Download or read book A National Joke written by Andy Medhurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

Download or read book The National Joke written by Torben Betts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-09 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will the Prime Minister give Rupert the political prize he’s been hoping for? How much more can Olivia take of her mother Mary and her withering put-downs? Will Charlie get off her phone for long enough to listen to anyone, let alone her boyfriend? Home truths emerge and a reputation could tumble as Rupert St John-Green MP and three generations of women gather in the family garden to watch a total solar eclipse. A searingly funny contemporary look at one family and at Britain today.

Download or read book Philogelos written by R. D. Dawe and published by B. G. Teubner Gmbh. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Just Joking written by National Geographic Kids and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Packed with the silly jokes that kids love--including knock-knocks, tongue twisters, riddles, traditional question and answer jokes and more--a fun-filled book will keep readers laughing page after page.

Download or read book How to Tell a Joke written by Marcus Tullius Cicero and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audience Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome’s greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity’s funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him “the stand-up Consul.” How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero’s essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian. The result is a timeless practical guide to how a well-timed joke can win over any audience. As powerful as jokes can be, they are also hugely risky. The line between a witty joke and an offensive one isn’t always clear. Cross it and you’ll look like a clown, or worse. Here, Cicero and Quintilian explore every aspect of telling jokes—while avoiding costly mistakes. Presenting the sections on humor in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Quintilian’s The Education of the Orator, complete with an enlightening introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Tell a Joke examines the risks and rewards of humor and analyzes basic types that readers can use to write their own jokes. Filled with insight, wit, and examples, including more than a few lawyer jokes, How to Tell a Joke will appeal to anyone interested in humor or the art of public speaking.

Download or read book The McSweeney s Joke Book of Book Jokes written by McSweeney's and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As John Hodgman says in this book's introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.” With that in mind, the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters, and spoofs as: Postcards from James Joyce to his Brother Stan Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character? Popular Children's Fairy Tales Reimagined Using Members of My Family The Very Unauthorized Biography of Steven Seagal Chuck Norris Erotica John Updike, Television Writer Jane Eyre Runs for President Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech to a High School Letters from Odysseus's College Roommate And many dozens more.

Download or read book Lincoln Tells a Joke written by Kathleen Krull and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poor Abraham Lincoln! His life was hardly fun at all. A country torn in two by war, citizens who didn’t like him as president, a homely appearance—what could there possibly be to laugh about? And yet he did laugh. Lincoln wasn’t just one of our greatest presidents. He was a comic storyteller and a person who could lighten a grim situation with a clever quip. This unusual biography of Lincoln highlights his life and presidency, focusing on what made his sense of humor so distinctive—and so necessary to surviving his tough life and times.

Download or read book The National Joke written by Torben Betts and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Will the Prime Minister give Rupert the political prize he's been hoping for? How much more can Olivia take of her mother Mary and her withering put-downs? Will Charlie get off her phone for long enough to listen to anyone, let alone her boyfriend? Home truths emerge and a reputation could tumble as Rupert St John-Green MP and three generations of women gather in the family garden to watch a total solar eclipse. A searingly funny contemporary look at one family and at Britain today"--About the play

Download or read book Pretty Good Joke Book written by Garrison Keillor and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 2,200 Jokes from America’s favorite live radio show A treasury of hilarity from Garrison Keillor and the cast of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion. A guy walks into a bar. Eight Canada Geese walk into a bar. A termite jumps up on the bar and asks, “Where is the bar tender?” Drum roll. The Sixth Edition of the perennially popular Pretty Good Joke Book is everything the first five were and more. More puns, one-liners, light bulb jokes, knock-knock jokes, and third-grader jokes (have you heard the one about Elvis Parsley?). More religion jokes, political jokes, lawyer jokes, blonde jokes, and jokes in questionable taste (Why did the urologist lose his license? He got in trouble with his peers). More jokes about chickens, relationships, and senior moments (the nice thing about Alzheimer’s is you can enjoy the same jokes again and again). It all started back in 1996, when A Prairie Home Companion fans laughed themselves silly during the first Joke Show. The broadcast was such a hit that it became an almost-annual gagfest. Then fans wanted to read the jokes, share them, and pass them around, and the first Pretty Good Joke Book was born. With over 200 new and updated jokes, the latest edition promises countless giggles, chortles, and guffaws anyone—fans of the radio show or not—will enjoy.

