Funny Times Presents The Best Of The Best American Humor
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Funny Times Presents the Best of the Best American Humor by Raymond Lesser,Susan Wolpert Pdf
Provides a selection of the most hilarious cartoons, columns, essays, and comic strips from The Funny Times, a monthly publication containing selections of humor from America's magazines, newspapers, and other sources.
Bob Odenkirk is a legend in the comedy-writing world, winning Emmys and acclaim for his work on Saturday Night Live, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and many other seminal TV shows. This book, his first, is a spleen-bruisingly funny omnibus that ranges from absurdist monologues (“Martin Luther King, Jr’s Worst Speech Ever”) to intentionally bad theater (“Hitler Dinner Party: A Play”); from avant-garde fiction (“Obituary for the Creator of Madlibs”) to free-verse poetry that's funnier and more powerful than the work of Calvin Trillin, Jewel, and Robert Louis Stevenson combined. Odenkirk's debut resembles nothing so much as a hilarious new sketch comedy show that’s exclusively available as a streaming video for your mind. As Odenkirk himself writes in “The Second Coming of Jesus and Lazarus,” it is a book “to be read aloud to yourself in the voice of Bob Newhart.”
The paramount question answered in this absorbing collection of essays is: What's so funny about American humor, and why? What are American humor's characteristics? How have they evolved and displayed themselves? Which characteristics are distinctively, or even uniquely, American? Originally appearing as an issue of the American Quarterly, these essays take a close look at American humor from revolutionary times to the present day, and particularly focus on the neglected trends of the past fifty years. Looking at American comic figures as diverse--and even surprising--as Mark Twain and Richard Nixon, at various vehicles for American humor such as comic strips, radio and television, movies, and standup comedians, and at different genres of humor including political, ethnic, and feminist humor, this book brings a lively new perspective to the study of American culture.
Every year, Reader’s Digest readers send in tens of thousands of jokes and funny anecdotes, in their quest for a $100 check and, as an extra benefit, eternal glory: to have their joke published in the world’s best-read magazine. One man is stopping them from their quest. Andy Simmons. It takes a sense of humor. And Andy certainly has that. Not only is he the arbiter of all things funny in Reader’s Digest; he is their Mark Twain, Bill Cosby, and even their David Sedaris. In other words, Andy is the guy Reader’s Digest turns to whenever they need a funny story all of America can appreciate. He’s perfect for the job. Andy takes great delight in the funny and oddball side of everyday life. In Now That’s Funny!, Andy presents his most popular, funniest writings on all things America, some exclusive and all-new, some taken from the award-winning pages of Reader’s Digest. You’ll discover the Andy that goes out and tries things. His first-person tales of taking dance lessons, participating in a Revolutionary War reenactment, and even taking stand-up comedy lessons are some of the funniest articles to ever appear in Reader’s Digest. Then you discover the Andy that observes America. His roundups of dumb criminals, crazy lawsuits, ridiculous excuses and out-of-touch scientific research will have you roaring with laughter -- and feeling much better about yourself. Then there’s Andy, the family man. You’ll laugh out loud as he goes in search of his inner macho --or for the next stop on his vacation, if only he can find the directions. And Andy’s observations on marriage and fatherhood are as accurate as they are funny. Finally, there’s Andy the jokester. Here are tales from the job of trying to think, act, and be funny every workday, no matter what the dog did this morning on the rug. Tales of his sit-downs with comic legends from Robin Williams to Woody Allen will have you in stitches. Andy also shares his favorite jokes -- many of them too edgy for printing in Reader’s Digest! Add it up, and it’s a book filled with hundreds of feel-good, laugh-out-loud moments about life in these United States -- exactly the type of reading we need today!
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
No matter how many times female comedians buck the conventional wisdom, people continue to ask: "Are women funny?" The question has been nagging at women off and on (mostly on) for the past sixty years. It's incendiary, much discussed, and, as proven in Yael Kohen's fascinating oral history, totally wrongheaded. In We Killed, Kohen pieces together the revolution that happened to (and by) women in American comedy, gathering the country's most prominent comediennes and the writers, producers, nightclub owners, and colleagues who revolved around them. She starts in the 1950s, when comic success meant ridiculing and desexualizing yourself; when Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller emerged as America's favorite frustrated ladies; when the joke was always on them. Kohen brings us into the sixties and seventies, when the appearance of smart, edgy comedians (Elaine May, Lily Tomlin) and the women's movement brought a new wave of radicals: the women of SNL, tough-ass stand-ups, and a more independent breed on TV (Mary Tyler Moore and her sisters). There were battles to fight and preconceptions to shake before we could arrive in a world in which women like Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey can be smart, attractive, sexually confident—and, most of all, flat-out funny. As the more than 150 people interviewed for this riveting oral history make clear, women have always been funny. It's just that every success has been called an exception and every failure an example of the rule. And as each generation of women has developed its own style of comedy, the coups of the previous era are washed away and a new set of challenges arises. But the result is the same: They kill. A chorus of creative voices and hilarious storytelling, We Killed is essential cultural and social history, and—as it should be!—great entertainment.
