Not Even Laughter

Author : Terry Lindvall
Publisher : B&H Publishing Group
Page : 94 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2003-09-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781433677731

Get Book

The Mother of All Laughter by Terry Lindvall Pdf

When the superannuated biblical Sarah learned that she would give birth to a son, she burst out laughing, and that son's name-Isaac-was forever a testimony to this moment of holy mirth. In The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah & the Genesis of Comedy, Terry Lindvall argues that there is a biblical place for laughter. At times, he lets truth be obscured by a good story (as when he cites the famous Neil Armstrong/"Mr. Gorsky" urban legend as fact), but he raises important points about humor for Christians.

Author : Max Eastman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-29
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9781351311700

Get Book

Enjoyment of Laughter by Max Eastman Pdf

Humor at its best is a somewhat fluid and transitory element, but most books about it are illustrated with hardened old jokes from the comic papers, or classic witticisms jerked out of their context. Max Eastman, in this work, avoids this catastrophe by quoting mainly from contemporary American humor. This is not an anthology in that selections have been made with a view to making a point rather than covering the field. The purpose of Eastman's fabled work is to make the reader laugh. Since his early school days, it has seemed to him that textbooks are wrongly written in that they are conducted in a way which ignores the natural operation of the mind. As a result, the opinion is universal, and under the circumstances a fact, that in order to learn anything you have to study. Since this introduction to humor is itself near to writing a textbook, Eastman uses the very text he constructs to illustrate the manner in which textbooks should be written. Examination and classification of the kinds of humorous experience upon the basis of a theory is a science. As such, this work offers a fair chance to illustrate a method of instruction. However, the distinction between a good joke and a bad one will not prevent the reader from making bad jokes nor enable one to make good ones. There is an artistic and playful element that simply cannot be taught. Enjoyment of Laughter presents a total view of the science of laughter and draws upon some of the great American humorists to do so.

Author : Matthew Ward
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2024-07-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198894766

Get Book

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling by Matthew Ward Pdf

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer a compelling new reading of British Romanticism. Matthew Ward reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics.

Author : Ros Ben-Moshe
Publisher : Crooked Lane Books
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2024-03-19
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9781639105762

Get Book

The Laughter Effect by Ros Ben-Moshe Pdf

Laughter really can be the best medicine, and in this transformative body-mind guide, acclaimed wellness expert Ros Ben-Moshe shares the prescription. In The Laughter Effect, Ros Ben-Moshe provides a roadmap to tap into the lighter side of life with laughter therapy. Ben-Moshe shares tips and tools to achieve an intentional state of being she calls the Laughter Effect–a way to elevate mindfulness, gratitude, and self-compassion. When used regularly, it enhances resilience to stress, enabling you to respond to adversity and bounce forward with humor, levity, and grace. Drawing on research from around the world, practice and wisdom from humor and laughter therapy, and positive psychology and neuroscience, Ben-Moshe shows you how to use the energy of laughter and joy to counter stress hormones and stimulate a daily dose of positive wellbeing with “happy hormones.” The techniques, strategies and practices you’ll learn can transform your physical, mental, social and emotional landscape. Viewing life through a laughter lens will awaken a positive change in yourself, how you respond to the world and, in turn, how the world responds to you.

Author : David Watt
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2023-08-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781350146853

Get Book

Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England by David Watt Pdf

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.

Author : Harvey Mindess
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351509640

Get Book

Laughter and Liberation by Harvey Mindess Pdf

Laughter and Liberation is based on the idea that humor is an agent of psychological liberation. Since we are able to include every kind of wit and humor under the umbrella of this thesis, it amounts to an informal, comprehensive theory of the ludicrous. Briefly put, the theory proposes that the most fundamental function of humor is its power to release us from the inhibitions and restrictions under which we live our daily lives.The quest for laughter is as old as man himself?Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors went to great lengths to amuse themselves, as did the monarchs of medieval Europe with court jesters. Our speech and literature abound with references to humor such as: "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone," "He who laughs last laughs best," "All the world loves a clown," "Laugh if you are wise," and "A good laugh is sunshine in the house."In Laughter and Liberation, Harvey Mindess tells us how laughter and our sense of humor work. He gives us the background of several well-known humorists?Steve Allen, Richard Armour, Sholom Aleichem?and explains his theory of how and why they have become expert in making others laugh.