Download or read book The JOKE written by Milan Kundera and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1993-02-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

Download or read book World s Oldest Joke Book written by Dan Crompton and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-11 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published as 'A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum' by Michael O'Mara Books Limited in London, 2010"--T.p. verso.

Download or read book No Joke written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. A.

Download or read book The Great Rock N Roll Joke Book written by Dave Marsh and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-09-15 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you get a guitarist to stop playing? Put sheet music in front of him. What do you call guys that hang out with musicians? Drummers. Here it is the dirty, the absurd, the witty side of rock and roll as it turns 50. The love of young America's music in its purest form: The Joke.

Download or read book Good Humor Bad Taste written by Giselinde Kuipers and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an updated edition of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, published in 2006. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States. This edition includes new developments and research findings in the field of humor studies.

Download or read book Benjamin Franklin s Humor written by Paul Zall and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he called himself merely a “printer” in his will, Benjamin Franklin could have also called himself a diplomat, a doctor, an electrician, a frontier general, an inventor, a journalist, a legislator, a librarian, a magistrate, a postmaster, a promoter, a publisher—and a humorist. John Adams wrote of Franklin, “He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was pleasant and delightful . . . [and] talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill, to the promotion of moral and political truth.” In Benjamin Franklin’s Humor, author Paul M. Zall shows how one of America’s founding fathers used humor to further both personal and national interests. Early in his career, Franklin impersonated the feisty widow Silence Dogood in a series of comically moralistic essays that helped his brother James outpace competitors in Boston’s incipient newspaper market. In the mid-eighteenth century, he displayed his talent for comic impersonation in numerous editions of Poor Richard’s Almanac, a series of pocket-sized tomes filled with proverbs and witticisms that were later compiled in Franklin’s The Way to Wealth (1758), one of America’s all-time bestselling books. Benjamin Franklin was sure to be remembered for his early work as an author, printer, and inventor, but his accomplishments as a statesman later in life firmly secured his lofty stature in American history. Zall shows how Franklin employed humor to achieve desired ends during even the most difficult diplomatic situations: while helping draft the Declaration of Independence, while securing France’s support for the American Revolution, while brokering the treaty with England to end the War for Independence, and while mediating disputes at the Constitutional Convention. He supervised and facilitated the birth of a nation with customary wit and aplomb. Zall traces the development of an acute sense of humor throughout the life of a great American. Franklin valued humor not as an end in itself but as a means to gain a competitive edge, disseminate information, or promote a program. Early in life, he wrote about timely topics in an effort to reach a mass reading class, leaving an amusing record of early American culture. Later, Franklin directed his talents toward serving his country. Regardless of its origin, the best of Benjamin Franklin’s humor transcends its initial purpose and continues to evoke undying laughter at shared human experiences.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Humor Studies written by Salvatore Attardo and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 985 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Humor: A Social History explores the concept of humor in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. This work’s scope encompasses the humor of children, adults, and even nonhuman primates throughout the ages, from crude jokes and simple slapstick to sophisticated word play and ironic parody and satire. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, child development, social psychology, life style history, communication, and entertainment media. Readers will develop an understanding of the importance of humor as it has developed globally throughout history and appreciate its effects on child and adult development, especially in the areas of health, creativity, social development, and imagination. This two-volume set is available in both print and electronic formats. Features & Benefits: The General Editor also serves as Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research for The International Society for Humor Studies. The book’s 335 articles are organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes (approximately 1,000 pages). This work is enhanced by an introduction by the General Editor, a Foreword, a list of the articles and contributors, and a Reader’s Guide that groups related entries thematically. A Chronology of Humor, a Resource Guide, and a detailed Index are included. Each entry concludes with References/Further Readings and cross references to related entries. The Index, Reader’s Guide themes, and cross references between and among related entries combine to provide robust search-and-browse features in the electronic version. This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.

Download or read book Garfield Big Fat Hairy Joke Book written by Jim Davis and published by Random House Worlds. This book was released on 1993-12-29 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh from the funny papers, here is Garfield, all-around jokester. In this hilarious book, you'll find jokes of all shapes, species, and sizes. There are jokes about food and eating, other pets, Garfield and his pals, and knock-knocks, of course. So get ready to laugh out loud at humor told the Garfield way.