Download or read book The Anatomy of Laughter written by Toby Garfitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The nature of laughter has recently attracted the attention of a number of different disciplines. In two recent colloquia, TRIO (Translation Research in Oxford) brought together international authorities from fields as diverse as physiology, psychology, linguistics, translation and literary studies, and sociology, with scant regard for political correctness. This fascinating and often hilarious collection of essays is the result. With the contributions: Jane Taylor - Introduction Dominique Bertrand - Anatomie et etymologie: ordre et desordre du rire selon Laurent Joubert Silke Kipper, Dietmar Todt - The Sound of Laughter: Recent Concepts and Findings in Research into Laughter Vocalizations Sarah-Jayne Blakemore - Why Can't You Tickle Yourself? Michael Holland - Belly Laughs Walter Redfern - Upping the Ante/i: Exaggeration in Celine and Valles Giselinde Kuipers - Humour Styles and Class Cultures: Highbrow Humour and Lowbrow Humour in the Netherlands Christie Davies - Searching for Jokes: Language, Translation, and the Cross-Cultural Comparison of Humour Ted Cohen - And What If They Don't Laugh? Iain Galbraith - Without the Rape the Talk-Show Would Not Be Laughable Jean-Michel Deprats - Translating a Great Feast of Languages Paul J. Memmi - Traduire le rire Natacha Thiery - Rire et desir dans les comedies americaines de Lubitsch: l'exemple de Ninotchka (1939) Adam Phillips - What's So Funny? On Being Laughed at ...Sukanta Chaudhuri - Laughing and Talking Georges Roque - Le Rire comme accident en peinture Laurent Bazin - La Couleur du rire: peinture et traduction Gerard Toulouse - Views on the Physics and Metaphysics of Laughter"
Download or read book Enjoyment of Laughter written by Max Eastman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor at its best is a somewhat fluid and transitory element, but most books about it are illustrated with hardened old jokes from the comic papers, or classic witticisms jerked out of their context. Max Eastman, in this work, avoids this catastrophe by quoting mainly from contemporary American humor. This is not an anthology in that selections have been made with a view to making a point rather than covering the field. The purpose of Eastman's fabled work is to make the reader laugh. Since his early school days, it has seemed to him that textbooks are wrongly written in that they are conducted in a way which ignores the natural operation of the mind. As a result, the opinion is universal, and under the circumstances a fact, that in order to learn anything you have to study. Since this introduction to humor is itself near to writing a textbook, Eastman uses the very text he constructs to illustrate the manner in which textbooks should be written. Examination and classification of the kinds of humorous experience upon the basis of a theory is a science. As such, this work offers a fair chance to illustrate a method of instruction. However, the distinction between a good joke and a bad one will not prevent the reader from making bad jokes nor enable one to make good ones. There is an artistic and playful element that simply cannot be taught. Enjoyment of Laughter presents a total view of the science of laughter and draws upon some of the great American humorists to do so.
Download or read book Histories of Laughter and Laughter in History written by Rafał Borysławski and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughter is often no laughing matter, and, as such, it deserves continued scholarly attention as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon. This collection of essays is a meeting ground for scholars from several disciplines, including historians, philologists, and scholars of social sciences, to discuss places and roles of laughter in history, in historical narratives, and in cultural anthropology from prehistory to the present. The common foci of the papers gathered in this volume are to examine laughter and its meanings, to reflect on the place of laughter in Western history and literature, to disclose laughter’s manipulative potential in historical and literary narratives, to see it in the light of the concepts of carnivalesque and playfulness, to see it as a reflection of hysterical historicizing, to see its place in comedy, farce, grotesque and irony, and to see it against its broadly understood theoretical, philosophical and psychological aspects. The book will appeal chiefly to an academic readership, including students, historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.
Download or read book Worlds of Laughter written by Juniper Ellis and published by . This book was released on with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Laughter written by Henri Bergson and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2005-09-13 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ."..Originally published in 1911 by the Macmillan Company, New York."--T. p. verso.
Download or read book The Game of Humor written by Charles R. Gruner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"?that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all?applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears.Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In The Game of Humor, he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score?winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature.The Game of Humor makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life.