Author : Robert R. Provine
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2001-12-01
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781101659250

Get Book

Laughter by Robert R. Provine Pdf

Do men and women laugh at the same things? Is laughter contagious? Has anyone ever really died laughing? Is laughing good for your health? Drawing upon ten years of research into this most common-yet complex and often puzzling-human phenomenon, Dr. Robert Provine, the world's leading scientific expert on laughter, investigates such aspects of his subject as its evolution, its role in social relationships, its contagiousness, its neural mechanisms, and its health benefits. This is an erudite, wide-ranging, witty, and long-overdue exploration of a frequently surprising subject.

Author : James Nikopoulos
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2018-12-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780429639661

Get Book

The Stability of Laughter by James Nikopoulos Pdf

A "sad and corrupt" age, a period of "crisis" and "upheaval"—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as "the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why, then, was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud to Pirandello, Beckett, Hughes, Barnes, and Joyce, no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world, as Max Weber wrote, that had been "disenchanted of its gods?" In answering these questions, Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory, as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor, in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter, humor, and their complicated relationships with modern life. The Stability of Laughter explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.

Author : Patsy Petzold
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016-09-14
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781365002915

Get Book

No Regrets: Love, Laughter and Life with Colon Cancer by Patsy Petzold Pdf

Patsy was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer February 25th, 2013. She was 34 years old, a happy, healthy mother of 3 with no symptoms or family medical history of colorectal cancer. Her next 3 years would be filled with chemo, surgeries, CT/PET scans and disappointments as treatment failed to clear the cancer. But they were also filled with happiness, faith, love, laughter, advocacy and dancing. We put her writings together in order that others can benefit from her amazing spirit and so we can share her with the world. This is the book she always wanted to write.

Author : Henry Viscardi Jr.
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2018-12-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781789124743

Get Book

A Laughter in the Lonely Night by Henry Viscardi Jr. Pdf

A STORY OF DETERMINED MEN AND WOMEN WHO MADE AND HEARD THAT LAUGHTER The fifteen men and women whose stories you are about to read never thought for one moment—while they were going through their particular kind of hell—that anyone would ever write a book about them. In the months and years during which they faced and fought their war with life they could think only such thoughts as “How will I face the future?” “How can I go on living?” “Why did this happen to me?” “Will the world ever accept me as an ordinary human being?” Today, these men and women, who became extraordinary human beings—each in his own way—tell their individual and incredible stories through Henry Viscardi, Jr., probably the one man in the world who could put down on paper all that they experienced, all that they won, all that they now—after victory—have to say to us. A LAUGHTER IN THE LONELY NIGHT is the guts-deep, unvarnished, often unlovely, but always thrilling account of fifteen people whom the world rejected as “cripples” and how they, together with hundreds more, crashed their way through their own self-rejection and the laughter (often of their own making) which they heard over and over again in the lonely night. Here is their story of personal and professional victory. Who are they? They are workers in the million-dollar-a-year industry called Abilities, Inc.—the world-famous company founded by the author, where only the severely disabled can get jobs, from the president (Henry Viscardi was born with stumps of legs) on down. Henry Viscardi has let them tell their stories in their own words, and throughout the book you can hear the many sounds their voices make—angry cries, determined statements, ribald jokes, tender encouragement, and laughter—the language of the kind of courage most people can only imagine.

