Download or read book Treatise On Laughter written by Laurent Joubert and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1980-06-30 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translation from French of an essay on the nature and character of human laughter Until its translation, Treatise on Laughter remained accessible solely to readers of French for nearly four centuries. Joubert’s treatise offers a curious and stimulating experience: the sensation of moving through another epistemology. His theory was composed during a period of great turmoil in the history of France when the human race was becoming much more aware of the organic structure of man and nature. He begins with the immediately observable phenomena before penetrating into the more hidden aspects of one of the most admirable of human acts, amirables accions de l’homme, laughter. Joubert is keenly aware of the difficulty of his subject matter. Rather than discouraging him, however, this becomes an incentive, making the study of such a formidable mystery more enticing. His ideas can appear quaint, and many of his beliefs can make us smile. Yet our smile may well disappear when we wonder which of today’s accepted ideas might seem laughable half a millennium hence.
Download or read book Laughter Yoga written by Madan Kataria, M.D. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could you use a good laugh? This definitive guide by the founder of the worldwide laughter yoga movement will show you how to giggle your way to good health! Bring laughter into your life at any time of day--no special equipment needed, no new wardrobe, no expensive classes, not even a sense of humor! Laughter yoga is all about voluntary laughter--how you can learn to laugh even in the absence of humorous stimuli, and reap the extraordinary, scientifically proven benefits, which include stress reduction, pain relief, weight loss, heightened immunity, and, especially, enhanced mood: If you act happy, you'll become happy--your body can't tell the difference! Children laugh more than 300 times a day, adults fewer than fifteen. But it's easy to start laughing again. The exercises in this book combine voluntary laughter with yogic breathing to give you a full body-mind workout. And it turns out that laughter is the fastest way to reduce stress and the best kind of cardio: Ten minutes of hearty laughter is equal to thirty minutes on the rowing machine. With Laughter Yoga, join the growing worldwide movement and discover how laughter really is the best medicine. A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE
Download or read book Laughing Matters written by Lee Siegel and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 1989 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Only Joking written by Jimmy Carr and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain’s hottest young comedian presents a seriously funny, up-close look at joking matters—from the social origins of laughter, to the art and craft of humor, to why we can never remember the punch line—featuring over 300 jokes. As the host of the hit game show Distraction (now in its third season on Comedy Central) and one of the premier stand-up acts working today, award-winning comedian Jimmy Carr has won over millions of fans around the world with his trademark rapier wit, laced with "exquisitely economical and perfectly timed one-liners" (The Guardian). For this book he teams up with friend and fellow comedy writer Lucy Greeves to take an in-depth look at where humor comes from and how it works, through exploring its purest form: the joke. Only Joking begins with the mechanism of laughter—how it happens and why even infants do it—then delves into the power of the punch line, exploring the basics of all jokes, from the use of shock and surprise to advanced stand-up techniques such as the "pull-back/reveal." Carr and Greeves go on to explore taboo humor, jokes that bomb, and the psychology of finding something funny. They look into the long-standing connection between politics and humor, and discuss the survival prospects for contentious jokes in the current political climate. Throughout the book they conjure up a supporting cast of colorful joke enthusiasts, from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bruce, and discuss their influence on the jokes we tell today. Surveying across national, ethnic, and gender divides, this rollicking analysis of why joking will always be close to the human heart is an irresistible exploration of humor that makes clear why we need a good laugh now more than ever.
Download or read book What Are You Laughing At written by Dan O'Shannon and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive guide to all the variables that can come into play when we come into contact with comedy.
Download or read book Surprised by Laughter written by Terry Lindvall and published by Thomas Nelson Inc. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surprised by Laughter looks at the career and writings of C. S. Lewis and discovers a man whose life and beliefs were sustained by joy and humor. All of his life, C. S. Lewis possessed a spirit of individuality. An atheist from childhood, he became a Christian as an adult and eventually knew international acclaim as a respected theologian. He was known worldwide for his works of fiction, especially the Chronicles of Narnia; and for his books on life and faith, including Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, and Surprised by Joy. But perhaps the most visible difference in his life was his abiding sense of humor. It was through this humor that he often reached his readers and listeners, allowing him to effectively touch so many lives. Terry Lindvall takes an in-depth look at Lewis's joyful approach toward living, dividing his study of C. S. Lewis's wit into the four origins of laughter in Uncle Screwtape's eleventh letter to a junior devil in Lewis's The Screwtape Letters: joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. Lindvall writes, "One bright and compelling feature we can see, sparking in his sunlight and dancing in his moonlight, is laughter. Yet it is not too large to see at once because it inhabited all Lewis was and did." Surprised by Laughter reveals a Lewis who enjoyed the gift of laughter, and who willingly shared that gift with others in order to spread his faith.