Author : Paul Lewis Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 253 pages File Size : 54,5 Mb Release : 2006-10-02 Category : Current Events ISBN : 9780226476995
What do Jon Stewart, Freddy Krueger, Patch Adams, and George W. Bush have in common? As Paul Lewis shows in Cracking Up, they are all among the ranks of joke tellers who aim to do much more than simply amuse. Exploring topics that range from the sadistic mockery of Abu Ghraib prison guards to New Age platitudes about the healing power of laughter, from jokes used to ridicule the possibility of global climate change to the heartwarming performances of hospital clowns, Lewis demonstrates that over the past thirty years American humor has become increasingly purposeful and embattled. Navigating this contentious world of controversial, manipulative, and disturbing laughter, Cracking Up argues that the good news about American humor in our time—that it is delightful, relaxing, and distracting—is also the bad news. In a culture that both enjoys and quarrels about jokes, humor expresses our most nurturing and hurtful impulses, informs and misinforms us, and exposes as well as covers up the shortcomings of our leaders. Wondering what’s so funny about a culture determined to laugh at problems it prefers not to face, Lewis reveals connections between such seemingly unrelated jokers as Norman Cousins, Hannibal Lecter, Rush Limbaugh, Garry Trudeau, Jay Leno, Ronald Reagan, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Bill Clinton. The result is a surprising, alarming, and at times hilarious argument that will appeal to anyone interested in the ways humor is changing our cultural and political landscapes.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
A Decade of Dark Humor by Ted Gournelos,Viveca Greene Pdf
A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor-in a variety of forms-to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The volume's contributors cover a broad range of media productions, including news parodies (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Onion), TV roundtable shows (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher), comic strips and cartoons (Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, Jeff Danzinger's editorial cartoons), television drama (Rescue Me), animated satire (South Park), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers), documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11), and other productions. Along with examining the rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques of these productions, the essays place each in specific political and journalistic contexts, showing how corporations, news outlets, and political institutions responded to-and sometimes co-opted-these forms of humor.
The Best Joke Book (Period) by William Donohue Pdf
Discover hundreds of jokes for every occasion! Why was the limbo dancer shocked when his wallet was stolen right out of his back pocket? Because he didn't think anyone could stoop so low. The ultimate collection of the world’s greatest funnies, The Best Joke Book (Period) keeps you laughing for hours on end. Inside, you'll find hundreds of jokes that are guaranteed to stir up a room full of smiles, including knock-knocks, witty puns, and one-liners. Complete with hilarious quotes from celebrities like Jon Stewart, Lewis Black, and Jerry Seinfeld, everyone will revel in each gut-busting moment. So whether you’re looking to add a few jokes to your repertoire, impress your buds, or improve your banter, this sidesplitting book arms you with the perfect joke for any occasion!
Starting with Goodbye begins with loss and ends with love, as a midlife daughter rediscovers her enigmatic father after his death. Lisa has little time for grief, but when her dead dad drops in for “conversations,” his absent presence invites Lisa to examine why the parent she had turned away from in life now holds her spellbound. Lisa reconsiders the affluent upbringing he financed (filled with horses, lavish vacations, bulging closets), and the emotional distance that grew when he retired to Las Vegas and she remained in New Jersey where she and her husband earn moderate incomes. She also confronts death rituals, navigates new family dynamics, while living both in memory and the unfolding moment. In this brutally honest yet compelling portrayal and tribute, Lisa searches for meaning, reconciling the Italian-American father—self-made textile manufacturer who liked newspapers, smoking, Las Vegas craps tables, and solitude—with the complex man she discovers influenced everything, from career choice to spouse. By forging a new father-daughter “relationship,” grief is transformed to hopeful life-affirming redemption. In poignant, often lyrical prose, this powerful, honest book proves that when we dare to love the parent who challenged us most, it’s never too late.