Author : Paul E. Kirkland,Michael J. McNeal
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-06-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781350225251

Get Book

Joy and Laughter in Nietzsche’s Philosophy by Paul E. Kirkland,Michael J. McNeal Pdf

Analyzing the importance of joy, laughter, and cheerfulness in Nietzsche's thought, this volume addresses an under-examined topic in the secondary literature. By exploring disparate aspects of these interrelated emotions it provides new insights into his key ideas. The contributors-among them philosophers and political scientists-illustrate the significance of these feelings to reveal political ramifications of their affirmative potential and their broader role in Nietzsche's philosophical aims. These include how the joyful disposition Nietzsche commends informs his free spirit's self-overcoming, attempts to revalue all values, and prospects of ultimately transfiguring humanity. Among other topics, scholars assess the Übermensch and shared joy, learning to laugh at oneself, Schopenhauer's jokes, Pascal's cheerfulness, and the Dada movement's subversively playful aesthetic. By contemplating Nietzsche's emphasis on joy and laughter, the volume reveals a thinker who, far from being a caricature of hopeless nihilism, is in fact the hitherto unrecognised champion of an alternative liberatory politics.

Author : Vladimir I?Akovlevich Propp,Vladimir J. Propp,Vladimir I?A?kovlevich Propp
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780802099266

Get Book

On the Comic and Laughter by Vladimir I?Akovlevich Propp,Vladimir J. Propp,Vladimir I?A?kovlevich Propp Pdf

An extensive investigation of the forms and functions of the comic, this lively and engaging English critical edition will be welcomed by those interested in laughter, comedy, folklore, Russian literature, and specific authors such as Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Rabelais, Molière, and Shakespeare. The direct, humorous, and provocative style of this work, which tackles the subject of humour with a vast array of vivid examples encountered on every page, will certainly appeal to the contemporary reader. Vladimir Propp takes various forms of laughter in literature and real life and addresses questions such as the comic of similarity, the comic of difference, parody, duping, incongruity, lying, ritual laughter, and carnival laughter. The author of the widely acclaimed Morphology of the Folktale has written an original, comprehensive, and exciting study on how humour works, and on everything you wanted to know about the genre, in a clear, approachable, and insightful manner.

Author : Brian Edgar
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2019-08-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781532649851

Get Book

Laughter and the Grace of God by Brian Edgar Pdf

Laughter is important because we cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh, and this is true of our relationship with God. Having a sense of humor is essential for maturity in faith and holiness. Unfortunately, humor and the role that laughter plays in life and spirituality have often been neglected and the aim of Laughter and the Grace of God is to restore laughter to its central place in Christian spirituality and theology. It examines the role of laughter in Scripture and finds it in unexpected places including the story of Abraham and the formation of the covenant and the tragedy of Job. There is laughter in the incarnation, the resurrection, and even the crucifixion. Jesus is the great Laugh-maker. Thomas Aquinas spoke of the sin of having too little laughter as well as the danger of having too much, while Martin Luther said, "If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there." Laughter is nothing less than a participation in the life and love of God.

Author : Pierre Destrée,Franco V. Trivigno
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190917616

Get Book

Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Destrée,Franco V. Trivigno Pdf

Ancient philosophers considered question about laughter, humor, and comedy to be both philosophically interesting and important. They theorized about laughter and its causes, moralized about the appropriate uses of humor and what it is appropriate to laugh at, and wrote treaties on comedic composition. They were often merciless in ridiculing their opponents' positions, borrowing comedic devices and techniques from comic poetry and drama to do so. This volume is organized around three sets of questions that illuminate the philosophical concerns and corresponding range of answers found in ancient philosophy. The first set investigates the psychology of laughter. What is going on in our minds when we laugh? What background conditions must be in place for laughter to occur? Is laughter necessarily hostile or derisive? The second set of questions concerns the ethical and social norms governing laughter and humor. When is it appropriate or inappropriate to laugh? Does laughter have a positive social function? Is there a virtue, or excellence, connected to laugher and humor? The third set of questions concerns the philosophical uses of humor and comedic technique. Do philosophers use humor exclusively in criticizing rivals, or can it play a positive educational role as well? If it can, how does philosophical humor communicate its philosophical content? This volume does not aim to settle these fascinating questions but more importantly to start a conversation about them, and serve as a reference point for discussions of laughter, humor, and comedy in ancient philosophy.

Author : John Morreall
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1983-01-01
Category : Humor
ISBN : 0873956427

Get Book

Taking Laughter Seriously by John Morreall Pdf