Download or read book Redeeming Laughter written by Peter L. Berger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the variety of human experiences, the comic occupies a distinctive place. It is simultaneously ubiquitous, relative, and fragile. In this book, Peter L. Berger reflects on the nature of the comic and its relationship to other human experiences. Berger contends that the comic is an integral aspect of human life, yet one that must be approached and analyzed circumspectly and circuitously. Beginning with an exploration of the anatomy of the comic, Berger addresses humor in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and the social sciences before turning to a discussion of different types of comedy and finally suggesting a theology of the comic in terms of its relationship to folly, redemption, and transcendence. Along the way, the reader is treated to a variety of jokes on a variety of topics, with particular emphasis on humor and its relationship to religion. Originally published in 1997, the second edition includes a new preface reflecting on Berger’s work in the intervening years, particularly on the relationship between humor and modernity.
Download or read book Animal Joy A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation written by Nuar Alsadir and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
Download or read book Not Without Laughter written by Langston Hughes and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet Langston Hughes' only novel, a coming-of-age tale that unfolds amid an African American family in rural Kansas, explores the dilemmas of life in a racially divided society.
Download or read book Koba the Dread written by Martin Amis and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.
Download or read book Let There Be Laughter written by Michael Krasny and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the host of NPR affiliate’s Forum with Michael Krasny, a compendium of Jewish jokes that packs the punches with hilarious riff after riff and also offers a window into Jewish culture. Michael Krasny has been telling Jewish jokes since his bar mitzvah, and it’s been said that he knows more of them than anyone on the planet. He certainly states his case in this wise, enlightening, and hilarious book that not only collects the best of Jewish humor passed down from generation to generation, but explains the cultural expressions and anxieties behind the laughs. "What’s Jewish Alzheimer’s?" "You forget everything but the grudges." "You must be so proud. Your daughter is the President of the United States!" "Yes. But her brother is a doctor!" "Isn’t Jewish humor masochistic?" "No. And if I hear that one more time I am going to kill myself." With his background as a scholar and public-radio host, Krasny delves deeply into the themes, topics, and form of Jewish humor: chauvinism undercut by irony and self-mockery, the fear of losing cultural identity through assimilation, the importance of vocal inflection in joke-telling, and calls to communal memory, including the use of Yiddish. Borrowing from traditional humor and such Jewish comedy legends as Jackie Mason, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld and Amy Schumer, Let There Be Laughter is an absolute pleasure for the chosen and goyim alike.
Download or read book Ha written by Scott Weems and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining tour of the science of humor and laughter Humor, like pornography, is famously difficult to define. We know it when we see it, but is there a way to figure out what we really find funny -- and why? In this fascinating investigation into the science of humor and laughter, cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems uncovers what's happening in our heads when we giggle, guffaw, or double over with laughter. While we typically think of humor in terms of jokes or comic timing, in Ha! Weems proposes a provocative new model. Humor arises from inner conflict in the brain, he argues, and is part of a larger desire to comprehend a complex world. Showing that the delight that comes with "getting" a punchline is closely related to the joy that accompanies the insight to solve a difficult problem, Weems explores why surprise is such an important element in humor, why computers are terrible at recognizing what's funny, and why it takes so long for a tragedy to become acceptable comedic fodder. From the role of insult jokes to the benefit of laughing for our immune system, Ha! reveals why humor is so idiosyncratic, and why how-to books alone will never help us become funnier people. Packed with the latest research, illuminating anecdotes, and even a few jokes, Ha! lifts the curtain on this most human of qualities. From the origins of humor in our brains to its life on the standup comedy circuit, this book offers a delightful tour of why humor is so important to our daily lives.
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 Lost Second Book of Aristotle s Poetics written by Walter Watson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".
Download or read book Lacan Psychoanalysis and Comedy written by Patricia Gherovici and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge philosophers, psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and scholars use Freud and Lacan to shed light on laughter, humor, and the comic. Bringing together clinic, theory, and scholarship this compilation of essays offers an original mix with powerful interpretive implications.
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: No detailed description available for "No Joke".
