Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor (Classics in Communication and Mass Culture)
In Blind Men and Elephants, Arthur Asa Berger uses case histories to show how scholars from different disciplines and scholarly domains have tried to describe and understand humor. He reveals not only the many approaches that are available to study humor, but also the many perspectives toward humor that characterize each discipline. Each case history sheds light on …
About a decade ago we edited The Psychology of Humor. Besides the summary chapter and bibliography of about 400 items, the book contained eleven original papers that represented the state of knowledge at that time. We confess that it was not easy to fill that volume with first-rate contributions. In a few instances we invited contributors only on …
Did people really speak like Bertie Wooster? Who was the celebrated Maisie? What does a Jubilee watering trough look like? Where is Loose Chippings? What was “Just Like Mother Makes”? Where does “the exile from home splendour dazzles in vain” come from? What was a gazeka? Why was Bertie Wooster more to be pitied than censured? When did …
Laugh Yourself Thin: Making Happiness, Fun, and Pleasure the Keys to Permanent Weight Loss
Laugh Yourself Thin: Making Happiness, Fun, and Pleasure the Keys to Permanent Weight Loss argues a unique thesis. Laughter, its physician author proclaims, is the key to losing weight. Losing weight, she goes on to say, will not necessarily lead to happiness, but happiness does lead to weight loss. Offering an approach to weight loss that is grounded …
What is comedy? Andrew Stott tackles this question through an investigation of comic forms, theories and techniques, tracing the historical definitions of comedy from Aristotle to Chris Morris’s Brass Eye via Wilde and Hancock. Rather than attempting to produce a totalising definition of ‘the comic’, this volume focuses on the significance of comic ‘events’ through study of various …
Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women’s writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be …
For more than two thousand years we have known satirists as those wits who expose hypocrisy and deftly stick shafts into our ballooned egos. Collectively we resent this perspicacity-satirists are never much liked. We give them their due, however, by admiring their ability to make us laugh while they make us squirm. Introduction to Satire explains fully …
How was it that the Torrens system, a mid-nineteenth-century reform of land titles registration from distant South Australia, gradually replaced the inherited Anglo-Canadian common law system of land registration? In The Law of the Land, Greg Taylor traces the spread of the Torrens system, from its arrival in the far-flung outpost of 1860s Victoria, British Columbia, right up …
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
Whistler’s Gentle Art, a classic in the literature of insult and denigration, might well be subtitled “The Autobiography of a Hater,” for it contains the deadly sarcasm and stinging remarks of one of the wittiest men of the nineteenth century. Whistler not only refused to tolerate misunderstanding by critics and the so-called art-loving public — but launched vicious …
Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)
While Middle Eastern culture does not tend to be associated with laughter and levity in the global imagination, humor-often satirical-has long been a staple of mainstream Arabic film. In Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema, editors Gayatri Devi and Najat Rahman shed light on this tradition, as well as humor and laughter motivated by other intent-including parody, irony, the …