The Comedian As Critic

The Comedian As Critic Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of The Comedian As Critic book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

The Comedian as Critic

Matthew Ephraim Wright
The Comedian as Critic Book PDF

Author : Matthew Ephraim Wright
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Criticism
ISBN : 1472555791

Get Book

The Comedian as Critic by Matthew Ephraim Wright Pdf

"Some of the best evidence for the early development of literary criticism before Plato and Aristotle comes from Athenian Old Comedy. Playwrights such as Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes and others wrote numerous comedies on literary themes, commented on their own poetry and that of their rivals, and played around with ideas and theories from the contemporary intellectual scene. How can we make use of the evidence of comedy? Why were the comic poets so preoccupied with questions of poetics? What criteria emerge from comedy for the evaluation of literature? What do the ancient comedians' jokes say about their own literary tastes and those of their audience? How do different types of readers in antiquity evaluate texts, and what are the similarities and differences between 'popular' and 'professional' literary criticism? Does Greek comedy have anything serious to say about the authors and texts it criticizes? How can the comedians be related to the later literary-critical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle and subsequent writers? This book attempts to answer these questions by examining comedy in its social and intellectual context, and by using approaches from modern literary theory to cast light on the ancient material."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Comedian as Critic

Matthew Wright
The Comedian as Critic Book PDF

Author : Matthew Wright
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2012-05-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781780933467

Get Book

The Comedian as Critic by Matthew Wright Pdf

Some of the best evidence for the early development of literary criticism before Plato and Aristotle comes from Athenian Old Comedy. Playwrights such as Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes and others wrote numerous comedies on literary themes, commented on their own poetry and that of their rivals, and played around with ideas and theories from the contemporary intellectual scene. How can we make use of the evidence of comedy? Why were the comic poets so preoccupied with questions of poetics? What criteria emerge from comedy for the evaluation of literature? What do the ancient comedians' jokes say about their own literary tastes and those of their audience? How do different types of readers in antiquity evaluate texts, and what are the similarities and differences between 'popular' and 'professional' literary criticism? Does Greek comedy have anything serious to say about the authors and texts it criticizes? How can the comedians be related to the later literary-critical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle and subsequent writers? This book attempts to answer these questions by examining comedy in its social and intellectual context, and by using approaches from modern literary theory to cast light on the ancient material.

Lenny Bruce

Frank Kofsky
Lenny Bruce Book PDF

Author : Frank Kofsky
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1974
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015038888668

Get Book

Lenny Bruce by Frank Kofsky Pdf

From the Peter Neil Issacs collection.

Comedy and Critical Thought

Iain MacKenzie,Fred Francis,Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
Comedy and Critical Thought Book PDF

Author : Iain MacKenzie,Fred Francis,Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2018-03-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781786604088

Get Book

Comedy and Critical Thought by Iain MacKenzie,Fred Francis,Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone Pdf

Throughout history, comedians and clowns have enjoyed a certain freedom to speak frankly often denied to others in hegemonic systems. More recently, professional comedians have developed platforms of comic license from which to critique the traditional political establishment and have managed to play an important role in interrogating and mediating the processes of politics in contemporary society. This collection will examine the questions that arise when of comedy and critique intersect by bringing together both critical theorists and comedy scholars with a view to exploring the nature of comedy, its potential role in critical theory and the forms it can take as a practice of resistance.

The Comedians

Graham Greene
The Comedians Book PDF

Author : Graham Greene
Publisher : Random House
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2010-10-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781409017493

Get Book

The Comedians by Graham Greene Pdf

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt 'Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American and Jones the confidence man - these are the 'comedians' of Graham Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. And, to begin with, they are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself...

The Humorist

Russell Kane
The Humorist Book PDF

Author : Russell Kane
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2012-04-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780857209269

Get Book

The Humorist by Russell Kane Pdf

Survivor, genius, critic. Murderer. Meet Benjamin Davids White, blessed since his infancy with an extraordinary gift: to understand humour at its deepest level. Yet Benjamin is cursed, too: in all his life, he has never laughed or smiled. At the height of his profession as a comedy critic, yet lacking any kind of human empathy, Benjamin discovers a formula that will allow him to construct the most powerful joke the world has ever known. A joke that has the power to kill...

