Download or read book The Birth of Comedy written by Jeffrey Rusten and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at all aspects of classical Greek comedy. Aside from the well-known plays of Aristophanes, many of the comedies of ancient Greece are known only through fragments and references written in Greek. Now a group of distinguished scholars brings these nearly lost works to modern readers with lively English translations of the surviving texts. The Birth of Comedy brings together a wealth of information on the first three generations of Western comedy. The translations, presented in chronological order, are based on the universally praised scholarly edition in Greek, Poetae Comici Graeci, by R. Kassel and C. A. Austin. Additional chapters contain translations of texts relating to comedy at dramatic festivals, staging, audience, and ancient writers on comedy. The main text is supplemented by an introduction assessing the fragments' contributions to the political, social, and theatrical history of classical Athens and more than forty illustrations of comic scenes, costumes, and masks. A glossary of komoidoumenoi—the ancient word for "people mentioned in comedies"—provides background information on the most notorious comic victims. A full index includes not only authors, play titles, and persons mentioned, but themes from the whole Greek comic sphere (including politics, literature and philosophy, celebrities and social scandals, cookery and wine, sex, and wealth).
Download or read book The History of Stand Up written by Wayne Federman and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's top stand-up comedians sell out arenas, generate millions of dollars, tour the world, and help shape our social discourse. So, how did this all happen? The History of Stand-Up chronicles the evolution of this American art form - from its earliest pre-vaudeville practitioners like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain to present-day comedians of HBO and Netflix. Drawing on his acclaimed History of Stand-up podcast and popular university lectures, veteran comedian and adjunct USC professor Wayne Federman guides us on this fascinating journey. The story has a connective tissue - humans standing on stage, alone, trying to get laughs. That experience connects all stand-ups through time, whether it's at the Palace, the Copacabana, the Apollo, Mister Kelly's, the hungry i, Grossinger's, the Comedy Cellar, the Improv, the Comedy Store, Madison Square Garden, UCB, or at an open mic in a backyard.
Download or read book Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film written by Andrea Bini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most popular film genre during the golden years of Italian cinema, the Comedy Italian Style emerged after the fall of the Facist regime, narrating the identity crisis of many Italian men. Exploring the birth, growth, and decline of this genre, Bini shows this notable style was the search for a new role in the shattered postwar middle class.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy written by Michael Fontaine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.
Download or read book The Birth of Comedy written by Jeffrey Rusten and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at all aspects of classical Greek comedy. Aside from the well-known plays of Aristophanes, many of the comedies of ancient Greece are known only through fragments and references written in Greek. Now a group of distinguished scholars brings these nearly lost works to modern readers with lively English translations of the surviving texts. The Birth of Comedy brings together a wealth of information on the first three generations of Western comedy. The translations, presented in chronological order, are based on the universally praised scholarly edition in Greek, Poetae Comici Graeci, by R. Kassel and C. A. Austin. Additional chapters contain translations of texts relating to comedy at dramatic festivals, staging, audience, and ancient writers on comedy. The main text is supplemented by an introduction assessing the fragments' contributions to the political, social, and theatrical history of classical Athens and more than forty illustrations of comic scenes, costumes, and masks. A glossary of komoidoumenoi—the ancient word for "people mentioned in comedies"—provides background information on the most notorious comic victims. A full index includes not only authors, play titles, and persons mentioned, but themes from the whole Greek comic sphere (including politics, literature and philosophy, celebrities and social scandals, cookery and wine, sex, and wealth).
Download or read book Jewish Comedy A Serious History written by Jeremy Dauber and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award “Dauber deftly surveys the whole recorded history of Jewish humour.” —Economist In a major work of scholarship that explores the funny side of some very serious business (and vice versa), Jeremy Dauber examines the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing Jewish comedy into “seven strands”—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Dauber also explores the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy written by Martin Revermann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.
Download or read book Aristophanes Four Plays Clouds Birds Lysistrata Women of the Assembly written by Aristophanes and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.
Download or read book Comedy Caricature and the Social Order 1820 50 written by Brian Maidment and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an overview of the marketplace for comic images between 1820 and 1850, this book makes a case for the interest and importance of a largely neglected area of visual culture. It considers the impact on the development of print culture of the emergent, but soon widespread, use of lithography and wood engraving, both capable of integrating texts and images cheaply and imaginatively on the printed page. Drawing on a wide range of commercially produced print genres, including song books, play-texts, comic annuals and magazines as well as single plate and series of caricatures, this book traces the ways in which Regency and early Victorian visual humor both sustains some of the characteristics of an earlier caricature tradition while also beginning to develop new ways of analyzing and coping with social change through comic forms and genres.
