Guide to Comedy Writing written by James Mendrinos and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You've always known writing comedy was about more than just being funny. But how do you create a joke and work it into a script or a stand-up routine? Comedian, writer, and teacher Jim Mendrinos has the answers. In The Complete Idiot s Guide to Comedy Writing, Mendrinos gives readers the principles he teaches in his popular courses, from understanding what funny is and how to find it, to how to actually construct comedy. Working through the basic constructions and forms including premises, points of view, and twists, he shows the variations of written, verbal, and physical comedy. With useful exercises, Mendrinos helps writers refine their writing, appeal to their audience, and even break writer's block by learning techniques for brainstorming, free association, lists, and finding infinite points of view.
Download or read book An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit written by George Meredith and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealth of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long to run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their station, like the ladies of ArthurÕs Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of the mantle. There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition; and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity. Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands more than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift in the Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startling exhibition of the dyerÕs hand, if he is without it. People are ready to surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle to penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. The necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count him during centuries in the singular number.
Download or read book An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit written by George Meredith and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-10-19 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original.
Download or read book An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit written by George Meredith and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An essay on comedy and the uses of the comic spirit written by Meredith George and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-02-22 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1897. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future...."
Download or read book Playboys and Killjoys written by Harry Levin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-09-08 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Levin--one of America's major literary critics--offers a brilliant and original study of the whole world of comedy, concentrating on playwrights through the centuries, from Aristophanes and Plautus in classical times to Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht and their recent successors. Viewing the comic repertory as a richly varied yet broadly unified whole, Levin provides a synthesis of theories and practice. Isolating two fundamental aspects of comedy--the ludicrous and irreverent "playboy," whom we laugh with, and the ridiculous and forbidding "killjoy," whom we laugh at--he traces the dialectical interplay of these components throughout history and across various cultures and media. While mainly focusing on the plays and the stage, with discussions of such major dramatists as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, and William Congreve, Levin also includes essays on such related topics as humor, satire, and games.
