Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Humor in Life and Letters Series)
How do contemporary American female comics perform onstage, and what does this performance reveal about power relations in our culture as well as the existence of a “female” and, more specifically, “feminist” genre of stand-up comedy? In this long overdue study of women and stand-up comedy, Joanne R. Gilbert explores these questions in order to illuminate the social, …
The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue (Humor in Life and Letters Series)
In this lively and fascinating analysis of humorists and their work, Will Kaufman breaks new ground with his irony fatigue theory. The Comedian as Confidence Man examines the humorist’s internal conflict between the social critic who demands to be taken seriously and the comedian who never can be: the irony fatigue condition. Concentrating on eight American literary and …
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 …
Laughing Feminism focuses on comedy in the works of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, authors who scrutinized the subjected prejudices against women in order to expose their absurdity and encourage readers to laugh at the folly of sexist views. Audrey Bilger shows that these women writers employed a full arsenal of comic weapons such as satire, …
Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing documents the thriving folklore tradition that circulates in the workplace. Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter have collected more than two hundred and fifty “signs of the times”-the office memoranda, parodies, cartoons, and poems that daily make their way through copy machines, interoffice mail systems, and fax machines and are affixed …
Anyone who has ever filled in a form in triplicate, taken an aptitude test, or been rebuffed by a form letter will appreciate the urban folklore found in this collection. Urban people as a folk are bound together by their unhappy experiences in battling “the system,” whether that system is the machinery of government or the office where …
When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire
Office copier folklore-those tattered sheets of cartoons, mottoes, zany poems, defiant sayings, parodies, and crude jokes that regularly circulate in office buildings everywhere-is the subject of this innovative study. this type of folklore represents a major form of tradition in modern America, and the authors have compiled this raw data for scholarship-and entertainment. These creations of the Paperwork …
Using an introduction to mythology by the master storyteller Ovid himself, the authors have prepared a unique teaching tool designed to achieve proficiency at Latin in one year at the college level, two years at the high school or intermediate level. The volume provides students with imaginative, connected reading, beginning with introductory prose versions of Ovid’s simple myth …