A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar

Caty Borum Chattoo,Lauren Feldman
A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar Book PDF

Author : Caty Borum Chattoo,Lauren Feldman
Publisher : University of California Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-03-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520299764

Get Book

A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar by Caty Borum Chattoo,Lauren Feldman Pdf

Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh

Helen Rutter
The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh Book PDF

Author : Helen Rutter
Publisher : Scholastic Inc.
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021-08-03
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9781338652284

Get Book

The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh by Helen Rutter Pdf

When life is funny, make some jokes about it. Billy Plimpton has a big dream: to become a famous comedian when he grows up. He already knows a lot of jokes, but thinks he has one big problem standing in his way: his stutter. At first, Billy thinks the best way to deal with this is to . . . never say a word. That way, the kids in his new school won’t hear him stammer. But soon he finds out this is NOT the best way to deal with things. (For one thing, it’s very hard to tell a joke without getting a word out.) As Billy makes his way toward the spotlight, a lot of funny things (and some less funny things) happen to him. In the end, the whole school will know -- If you think you can hold Billy Plimpton back, be warned: The joke will soon be on you!

The Joke Is on Us

Julie A. Webber
The Joke Is on Us Book PDF

Author : Julie A. Webber
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-12-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781498569859

Get Book

The Joke Is on Us by Julie A. Webber Pdf

This edited volume brings together scholars of comedy to assess how political comedy encounters neoliberal themes in contemporary media. Central to this task is the notion of genre; under neoliberal conditions (where market logics motivate most actions) genre becomes “mixed.” Once stable, discreet categories such as comedy, horror, drama and news and entertainment have become blurred so as to be indistinguishable. The classic modern paradigm of comedy/tragedy no longer holds, if it ever did. Moreover, as politics becomes more economic and less moral or normative under neoliberalism, we are able to see new resistance to comedic genres that support neoliberal strategies to hide racial and gender injustice such as unlaughter, ambiguity, and anti-comedy. There is also an increasing interest with comedy as a form of entertainment on the political right following both Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the U.S. Several essays confront this conservative comedy and place it in context of the larger humor history of these debates over free speech and political correctness. For comedians too, entry into popular media now follows the familiar neoliberal script of the celebration of self-help with the increasing admonishment of those who fail to win in market terms. Laughter plays an important role in shaming and valorizing (often at the same time!) the precarious subject in the aftermath of global recession. Doubling down on austerity, self-help policies and equivocation in the face of extremist challenges (right and left), politics foils the critical comedian’s attempt to satirize and parody its object. Characterized by ambiguity, mixed genre and the increasing use of anti-humor, political comedy mirrors the social and political world it mocks, parodies and celebrates often with lackluster results suggesting that the joke might be on us, as audiences.

Free Speech And Why It Matters

Andrew Doyle
Free Speech And Why It Matters Book PDF

Author : Andrew Doyle
Publisher : Constable
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780349135397

Get Book

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle Pdf

'A fantastically timely book written by one of the smartest thinkers in Britain' Piers Morgan 'Impassioned, scholarly and succinct' The Times Free speech is the bedrock of all our liberties, and yet in recent years it has come to be mistrusted. A new form of social justice activism, which perceives language as potentially violent, has prompted a national debate on where the limitations of acceptable speech should be drawn. Governments throughout Europe have enacted 'hate speech' legislation to curb the dissemination of objectionable ideas, Silicon Valley tech giants are collaborating to ensure that they control the limitations of public discourse, and campaigners in the US are calling for revisions to the First Amendment. However well-intentioned, these trends represent a threat to the freedoms that our ancestors fought and died to secure. In this incisive and fascinating book, Andrew Doyle addresses head-on the most common concerns of free speech sceptics, and offers a timely and robust defence of this most foundational of principles.

