Download or read book Stand up Comedy in Theory Or Abjection in America written by John Limon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-23 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural theory of stand-up comedy.
Download or read book Stand up Comedy in Theory or Abjection in America written by John Limon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-23 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
Download or read book Stand up Comedy in Theory Or Abjection in America written by John Limon and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural theory of stand-up comedy.
Download or read book The Legacy of the Wisecrack written by Eddie Tafoya and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention. The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a look at the works of specific comedians such as Steven Wright, whose three decades of performances comprise a single picaresque tale, and Richard Pryor, whose 1982 masterpiece Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip serves as modern America's answer to Dante Aligheri's epic poem, Inferno. The result is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.
Download or read book Lyric as Comedy written by Calista McRae and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.
Download or read book Oxford Bibliographies written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Arab American Drama Film and Performance written by Michael Malek Najjar and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with early Arab American playwright, poet and novelist Kahlil Gibran and concluding with contemporary playwright Yussef El Guindi, this book provides an historical overview and critical analysis of the plays, films and performances of self-identified Arab Americans. Playwrights, filmmakers and performers covered include Ameen Fares Rihani, Danny Thomas, Heather Raffo, Ahmed Ahmed, Mona Mansour and Cherien Dabis. These artists, traditionally underrepresented in entertainment, publishing and academia, have created works that exemplify the burgeoning Arab American arts movement. By addressing cinema, stand-up comedy and solo performance, the author introduces audiences to contemporary genres that are shaping Arab American culture in the United States.
Download or read book Stand up Comedy in Africa written by Izuu Nwankwọ and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African cultural productions of humour have increased even in the face of myriad economic foibles and social upheavals. For instance, from the 1990s, stand-up comedy emerged across the continent and has maintained a pervasive presence since then. Its specificities are related to contemporary economic and political contexts and are also drawn from its pre-colonial history, that of joking forms and relationships, and orality. Izuu Nwankwọ's fascinating collected volume offers a transnational appraisal of this unique art form spanning different nations of the continent and its diasporas. The book engages variously with jokesters, their materials, the mediums of dissemination, and the cultural value(s) and relevance of their stage work, encompassing the form and content of the practice. Its ruling theoretical perspective comes from theatre and performance, cultural studies, linguistics, and literary studies.
Download or read book Taking a Stand written by Jared N. Champion and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raúl Pérez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.
Download or read book The Dark Side of Stand Up Comedy written by Patrice A. Oppliger and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.
Download or read book The Laughing Stalk written by Judy Batalion and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions by leading scholars, writers and comedians in the USA, the UK and Canada, The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences focuses on the dynamics of audience behavior. Performers, writers, historians, producers, and theorists explore the practice and reception of live comedy performance, including cultural and historical variations in comedy audience conduct, the reception of “low” versus “high” comedy, and the differences between televised and live jokes. Contributors reflect on the subjectivity of audience members and the spread of affect, as well as the two-way relationship between joker and listener. They investigate race, sexuality and gender in humor, and contemplate the comedy club as a distinct spatial and emotional environment. The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences includes excerpts and scripts from Michael Frayne’s Audience and Andrea Fraser’s Inaugural Speech. Judy Batalion interviews noted comic writers, performers, and theater designers, including Iain Mackintosh, Shazia Mirza, Julia Chamberlain, Scott Jacobson, and Andrea Fraser. Sarah Boyes contributes a short photographic essay on comedy clubbers. Essay contributors include Alice Rayner, Matthew Daube, Lesley Harbidge, Gavin Butt, Diana Solomon, Rebecca Krefting, Kevin McCarron, Nile Seguin, Elizabeth Klaver, Frances Gray, AL Kennedy, Kélina Gotman, and Samuel Godin. The comedy duo of Sable & Batalion share their conclusions about audience responses to hip-hop theater.
