The Object Of Comedy

Author : Jamila M. H. Mascat,Gregor Moder
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2020-02-12
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9783030277420

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The Object of Comedy by Jamila M. H. Mascat,Gregor Moder Pdf

What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives – both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects. In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) –regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.

Author : Alenka Zupancic
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2008-02-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262740319

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The Odd One In by Alenka Zupancic Pdf

A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat. Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, “naturalized” cheerfulness. Real, subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders. Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

Author : Steven A. Benko
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781476640976

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Ethics in Comedy by Steven A. Benko Pdf

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.

Author : Kent Cartwright
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2022-02-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198868897

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Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment by Kent Cartwright Pdf

Introduction -- Clowns, fools, and folly -- Structural doubleness and repetition -- Place, being, and agency -- The manifestation of desire -- The return from the dead -- Ending and wondering.

Author : James Feibleman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2022-04-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000579239

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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.

Author : Julie A. Webber
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2018-12-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781498569859

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The Joke Is on Us by Julie A. Webber Pdf

This book provides a critical assessment of the broad range of responses by political comedians to the acceleration of neoliberal policy following the 2007 recession. The volume assesses the effectiveness of comedy in its encounter with market logic and material impact in culture, politics and mass media.

Author : Mark William Roche
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 1998-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0791435466

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Tragedy and Comedy by Mark William Roche Pdf

The first evaluation and critique of Hegel's theory of tragedy and comedy, this book also develops an original theory of both genres.

Author : Sam Friedman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-04-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781135009014

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Comedy and Distinction by Sam Friedman Pdf

This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.

Author : Todd McGowan
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780810135826

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Only a Joke Can Save Us by Todd McGowan Pdf

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.

Author : Richard Janko,Professor of Greek Richard Janko
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1984-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0520053036

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Aristotle on Comedy by Richard Janko,Professor of Greek Richard Janko Pdf

Author : Mark Alznauer
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781438483382

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Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy by Mark Alznauer Pdf

No philosopher has treated the subject of tragedy and comedy in as original and searching a manner as G. W. F. Hegel. His concern with these genres runs throughout both his early and late works and extends from aesthetic issues to questions in the history of society and religion. Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy is the first book to explore the full extent of Hegel's interest in tragedy and comedy. The contributors analyze his treatment of both ancient and modern drama, including major essays on Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the German comedic tradition, and examine the relation of these genres to political, religious, and philosophical issues. In addition, the volume includes several essays on the role tragedy and comedy play in Hegel's philosophy of history. This book will not only be valuable to those who wish for a general overview of Hegel's treatment of tragedy and comedy but also to those who want to understand how his treatment of these genres is connected to the rest of his thought.

Author : Mario Telò
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226309699

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Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy by Mario Telò Pdf

Aristophanes and the Generation of Greek Comedy challenges the ways in which both ancient and modern scholarship have created the figure we know as Aristophanes and it builds on Telo's the long-term project to study the genres of ancient Greek literature (particularly plays) as well as genre theory more generally.Telo asks, how did the image we know of Aristophanes arose? Aristophanes' supremacy is traced, by Telo, back to the playwright himself. Early scholars presented Aristophanes' work as a prestigious object, an expression of supposedly transhistorical values of dignity (semnotes) and self-control (sophrosune). This construction of the merits of Aristophanic comedy over that of other varieties depends on its textual connections with other works, particularly tragedies. Telo shows, through close readings of Wasps and Clouds, for example, how the Aristophanic style is actually figured in the plays as the tactile experience of a garment, a soft, protective cloak intended to shield an audience from the debilitating effects of competitors' comedies during the Dionysia. Aristophanes' narratives of sons and fathers, poet and audience, is thus at the center of the discourse that has shaped his canonical dominance ever since.

Author : Jan Hokenson
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0838640966

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The Idea of Comedy by Jan Hokenson Pdf

"Disengaging unstated premises to show how the theoretical discourse about comedy often enacts the intellectual disputes of its time, The idea of comedy tracks the history of comic theories along two principal axes. The first is historical, showing how the Hellenistic ethical conception devolves into social superiority and then into populist assertions, enidng on the question of whether contemporary comic theory is still populist today." "The second axis is conceptual, sorting theories by types of agreement and dispute. Whether comedy improves the citizens or threatens political instability, whether it insults or enacts moral standards, whether it serves God and the integrated superego or the devil and the anarchic id, are some of the questions addressed by theroists such as Cicero, Maggi, Dryden, Kant, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Genette." -book jacket.

Author : David Robbins
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Arts, Modern
ISBN : 8791409586

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Concrete Comedy by David Robbins Pdf

"Conventional histories of comedy address the verbal comedy presented on stage or screen, or in broadcast media. During the twentieth century, however, there emerged another form of comedy--a comedy of doing rather than saying--that yielded prop-like conceptual objects and gestures of public theater. Termed 'concrete comedy' by internationally known artist and writer David Robbins, its origins date from around 1915, with the work of Karl Valentin, a German comedian of stage and screen who also made comic objects, and Marcel Duchamp, who used the art context as a site as for comedy. Concrete Comedy discusses visual artists (Manzoni, Warhol, Cattelan, Kippenberger, among many others) alongside entertainers (Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Jack Benny), musicians (The Ramones, The Replacements, Frank Zappa), couturiers (from Chanel to Viktor & Rolf), architects (SITE Architects) and dozens of other comic imaginations. It offers both an alternative to conventional comedy and an alternative reading of certain abiding strategies in recent art."--Publisher's description.

Author : James Mendrinos
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2004-07-06
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781440696206

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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Comedy Writing by James Mendrinos Pdf

Comedy is serious business—and serious money. In this guide, comedian, writer, and teacher James Mendrinos explains the principles of comedy and how to apply them to forms from stand-up to sitcoms- including fiction, film, speeches, articles, essays, and more. He also includes exercises designed to hone the craft, break through writer’s block, and tailor a piece to its intended audience. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get: • Foolproof advice for writing scripts, feature films, plays, cartoons, stand-up jokes—even working humor into your presentation at work. • Terrific techniques for brainstorming, free associating, and drafting lists to make your writing better—and funnier. • Stand-up tips on identifying with and writing for your audience and genre. • Navigation tools for the inroads to marketing and selling your comedy.