Mixed Plate

Jo Koy
Mixed Plate Book PDF

Author : Jo Koy
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-23
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780062969989

Get Book

Mixed Plate by Jo Koy Pdf

A stunning, hilarious memoir from beloved comedian Jo Koy, “far and away one of the funniest people out there” (Chelsea Handler). Mixed Plate illuminates the burning drive and unique humor that make Jo Koy one of today’s most successful comedians. Includes never-before-seen photos. Well guys, here it is—my story. A funny, sad, at times pathetic but also kick-ass tale of how a half-Filipino, half-white kid whose mom thought (and still thinks) his career goal was to become a clown became a success. Not an overnight success, because that would have made for a really short read, but an All-American success who could give my immigrant mom the kind of life she hoped for when she came to this country, and my son the kind of life I wished I’d had as a kid. With all the details of what it felt like to get the doors closed in my face, to grind it out on the road with my arsenal of dick jokes, and how my career finally took off once I embraced the craziness of my family, which I always thought was uniquely Filipino but turns out is as universal as it gets. In this book, I’ll take you behind the mic, behind the curtain—OK, way behind it. From growing up with a mom who made me dance like Michael Jackson at the Knights of Columbus, to some real dark stuff, the stuff we don’t talk about often enough as immigrants. Mental health, poverty, drinking. And show you the path to my American Dream. Which was paved with a lot of failure, department store raffle tickets to win free color televisions, bad jokes, old VHS tapes, a motorcycle my mom probably still hates, the only college final I aced (wasn’t math), and getting my first laugh on stage. There’s photo evidence of it all here, too. In this book, I get serious about my funny. And I want to make you laugh a little while I do it. I’m like Hawaii’s favorite lunch—the mixed plate. Little bit of this, a little bit of that. My book Mixed Plate is too.

We Killed

Yael Kohen
We Killed Book PDF

Author : Yael Kohen
Publisher : Sarah Crichton Books
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781466828117

Get Book

We Killed by Yael Kohen Pdf

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.

In Praise of Comedy

James Feibleman
In Praise of Comedy Book PDF

Author : James Feibleman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000579130

Get Book

In Praise of Comedy by James Feibleman Pdf

First published in 1939, the original blurb reads: We have learned much lately concerning theories of laughter, yet laughter is only what we do about comedy. What is comedy itself? In this work the history of comic instances is combed in the search for the truth about comedy. Today, when laughter is stifled in so many countries, an exposition of comedy shows it to have a universal and necessary character. Comedy, as its natures reveals, is one criterion of the state of human culture; it is highly contemporary and requires freedom – but freedom for adventure, not for routine. After a chapter devoted to the explanation of a logical theory of comedy, the modern comedians are examined, and the humour of every one, from the Marx Brothers to surrealism, from Gertrude Stein to Mickey Mouse, from James Joyce to Charlie Chaplin, is shown to be a constant, inherent in the same set of unchanging conditions.

Kasher in the Rye

Moshe Kasher
Kasher in the Rye Book PDF

Author : Moshe Kasher
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781455504954

Get Book

Kasher in the Rye by Moshe Kasher Pdf

“The finest, most moving and powerful memoir I have ever read.”—MAYIM BIALIK Rising young comedian Moshe Kasher is lucky to be alive. He started using drugs when he was just 12. At that point, he had already been in psychoanlysis for 8 years. By the time he was 15, he had been in and out of several mental institutions, drifting from therapy to rehab to arrest to...you get the picture. But Kasher in the Rye is not an "eye opener" to the horrors of addiction. It's a hilarious memoir about the absurdity of it all. When he was a young boy, Kasher's mother took him on a vacation to the West Coast. Well it was more like an abduction. Only not officially. She stole them away from their father and they moved to Oakland , California. That's where the real fun begins, in the war zone of Oakland Public Schools. He was more than just out of control-his mother walked him around on a leash, which he chewed through and ran away. Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Kasher's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations.

Believe Me

Eddie Izzard
Believe Me Book PDF

Author : Eddie Izzard
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-06-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780698405660

Get Book

Believe Me by Eddie Izzard Pdf

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Izzard is one of the funniest people alive, a talented actor, a sharp cross-dresser, an experienced marathon runner, and a great writer. You will have to read this if only to find out what a jazz chicken is.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer With his brand of keenly intelligent humor that ranges from world history to historical politics, sexual politics, mad ancient kings, and chickens with guns, Eddie Izzard has built an extraordinary fan base that transcends age, gender, and race. Writing with the same candor and insight evident in his comedy, he reflects on a childhood marked by the loss of his mother, boarding school, and alternative sexuality, as well as a life in comedy, film, politics, running and philanthropy. Honest and generous, Believe Me is an inspired account of a very singular life thus far.