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Author: Paul Provenza
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2010-05-04
Total Pages: 587
ISBN-13: 0061959871
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFeaturing our greatest comedic minds on the nature of humor, its relevance in society—and why sometimes you just need a good dirty joke to cleanse the palate—Satiristas is a hilarious multi-voiced manifesto on satire and comedy presented by Paul Provenza, co-creator of The Aristocrats.
Author: Al Gini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2020-10-07
Total Pages: 207
ISBN-13: 1538129728
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPolitical humor and satire are, perhaps, as old as comedy itself, and they are crucial to our society and our collective sense of self. Satire is confrontational. It’s about pushback, dissent, discord, disappointment, and demonstrating the absurdity of the status quo. This book is an attempt to explore how these aspects of satire help secure our sanity. Aristotle famously said that humans are naturally political animals. We need political community to flourish and live good lives. But politics also entails unpopular decisions, oppression, and power struggles. Satire is a vehicle through which we reflect on and challenge the irrational, incomprehensible, and intolerable nature of our lives without becoming totally despondent or depressed. In a poignant, pithy, but not ponderous manner, Al Gini and Abraham Singer delve into the history of satire to rejoice in its triumphs and watch its development from ancient graffiti to the latest late-night TV talk show.
Author: David B. Morris
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1991-09-09
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 9780520913820
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.
Author: Theodore Draper
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1351474634
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSatire takes as its subject the absurdity of human beings, their societies, and the institutions they create. For centuries, satirists themselves, scholars, critics, and psychologists have speculated about the satirist's reasons for writing, temperament, and place in society. The conclusions they have reached are sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary, sometimes outlandish. In this volume, Leonard Feinberg brings together the major theories about the satirist, to provide in one book a summary of the problems that specialists have examined intensively in numerous books and articles. In part 1, Feinberg examines the major theories about the motivation of the satirist, and then proposes that "adjustment" comes most closely to answering this question. In his view, the satirist resolves his ambivalent relation to society through a playfully critical distortion of the familiar. The personality of the satirist, the apparently paradoxical elements of his nature, the problem of why so many great humorists are sad men, and the contributions of psychoanalysts are explored in part 2, where Feinberg contends that the satirist is not as abnormal as he has sometimes been made to seem, and that if he is a neurotic he shares traits of emotional or social alienation with many others. Part 3 explores the beliefs of satirists and their relation to the environment within which they function, particularly in the contexts of politics, religion, and philosophy. Feinberg stresses the ubiquity of the satirist and suggests that there are a great many people with satiric temperaments who fail to attain literary expression. Ranging with astonishing breadth, both historical and geographical, The Satirist serves as both an introduction to the subject and an essential volume for scholars. Brian A. Connery's introduction provides an overview of Feinberg's career and situates the volume in the intellectual currents in which it was written.
Author: David H. J. Larmour
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2016-01-04
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0806155051
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this first comprehensive reading of Juvenal’s satires in more than fifty years, David H. J. Larmour deftly revises and sharpens our understanding of the second-century Roman writer who stands as the archetype for all later practitioners of the satirist’s art. The enduring attraction of Juvenal’s satires is twofold: they not only introduce the character of the “angry satirist” but also offer vivid descriptions of everyday life in Rome at the height of the Empire. In Larmour’s interpretation, these two elements are inextricably linked. The Arena of Satire presents the satirist as flaneur traversing the streets of Rome in search of its authentic core—those distinctly Roman virtues that have disappeared amid the corruption of the age. What the vengeful, punishing satirist does to his victims, as Larmour shows, echoes what the Roman state did to outcasts and criminals in the arena of the Colosseum. The fact that the arena was the most prominent building in the city and is mentioned frequently by Juvenal makes it an ideal lens through which to examine the spectacular and punishing characteristics of Roman satire. And the fact that Juvenal undertakes his search for the uncorrupted, authentic Rome within the very buildings and landmarks that make up the actual, corrupt Rome of his day gives his sixteen satires their uniquely paradoxical and contradictory nature. Larmour’s exploration of “the arena of satire” guides us through Juvenal’s search for the true Rome, winding from one poem to the next. He combines close readings of passages from individual satires with discussions of Juvenal’s representation of Roman space and topography, the nature of the “arena” experience, and the network of connections among the satirist, the gladiator, and the editor—or producer—of Colosseum entertainments. The Arena of Satire also offers a new definition of “Juvenalian satire” as a particular form arising from the intersection of the body and the urban landscape—a form whose defining features survive in the works of several later satirists, from Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh to contemporary writers such as Russian novelist Victor Pelevin and Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh.
