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7 books about Comic, The
Engaging Humor
Elliott Oring
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression. Oring provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.
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Humor and Comedy in Puppetry
Celebration in Popular Culture
Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this book's focus is on a central and dominant feature--humor and comedy.
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Love Song for the Life of the Mind
An Essay on the Purpose of Comedy
Gene Fendt
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Love Song for the Life of the Mind develops the view of comedy that, the author argues, would have been set out in Aristotle's missing second book of Poetics. As such it is both a philosophical and a historical argument about Aristotle; and the theory of comedy it elucidates is meant to be trans-historically and trans-culturally accurate.
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Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies
An Essay on Comedies
Stuart M. Tave
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Through dreams and shadows and strangeness, through blinding charms and eye-opening counter-charms, through moments of mortification and laughter—thus Stuart M. Tave traces the journey of the lovers, clowns, and fairies who populate comedies from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Waiting for Godot. Tave avoids the pitfalls of theory, taking instead a close look at particular works to give us a sense of the relations between certain dramas and novels that are called comedies. The result is a wonderfully readable book that renews our delight in the enchanting possibilities of literature.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its "perfection," is Tave's point of departure. Its characters fall neatly into the three groups of Tave's title and fulfill to perfection their functions of desire, foolishness, and power. From the magical concord of Shakespeare's resolution, Tave moves to works whose character face ever greater difficulties in reaching a happy conclusion. From Jonson and Austen to Chekhov and Beckett, he meets comedies on their own terms, illuminating the complex and individual genius of each. A masterpiece of practical criticism, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies rediscovers the pleasure of reading comedies.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its "perfection," is Tave's point of departure. Its characters fall neatly into the three groups of Tave's title and fulfill to perfection their functions of desire, foolishness, and power. From the magical concord of Shakespeare's resolution, Tave moves to works whose character face ever greater difficulties in reaching a happy conclusion. From Jonson and Austen to Chekhov and Beckett, he meets comedies on their own terms, illuminating the complex and individual genius of each. A masterpiece of practical criticism, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies rediscovers the pleasure of reading comedies.
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The Morality of Laughter
F. H. Buckley
University of Michigan Press, 2005
“Bravo! I’ll say nothing funny about it, for it is a
superior piece of work.”
—P. J. O’Rourke
“F. H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter is at once
a humorous look at serious matters and a serious
book about humor.”
—Crisis Magazine
“Buckley has written a . ne and funny book that will
be read with pleasure and instruction.”
—First Things
“. . . written elegantly and often wittily. . . .”
—National Post
“. . . a fascinating philosophical exposition of
laughter. . . .”
—National Review
“. . . at once a wise and highly amusing book.”
—Wall Street Journal Online
“. . . a useful reminder that a cheery society is a
healthy one.”
—Weekly Standard
superior piece of work.”
—P. J. O’Rourke
“F. H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter is at once
a humorous look at serious matters and a serious
book about humor.”
—Crisis Magazine
“Buckley has written a . ne and funny book that will
be read with pleasure and instruction.”
—First Things
“. . . written elegantly and often wittily. . . .”
—National Post
“. . . a fascinating philosophical exposition of
laughter. . . .”
—National Review
“. . . at once a wise and highly amusing book.”
—Wall Street Journal Online
“. . . a useful reminder that a cheery society is a
healthy one.”
—Weekly Standard
[more]
Only a Joke Can Save Us
A Theory of Comedy
Todd McGowan
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess.
After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay.
Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.
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Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
Daniel Boyarin
University of Chicago Press, 2009
What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond these structural similarities, arguing also for a cultural relationship.
In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin suggests that both the Platonic and the talmudic dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin’s notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually much closer to a monologue in spirit. At the same time, he shows that there is a dialogism in both texts on a deeper structural level between a voice of philosophical or religious dead seriousness and a voice from within that mocks that very high solemnity at the same time. Boyarin ultimately singles out Menippean satire as the most important genre through which to understand both the Talmud and Plato, emphasizing their seriocomic peculiarity.
An innovative advancement in rabbinic studies, as well as a bold and controversial new way of reading Plato, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis makes a major contribution to scholarship on thought and culture of the ancient Mediterranean.
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