Download or read book The Comedy of Errors written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stan and Ollie The Roots of Comedy written by Simon Louvish and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-12-10 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Laurel and Hardy describes their original teaming in the 1927 short, "Duck Soup, " their considerable innovations, and their ongoing influence.
Download or read book The Object of Comedy written by Jamila M. H. Mascat and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives – both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects. In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) –regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.
Download or read book Last Man Standing written by James Curtis and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Literary Supplement 2017 Book of the Year On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged--Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Through the extraordinary details of Sahl's life, author James Curtis deftly illustrates why Sahl was dubbed by Steve Allen as "the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy." Sahl came on the scene the same year Eisenhower and Nixon entered the White House, the year Playboy first hit the nation's newsstands. Clad in an open collar and pullover sweater, he adopted the persona of a graduate student ruminating on current events. "It was like nothing I'd ever seen," said Woody Allen, "and I've never seen anything like it after." Sahl was billed, variously, as the Nation's Conscience, America's Only Working Philosopher, and, most tellingly, the Next President of the United States. Yet he was also a satirist so savage the editors of Time once dubbed him "Will Rogers with fangs." Here, for the first time, is the whole story of Mort Sahl, America's iconoclastic father of modern standup comedy. Written with Sahl's full cooperation and the participation of many of his friends and contemporaries, it delves deeply into the influences that shaped him, the heady times in which he soared, and the depths to which he fell during the turbulent sixties when he took on the Warren Commission and nearly paid for it with his career.
Download or read book Constant Comedy written by Art Bell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the riveting, hilarious true story of the birth of Comedy Central in what New York Times bestselling author, Dan Lyons, calls the “funniest behind-the-scenes memoir I’ve ever read, full of crazy characters, plot twists, and suspense.” Award-Winning Finalist in the Narrative: Non-Fiction category of the 2020 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest In 1988, a young, mid-level employee named Art Bell pitched a novel concept—a television channel focused 100% on just one thing: comedy—to the chairman of HBO. The station that would soon become Comedy Central, with celebrated programs like South Park, Chapelle’s Show, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, was born. Constant Comedy takes readers behind the scenes into the comedy startup on its way to becoming one of the most successful and creative purveyors of popular culture in the United States. From disastrous pitch meetings with comedians to the discovery of talents like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, this intimate biography peers behind the curtain and reveals what it’s really like to work, struggle, and ultimately succeed at the cutting edge of show business.
Download or read book Funny Thing about Minnesota written by Patrick Strait and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insiders' look at the land of 10,000 laughs--how Minneapolis became a hotspot for comedy. It is a lively look back at the wild '80s scene and the creative legacy it wrought.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity written by Michael Ewans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together contributions from scholars in a wide range of fields inside Classics and Drama, this volume traces the development of comedic performance and examines the different characteristics of Greek and Roman comedy. Although the origins of comedy are obscure, this study argues that comedic performances were at the heart of Graeco-Roman culture from around 486 BCE to the mid first century BCE. It explores the range of comedies during this period, which were fictional dramas that engaged with the political and social concerns of ancient society, and also at times with mythology and tragedy. The volume centres largely around the surviving work of Aristophanes and Menander in Athens, and Plautus and Terence in Rome, but authors whose plays survive only in fragments are also discussed. Performances and plays drew on a range of forms, including satire and fantasy, and were designed to entertain and amuse their audiences while also asking them to question issues of morality, privilege and class. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to ancient comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
Download or read book Born a Crime written by Trevor Noah and published by One World. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than one million copies sold! A “brilliant” (Lupita Nyong’o, Time), “poignant” (Entertainment Weekly), “soul-nourishing” (USA Today) memoir about coming of age during the twilight of apartheid “Noah’s childhood stories are told with all the hilarity and intellect that characterizes his comedy, while illuminating a dark and brutal period in South Africa’s history that must never be forgotten.”—Esquire Winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor and an NAACP Image Award • Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Time, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Esquire, Newsday, and Booklist Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.