Author: Stephanie N. Brehm
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2019-09-03
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0823285324
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor nine years, Stephen Colbert’s persona “Colbert”—a Republican superhero and parody of conservative political pundits—informed audiences on current events, politics, social issues, and religion while lampooning conservative political policy, biblical literalism, and religious hypocrisy. To devout, vocal, and authoritative lay Catholics, religion is central to both the actor and his most famous character. Yet many viewers wonder, “Is Colbert a practicing Catholic in real life or is this part of his act?” America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself) examines the ways in which Colbert challenges perceptions of Catholicism and Catholic mores through his faith and comedy. Religion and the foibles of religious institutions have served as rich fodder for scores of comedians over the years. What set “Colbert” apart on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, was that his critical observations were made more powerful and harder to ignore because he approached religious material not from the predictable stance of the irreverent secular comedian but from his position as one of the faithful. He is a Catholic celebrity who can bridge critical outsider and participating insider, neither fully reverent nor fully irreverent. Providing a digital media ethnography and rhetorical analysis of Stephen Colbert and his character from 2005 to 2014, author Stephanie N. Brehm examines the intersection between lived religion and mass media, moving from an exploration of how Catholicism shapes Colbert’s life and world towards a conversation about how “Colbert” shapes Catholicism. Brehm provides historical context by discovering how “Colbert” compares to other Catholic figures, such Don Novello, George Carlin, Louis C.K., and Jim Gaffigan, who have each presented their views of Catholicism to Americans through radio, film, and television. The last chapter provides a current glimpse of Colbert on The Late Show, where he continues to be voice for Catholicism on late night, now to an even broader audience. America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself) also explores how Colbert carved space for Americans who currently define their religious lives through absence, ambivalence, and alternatives. Brehm reflects on the complexity of contemporary American Catholicism as it is lived today in the often-ignored form of Catholic multiplicity: thinking Catholics, cultural Catholics, cafeteria Catholics, and lukewarm Catholics, or what others have called Colbert Catholicism, an emphasis on the joy of religion in concert with the suffering. By examining the humor in religion, Brehm allows us to see clearly the religious elements in the work and life of comedian Stephen Colbert.
Author: Dustin H. Griffin
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSatire has been with us since at least the Greeks and is a staple of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin now moves away from the prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty years ago to a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the tradition of formal verse satire. Exploring texts from Aristophanes to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, Griffin uses a dozen major figures - Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and Byron - as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of his topics are traditional in satire criticism: the role of the satirist as moralist; the nature of satiric rhetoric; and the impact of satire on the political order. Others are new: the problems of satire and closure; the pleasure it affords readers and writers; and the socioeconomic status of the satirist. Griffin concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than to provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers. Here is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory.
Author: Paul Rudnick
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2013-04-30
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 0545464897
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA book that will make you see yourself clearly for the first time. When Becky Randle's mother dies, she's whisked from her trailer park home to New York. There she meets Tom Kelly, the world's top designer, who presents Becky with an impossible offer: He'll design three dresses to transform the very average Becky into the most beautiful woman who ever lived.Soon Becky is remade as Rebecca -- pure five-alarm hotness to the outside world and an awkward mess of cankles and split ends when she's alone. With Rebecca's remarkable beauty as her passport, soon Becky's life resembles a fairy tale. She stars in a movie, VOGUE calls, and she starts to date Prince Gregory, heir to the English throne. That's when everything crumbles. Because Rebecca aside, Becky loves him. But the idea of a prince looking past Rebecca's blinding beauty to see the real girl inside? There's not enough magic in the world.Defiant, naughty, and impossibly fun, GORGEOUS answers a question that bewilders us all: Just who the hell IS that in the mirror?
Author: Dustin Griffin
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-03-17
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 0813156246
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHere is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory. Satire is a staple of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin moves away from the prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty some years ago to a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the tradition of formal verse satire. Exploring texts from Aristophanes to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, Griffin uses a dozen figures—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and Byron—as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of his topics are traditional in satire criticism: the role of satire as moralist, the nature of satiric rhetoric, the impact of satire on the political order. Others are new: the problems of satire and closure, the pleasure it affords readers and writers, and the socioeconomic status of the satirist. Griffin concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers.
Author: Louis R. Franzini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-07-30
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 1442213388
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor professional comedians, their primary goal is to make people laugh. For everyone else humor can be the envelope in which another message is sent and therefore will be received with pleasure. This bookis designed precisely to help you make your own efforts at humor more effective in achieving the primary goals of your interaction: to solidify friendships, preserve a marriage, obtain employment, close sales, conduct therapy, defuse conflict, or simply enjoy life more. Humor is a quality nearly all of us claim in ourselves and one which we seek and highly value in others. We love a sense of humor in our dates and mates, our children, and everyone with whom we have social contacts. When humor making is successful, we are drawn closer to other people and share a bonding emotional experience. We enjoy life more and our troubles seem to lessen instantly. There are many proven ways to enhance our senses of humor in ourselves and even our children. Humor making can be taught and developed to a very high level, thus increasing our chances for social and even economic success. Just Kidding: Using Humor Effectively is for adults who enjoy humor and who would like to be funnier. It includes definitions of funniness and examples of both helpful and harmful humor. It describes the relevant comedic and psychological rules for making humor effective. The book points out the danger signs for offensive humor and how to make the decision to “say it or stuff it.” Examples of successful and unsuccessful humor from comedians to politicians are used throughout to illustrate the many varieties of humor and how context and audience make a difference. Finally, a variety of fun exercises are offered to build the skills for effective humor making.