Download or read book Stand Up Preaching written by Jacob D. Myers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few vocations share more in common with preaching than stand-up comedy. Each profession demands attention to the speaker’s bodily and facial gestures, tone and inflection, timing, and thoughtful engagement with contemporary contexts. Furthermore, both preaching and stand-up arise out of creative tension with homiletic or comedic traditions, respectively. Every time the preacher steps into the pulpit or the comedian steps onto the stage, they must measure their words and gestures against their audience’s expectations and assumptions. They participate in a kind of dance that is at once choreographed and open to improvisation. It is these and similar commonalities between preaching and stand-up comedy that this book engages. Stand-Up Preaching does not aim to help preachers tell better jokes. The focus of this book is far more expansive. Given the recent popularity of comedy specials, preachers have greater access to a broad array of emerging comics who showcase fresh comedic styles and variations on comedic traditions. Coupled with the perennial Def Comedy Jams on HBO, preachers also have ready access to the work of classic comics who have exhibited great storytelling and stage presence. This book will offer readers tools to discern what is homiletically significant in historical and contemporary stand-up routines, equipping them with fresh ways to riff off of their respective preaching traditions, and nuanced ways to engage issues of contemporary sociopolitical importance.
Download or read book Furiously Funny written by Terrence T. Tucker and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An important and timely expansion of American racial discourse. Tucker’s demonstration of how the comic is not (just) funny and how rage is not (just) destructive is a welcome reminder that willful injustice merits irreverent scorn. "—Derek C. Maus, coeditor of Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights "Adroitly explores how comic rage is a skillfully crafted, multifaceted critique of white supremacy and a soaring articulation of African American humanity and possibility. Sparkling and highly readable scholarship."—Keith Gilyard, author of John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love—Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America’s racial divide. In Furiously Funny, Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression into comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique. Their work, Tucker argues, shares a comic vision that centralizes the African American experience and realigns racial discourse through an unequivocal frustration at white perceptions of blackness. They perpetuate images of black culture that run the risk of confirming stereotypes as a means to ridicule whites for allowing those destructive depictions to reinforce racist hierarchies. At the center of comic rage, then, is a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white hegemony’s attempts to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject the mainstream perspective by confronting white audiences with America’s legacy of racial oppression. Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century and how it acts as a form of resistance where audiences can engage in subjects that are otherwise taboo.
Download or read book Abjection Melancholia and Love written by John Fletcher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume begins with a new essay by Julia Kristeva, ‘The Adolescent Novel’, in which she examines the relation between novelistic writing and the experience of adolescence as an ‘open structure’. It is this blend of the literary with the psychoanalytic that places Kristeva’s work central to current thinking, from semiotics and critical theory to feminism and psychoanalysis. The essays in this volume offer insight into the workings of Kristeva’s thought, ranging from her analyses of sexual difference, female temporality and the perceptions of the body to the mental states of abjection and melancholia, and their representation in painting and literature. Kristeva’s persistent humanity, her profound understanding of the dynamics of intention and creativity, mark her out as one of the leading theoreticians of desire. Each essay offers the reader a new insight into the many aspects that make up Kristeva’s entire oeuvre.
Download or read book Who Defines Me written by Eid Mohamed and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who Defines Me: Negotiating Identity in Language and Literature is a collection of insightful articles that represent an interdisciplinary study of identity. The articles start from the premise that identity is, and always has been, unstable and mutable; which is to say that identity is constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed – only to be deconstructed and reconstructed again, in turn to be deconstructed and reconstructed (and so on ad infinitum). Time and place are variables. So, too – as Who Defines Me underscores – are ethnicity, religion, politics and power, race and color, nationality, gender, culture, language, and socio-economic status. With all of these variables in mind, Who Defines Me focuses on language and literature as the portal through which identity is explored. The overarching rubrics under which the explorations are conducted are Arabs and Muslims, race identity in America, and language identity.
Download or read book Standing Up Speaking Out written by Matthew R. Meier and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.
Download or read book A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar written by Caty Borum Chattoo and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.
