Comedy and Culture
Comedy and Culture

Author: Roger B. Henkle

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1400857929

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Comedy cannot be understood as an abstract critical concept, argues Roger Henkle; it 'must be studied in specific cultural and historical contexts. From this point of view he examines the development of literary comedy in nineteenth-century England, and shows how comic modes and techniques were used to express and release the tensions of the middle class during periods of both rapid cultural change and relative stability. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Comedy and Distinction
Comedy and Distinction

Author: Sam Friedman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1135009015

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This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.

Planet Funny
Planet Funny

Author: Ken Jennings

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1501100602

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A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes. Where once society’s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness. Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials—those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day—and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV. In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar
A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar

Author: Caty Borum Chattoo

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0520299779

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Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

Culture Clash
Culture Clash

Author: Culture Clash

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group

Published: 1997-02-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1559366842

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This three-person troupe is unique not only for its imaginative explorations of contemporary Latin/Chicano culture but also for its vision of a society in transition.

Ethics in Comedy
Ethics in Comedy

Author: Steven A. Benko

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-10-02

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1476676410

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All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.

Humour, Comedy and Laughter
Humour, Comedy and Laughter

Author: Lidia Dina Sciama

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1782385436

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Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors’ cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities

Laughing North Koreans
Laughing North Koreans

Author: Immanuel Kim

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 179360830X

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This study analyzes North Korean comedy films from the late 1960s to present day. It examines the most iconic comedy films and comedians to show how North Koreans have enjoyed themselves and have established a culture of humor that challenges, subverts, and, at times, reinforces the dominant political ideology. The author argues that comedy films, popular comedians, and the viewers have an intricate interdependent relationship that shaped the film culture—the pre/post production of filmmaking, film-watching experience, and the legacies of actors—in North Korea.

A National Joke
A National Joke

Author: Andy Medhurst

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-09-18

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1134702558

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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.

Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture
Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture

Author: J. Whalley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-06-21

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 023010794X

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Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture sheds new light on the ways in which Saturday Night Live s confrontational, boundary-pushing approach spilled over into film production, contributing to some of the biggest hits in Hollywood history, such as National Lampoon s Animal House, Ghostbusters, and Beverly Hills Cop. Jim Whalley also considers how SNL has adapted to meet the needs of subsequent generations, launching the film careers of Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and others in the process. Supported by extensive archival research, some of Hollywood s most popular comedians are placed into the contexts of film and television comic traditions and social and cultural trends in American life.