Download or read book A History of English Laughter written by Manfred Pfister and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2002 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have expected it all - in Beowulf, or Paradise Lost or the Gothic Novel. Laughter at the margins of texts, which often coincides with laughter from the margins of society and its orthodoxies, is one of the special concerns of this book. This goes together with an interest in 'impure' forms of laughter - in laughter that is not the serene and intellectually or emotionally distanced response to a comic stimulus which is at the heart of many philosophical theories of the comic, but emotionally disturbed and troubled, aggressive and transgressive, satanic and sardonic laughter. We do not ask, then, what is comic, but: who laughs at and with whom where, when, why, and how?
Download or read book Sudden Glory written by Barry Sanders and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1996-10-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wonderful exploration of the meaning of laughter, Barry Sanders queries its uses from the ancient Hebrews to Lenny Bruce, turning up evidence of its age-old power to subvert authority and give voice to the voiceless.
Download or read book Laughter Literature Violence 1840 1930 written by Jonathan Taylor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.
Download or read book Posthumorism written by Frances McDonald and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the multiple non-humorous meanings of laughter, this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor, without humans, and without humanism. Providing a bold new theory of modernism's affects, Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature, film, and philosophy. From William James's trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter – defined by its ability to “crack up” and destroy, whilst opening new horizons of perception. Examining the creative operation of posthumorist laughter, this book explores how various stylists of the form-from Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous-use it as a tool to unsettle, reconfigure the individual human, and shape different forms of humanist discourse.
Download or read book Laughter written by Anca Parvulescu and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-08-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw. Most of our theories of laughter are not concerned with laughter. Rather, their focus is the laughable object, whether conceived of as the comic, the humorous, jokes, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the materiality of the burst of laughter itself. She sets out to uncover an archive of laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its tones. Historically, laughter—especially the passionate burst of laughter—has often been a faux pas. Manuals for conduct, abetted by philosophical treatises and literary and visual texts, warned against it, offering special injunctions to ladies to avoid jollity that was too boisterous. Returning laughter to the history of the passions, Parvulescu anchors it at the point where the history of the grimacing face meets the history of noise. In the civilizing process that leads to laughter's “falling into disrepute,” as Nietzsche famously put it, we can see the formless, contorted face in laughter being slowly corrected into a calm, social smile. How did the twentieth century laugh? Parvulescu points to a gallery of twentieth-century laughers and friends of laughter, arguing that it is through Georges Bataille that the century laughed its most distinct laugh. In Bataille's wake, laughter becomes the passion at the heart of poststructuralism. Looking back at the century from this vantage point, Parvulescu revisits four of its most challenging projects: modernism, the philosophical avant-gardes, feminism, and cinema. The result is an overview of the twentieth century as seen through the laughs that burst at some of its most convoluted junctures.
Download or read book In the Event of Laughter written by Alfie Bown and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter - far from being a mere response to a stimulus - changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown then investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter, ' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre."--
Download or read book Women Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature written by Lisa Renée Perfetti and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays a range of medieval heroines to ascertain how humor might have been used and enjoyed by medieval women
Download or read book A History of English Laughter written by Manfred Pfister and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cruelty and Laughter written by Simon Dickie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.
Download or read book The Stability of Laughter written by James Nikopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.
Download or read book An Anatomy of Humor written by Arthur Asa Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor permeates every aspect of society and has done so for thousands of years. People experience it daily through television, newspapers, literature, and contact with others. Rarely do social researchers analyze humor or try to determine what makes it such a dominating force in our lives. The types of jokes a person enjoys contribute significantly to the definition of that person as well as to the character of a given society. Arthur Asa Berger explores these and other related topics in An Anatomy of Humor. He shows how humor can range from the simple pun to complex plots in Elizabethan plays.Berger examines a number of topics ethnicity, race, gender, politics each with its own comic dimension. Laughter is beneficial to both our physical and mental health, according to Berger. He discerns a multiplicity of ironies that are intrinsic to the analysis of humor. He discovers as much complexity and ambiguity in a cartoon, such as Mickey Mouse, as he finds in an important piece of literature, such as Huckleberry Finn. An Anatomy of Humor is an intriguing and enjoyable read for people interested in humor and the impact of popular and mass culture on society. It will also be of interest to professionals in communication and psychologists concerned with the creative process.
