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Laughing Matter
With the help of theorists in such fields as psychology, anthropology, physiology, sociology, and folklore as well as literary criticism, Gutwirth perceives that writers across history have attempted to explain laughter in one of three ways - focusing on its social or political function, its emotional rationale, or its intellectual dimension. Offering an array of readings of comic texts and incidents, he constructs a general model of laughter which takes into account its causes, immediate effects, and long-range influence on human affairs. In conclusion, he looks at the unique nature of comic wisdom, particularly as reflected in works by Santayana, Cervantes, and Beckett.
Sitting in the Earth and Laughing
The work includes many of Dr. Eckardt's own fanciful stories, essays, and verses as well as material derived from student malapropisms, from children, and from professional humorists and comedians. Appearing at a time of burgeoning scholarly and popular interest in the domain of humor, Sitting in the Earth and Laughing shows how humor and laughter lie within the realm of human mysteries--together with tragedy, suffering, and love--that can be comprehended and relished.
Laughing Out Loud
Whoever wrote "Make 'em laugh!" knew that it's easier said than done. But people love to laugh, and good comedy will always sell. With the help of this complete and entertaining guide, writers and would-be writers for film and television can look forward to writing comedy that goes far beyond stereotypic jokes and characters. In Laughing Out Loud, award-winning screenwriter and author Andrew Horton blends history, theory, and analysis of comedy with invaluable advice. Using examples from Chaplin to Seinfeld, Aristophanes to Woody Allen, Horton describes comedy as a perspective rather than merely as a genre and then goes on to identify the essential elements of comedy. His lively overview of ...
Tilting at Mortality
This work considers Joseph Heller's career and examines each of his novels, including Closing Time. It pursues two complementary tracks: first it explores the evolution of Heller's treatment of human morality; and second, it delineates Heller's artistic developments as a novelist.
On the Way to Death
On the Way to Death completes Eckardt's astonishing trilogy on the interrelationship of comedy, death, and God. It addresses itself to the question of death as the basic incongruity of life. Here is opened to human view the final divine comedy: a total reversal of the traditional roles assigned to God and humankind, a comical denouncement of the terror of death. On the Way to Death follows Sitting in the Earth and Laughing and How to Tell God From the Devil to complete Roy Eckardt's trilogy on comedy, the devil, and God.
Comic Practice/comic Response
This study focuses on response to comedy. The author maintains we respond rather mindlessly to comic effect. Comedy itself, in the philosophical sense, is seen as play. The play impulse is manifest in numerous forms from theater to painting, the novel to sculpting, poetry to cartooning; and each medium has its own semiotic language.
The Female Romantics
This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen; and the reaction to Byronism of the Brontës and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It thus challenges previous critics' segregation of the male Romantic poets from their female peers, whose agenda was perceived to be different: domestic and social.
A National Joke
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.
Thomas Hardy and the Comic Muse
There has long been a tendency to regard Thomas Hardy as a great tragic writer and to ignore or underestimate the value of his comic works. This derives no doubt partly from the fact that comedy as an art form has been consistently undervalued ever since Aristotle dealt with it so slightly and so slightingly. It also stems from the evident inability of some readers and critics to allow an artist a wide scope and multiple voices. Thomas Hardy and the Comic Muse discusses the nature of comedy and the various theories that purport to explain or define it, and examines Hardy’s works — novels, short stories, and poetry — in terms of the categories of farce, humour, satire, and wit. It looks at where and why Hardy made use of these forms of comedy, what his historical sources were, and why this side of his work has been so frequently neglected. It also looks at what insights might be offered by Hardy — both directly and indirectly — to answer the difficult but always tantalizing question: what is comedy? The two subjects, Hardy and Comedy, are counterpointed throughout so that they prove to be mutually illuminating.
