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This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa's under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood - with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature - the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.

Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous \"comic relief\" moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination . Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Covering everything from the grotesque body in Freaks to the comedy of awkwardness in Midsommar , this book shows how integral humor has been to the development of the American horror film over the past century.

When wielded by the white majority, ethnic humor can be used to ridicule and demean marginalized groups. In the hands of ethnic minorities themselves, ethnic humor can work as a site of community building and resistance. In nearly all cases, however, ethnic humor can serve as a window through which to examine the complexities of American race relations. InEthnic Humor in Multiethnic America, David Gillota explores the ways in which contemporary comic works both reflect and participate in national conversations about race and ethnicity.Gillota investigates the manner in which various humorists respond to multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the American population. Rather than looking at one or two ethnic groups at a time-as is common scholarly practice-the book focuses on the interplay between humorists from different ethnic communities. While some comic texts project a fantasy world in which diverse ethnic characters coexist in a rarely disputed harmony, others genuinely engage with the complexities and contradictions of multiethnic America.The first chapter focuses on African American comedy with a discussion of such humorists as Paul Mooney and Chris Rock, who tend to reinforce a black/white vision of American race relations. This approach is contrasted to the comedy of Dave Chappelle, who looks beyond black and white and uses his humor to place blackness within a much wider multiethnic context.Chapter 2 concentrates primarily on the Jewish humorists Sarah Silverman, Larry David, and Sacha Baron Cohen-three artists who use their personas to explore the peculiar position of contemporary Jews who exist in a middle space between white and other.In chapter 3, Gillota discusses different humorous constructions of whiteness, from a detailed analysis ofSouth Parkto \"Blue Collar Comedy\" and the blogStuff White People Like.Chapter 4 is focused on the manner in which animated children's film and the network situation comedy often project simplified and harmonious visions of diversity. In contrast, chapter 5 considers how many recent works, such asHarold and Kumar Go to White Castleand the Showtime seriesWeeds, engage with diversity in more complex and productive ways.

College is a place for serious work. But does it need to be a serious place? In our efforts to communicate the importance of what we are teaching to our students, we may be casting aside one of our most valuable tools as educators: humor. Teaching with humor has tangible—and intangible—benefits, and media scholars are well positioned to use it. We tend to fear class clowns as distracting from our work in the classroom, but what if we view ourselves as the class clowns? We, the coauthors of this piece, are doctoral candidates who teach courses on film and television comedy, and while our demeanors and identity markers in the classroom are different, we operate from similar levels of junior-scholar precarity within current-day American academia. This position has a deep impact on our comfort with inviting the anarchy of laughter—or worse, failed humor—into our classrooms. In writing this collaborative essay, we decided to engage in conversation with prominent scholars, teachers, and mentors in our field. We reached out to three professors currently working in varying educational and institutional contexts who are in different stages of their professional careers: Bambi Haggins (associate professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Irvine), Linda Mizejewski (professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University), and Samantha Sheppard (assistant professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University).

According to her, comedy's formula is fairly simple. Motivated by the lack of scholarship about women jokesters, early analyses sought to recuperate the voices of women in the male-dominated fields of comedy production by publishing monographs and edited collections focusing on women's literary humor and comic performance, among them those of Nancy Walker, June Sochen, Regina Barecca, Lizabeth Goodman, Linda Martin, and Kerry Segrave.8 They argue for the subversive potential of comedy and do so by applying or revising several canonical theories and texts, such as Victor Turner's idea of liminality as offering a view from the margins, Henri Bergson's notion of laughter as a social corrective of unacceptable behavior, Sigmund Freud's exploration of social taboos, and Mikhail Bakhtin's reading of the carnivalesque as transgressive. Scholarship can benefit from examining larger industry forces—comedy club bookers and managers, agents, network executives, advertising and social media—as networks of power that reproduce social inequalities and perpetuate masculinist comic traditions. About which, Gadsby says in the Netflix show: \"I believe we could paint a better world if we learned how to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength, difference is a teacher.

Trolls' sudden omnipresence in today's political landscape, where they embody a perceived lapse into \"post-truth,\" makes trolling conceptually useful for the interpretation of contemporary political comedy. Because the trolling ethos demands a terminal irony in pursuit of tendentious laughter, its ability to function as political satire is diminished. The closest trolls come to weev's \"art\" is revealing the opportunism and epistemic instability of mass media when their hoaxes go viral.11 Yet this critique is hardly self-evident, requiring considerable interpretive effort from the observer, including knowing not to take trolls at their word, for trolls are unable to articulate a viewpoint uncompromised by irony. [...]the question of trolling's satirical value remains unanswered. [...]whether intentionally or not, MDE turns its free-floating incongruity and superiority humor against its own ideological kin. [...]the drive for trollish gestures among the left, including the Guggenheim Museum's ostensibly sincere offer to loan a solid-gold toilet to the White House instead of the Van Gogh painting that Trump originally requested.21 Now that the aesthetics and cultural logics of online spaces have migrated into offline space and old media platforms, trolling's ubiquity warrants attention from media scholars in general and comedy scholars in particular.

First published in 1980. In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed; the Falstaff plays are seen as a watershed, and the emergence of new comic protagonists - the resourceful, anti-romantic romantic heroine and the Fool - as the summit of the achievement. The plays are explored from three complementary perspectives - theoretical, developmental and interpretative which lead to a further understanding of the powerful relation between the plays' formal complexity and their naturalistic verisimilitude.

[...]related, it helps illuminate how offline forms of humor, particularly those invested in maintaining the status quo, are imported into online spaces. [...]RompHim provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways humor functions when black masculinity, (homo)sexuality, and fashion collide. [...]the text associated with the image functions to invert gender norms. The refrain that it's \"just a joke\" seeks to obscure the serious business of humor within digital spaces. Because of its spreadable nature, dismissing the humor around the RompHim elides the ways such jokes and images are deployed in the service of upholding the boundaries of hetero-masculinity, to the exclusion of the queer other.

No Laughing Matter is a wide-ranging collection of new studies of the comic theatre of Athens, from its origins until the 340s BCE. Fifteen international scholars employ an array of approaches and methodologies that will appeal to Classics and Theatre scholars while still remaining accessible to students. By including discussions of fragmentary authors alongside Aristophanes, the collection provides a broad understanding of the richness of Athenian comedy. The collection showcases the best of the new scholarship on Old and Middle Comedy, using the most up-to-date texts and tools. No Laughing Matter has been prepared in tribute to Professor Ian Storey of Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario), whose work on Athenian comedy will continue to shape scholarship for many years to come.