Download or read book The Dark Comedy written by J. L. Styan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1968-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who takes an intelligent interest in theatre-going will find profit and stimulus in this book.
Download or read book A Dirty Job written by Christopher Moore and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay—until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death. It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.
Download or read book A Decade of Dark Humor written by Ted Gournelos and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor-in a variety of forms-to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The volume's contributors cover a broad range of media productions, including news parodies (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Onion), TV roundtable shows (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher), comic strips and cartoons (Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, Jeff Danzinger's editorial cartoons), television drama (Rescue Me), animated satire (South Park), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers), documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11), and other productions. Along with examining the rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques of these productions, the essays place each in specific political and journalistic contexts, showing how corporations, news outlets, and political institutions responded to-and sometimes co-opted-these forms of humor.
Download or read book The Leaky Establishment written by David Langford and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _The Leaky Establishment_ is an atomic farce whose author David Langford once worked in the gentle radioactive glow of Britain's nuclear weapons industry, and hilariously satirizes its ghastly bureaucracy from the inside. Black comedy overtakes the unfortunate defence-scientist hero Roy Tappen when a "harmless" theft of office furniture lands him with his very own doomsday nuclear stockpile at home. Chain reactions of insanely comic escapades follow, with disaster piled on disaster, leading the increasingly desperate Tappen to the borders of science fiction as he seeks a way out of the mess.
Download or read book American Dark Comedy written by Wes D. Gehring and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1996-07-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing the movies he discusses in a historical and literary context, Gehring explores the genre's obession with death and the characters' failure to be shocked by it. Movies discussed include: Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-2, Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Heathers, and Natural Born Killers.
Download or read book Ump written by James Cohen and published by Walker & Company. This book was released on 1991 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he gets into trouble with the Golla brothers, Ump, a Mafia hitman, seeks refuge in a small Midwestern town, but when the townspeople discover Ump's profession, they try to enlist his talents in disposing of unwanted "problems"
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 Genre Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s written by Wes D. Gehring and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of dark comedies of the 1970s focuses on films which concealed black humor behind a misleading genre label. All That Jazz (1979) is a musical...about death--hardly Fred and Ginger territory. This masking goes beyond misnomer to a breaking of formula that director Robert Altman called "anti-genre." Altman's MASH (1970) ridiculed the military establishment in general--the Vietnam War in particular--under the guise of a standard military service comedy. The picaresque Western Little Big Man (1970) turned the bluecoats vs. Indians formula upside-down--the audience roots for the Indians instead of the cavalry. The book covers 12 essential films, including Harold and Maude (1971), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Being There (1979), with notes on A Clockwork Orange (1971). These films reveal a compounding complexity that reinforces the absurdity at the heart of dark comedy.
Download or read book Dark Humor written by Oliver Gaspirtz and published by Westhoff Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history’s darkest times, people have exhibited a particular type of humor: dark humor, also known as black humor, black comedy, dark comedy, or gallows humor. That’s my favorite kind. I like absurd, random stuff. But with a dark twist. Black humor makes fun of the things that terrify us. It’s a coping mechanism. Some people think death is taboo as a topic for jokes. But every stand up comic and every cartoonist knows that taboo jokes get the biggest laughs, the guilty laughs, and the biggest dopamine release. Humor is not supposed to be polite. It’s supposed to mock bad things. Here’s a little selection of some of my favorite cartoons, about life’s painful little absurdities that make me laugh. “I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all.” -Abraham Lincoln "If you're a fan of Gary Larson's The Far Side, you'll love Gaspirtz's Dark Humor." -Not Abraham Lincoln
Download or read book Good Omens written by Neil Gaiman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic collaboration from the internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, soon to be an original series starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant. ?Season 2 of Good Omens coming soon! “Good Omens . . . is something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and Don DeLillo had collaborated. Lots of literary inventiveness in the plotting and chunks of very good writing and characterization. It’s a wow. It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick.” —Washington Post According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .
Download or read book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2003-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
Download or read book Satan written by Jeremy C Leven and published by Dissertation.com. This book was released on 2000-11-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alas, poor Satan. He's not happy. No one seems to like or understand him; people have got him all wrong. And his relationship with God is a hostile one. Unloved and misunderstood, he's come back to Earth in search of a psychotherapist; he's prepared- if cured- to deliver the all-important Great Answer. In Jeremy Leven's wildly original comic novel, we follow the Prince of Darkness through his seven amazing therapy sessions. And we watch him grow increasingly well adjusted while his therapist, the unfortunate Dr. Kassler, descends deeper and deeper into hell.
Download or read book Dark Humor written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an examination of the use of dark humor in classic literary works.
Download or read book Black Comedy written by Pamela Faith Jackson and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1997 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Books). This first-of-its kind collection includes a wide range of works, from an early examination and critique of American society after World War II to plays that reflect socio-political concerns that kept pace with historical events, like the sit-in demonstrations, the bus boycotts, black nationalism, and the women's liberation movement. A hybrid of comedic forms including satire, farce, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, dark comedy, and tragicomedy are presented through vernacular language, stand-up performance art, masks, broad humor, as well as the minstrel show. Essays, articles and interviews complement this critical edition.
Download or read book The Black Comedy of John Guare written by Gene A. Plunka and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first full-length study of Guare's theater, will make his plays more accessible through an examination of the often unnerving type of black comedy that makes his plays work.".
Download or read book Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel written by L. Colletta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of Modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers from the period, and asks probing questions about the relationship between a dark humour that 'revels in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness' and the historical and social circumstances of the period. Colletta makes a compelling argument that probing deeply into the nature of humour or satire that define these 'social comedies' brings to light a more complex, and more accurate, understanding of the social changes and historical circumstances that define the modern era.
Download or read book Dimensions of Humor written by Carmen Valero-Garcés and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to exploring humor in the academic world. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives and practical orientations in the disciplines of Linguistics, Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation, but all concerned with the interactional aspects of humor. The two main reasons behind the publication of this volume are, first, to continue the journey along the path towards full recognition of humor as a discipline worthy of research and assessment, and, second, to offer a new and integrating perspective on hu¬mor to showcase the wide range of dimensions that it offers. This book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of Humor Studies: Linguistics, Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation.
