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"Comedy Social aspects."
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Irony in the age of empire : comic perspectives on democracy and freedom
Comedy, from social ridicule to the unruly laughter of the carnival,
provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination as well as
weapons for emancipation. In Irony in the Age of Empire, Cynthia Willett asks: What
could embody liberation better than laughter? Why do the oppressed laugh? What
vision does the comic world prescribe? For Willett, the comic trumps standard
liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate
relationships, topics which are usually neglected by political philosophy. Willett's
philosophical reflection on comedy issues a powerful challenge to standard
conceptions of freedom by proposing a new kind of freedom that is unapologetically
feminist, queer, and multiracial. This book provides a wide-ranging, original,
thoughtful, and expansive discussion of citizenship, social manners, and political
freedom in our world today.
eBook
Television's moment
Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.
eBook
Humour, comedy and laughter
Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors' cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities
eBook
All Play and No Work
Many of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) plays Paul Gagliardi analyzes in All Play and No Work feature complex portrayals of labor and work relief at a time when access to work was difficult. Gagliardi asks, what does it mean that many plays produced by the FTP celebrated forms of labor like speculation and swindling? All Play and No Work directly contradicts the promoted ideals of work found in American society, culture, and within the broader New Deal itself. Gagliardi shows how comedies of the Great Depression engaged questions of labor, labor history, and labor ethics. He considers the breadth of the FTP's production history, staging plays including Ah, Wilderness!, Help Yourself, and Mississippi Rainbow.Gagliardi examines backstage comedies, middle-class comedies, comedies of chance, and con-artist comedies that employed diverse casts and crew and contained radical economic and labor ideas. He contextualizes these plays within the ideologically complicated New Deal, showing how programs like the Social Security Act straddled progressive ideals and conservative, capitalist norms. Addressing topics including the politicization of theatrical labor and the real dangers of unchecked economic con artists, the comic plays of the FTP reveal acts of political resistance and inequality that reflected the concerns of their audiences.
eBook
The Marx Brothers and America : where film, comedy and history collide
\"Some lessons and teaching methods challenge the notion that learning history must be a droll, dry affair. The ground has shifted from the days in which \"serious history\" and \"boring\" went hand in glove. Textbooks and lectures have their place, but less traditional classrooms can be powerfully immersive and insightful. Take, for instance, the 1929 Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts and what it teaches about both the Great Depression and early sound films. The Marx Brothers are considered to be among the funniest comedy teams of all time. Four of their 13 films are on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American comedies ever made. For many contemporary viewers, though, \"getting\" the jokes is not always easy because the humor is frequently subjective and timebound. This work looks at the American past through the lens of the Marx Brothers' films and other projects. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific film, contextualizing the world at the time and how the Marx Brothers lampooned those subjects. Along the way, it demonstrates what the Marx Brothers revealed about weighty topics like gambling, gender relations, immigration, medical care, Prohibition, race and war, all leavened with offbeat humor\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Vulgar Art
InA Vulgar ArtIan Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, leveraging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize--\"literature\" or \"theatre\"; \"editorial\" or \"morality\"--and analyze it accordingly.A Vulgar Artbegins with a more fundamental observation: someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh. So this book takes the moment of performance as its focus, that stand-up comedy is a collaborative act between the comedian and the audience.
Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances between the performer and the audience.
eBook