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Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.
\"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture.\"--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction
This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.
eBook
Performing live comedy
'Performing Live Comedy' is for anyone who has ever thought about getting up onstage and being funny or for those who have already started. It offers a breakdown of the process of live comedy and provides a basic toolbox for the student comedian, covering all aspects of live comedy such as stand-up, music, double acts, and magicians.
Book
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
The Scoundrel: Der Schurke
Walter Benjamin's \"Fate and Character\" introduces a cast of eclectic characters. The final character, the Comic—otherwise known as the Scoundrel—is loved on the stage but despised in the world. This character study attempts to catch Benjamin's Scoundrel, who shadows the others, revealing layered concepts of character. The others ground their character in a tragic moral order that condemns the poor to uphold the authority of the Law. The Scoundrel, lacking character altogether, breaks from tragedy by scandalously exposing the moral world order as fiction, and fate as farce.
Journal Article
Rolling
Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled,
intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses.
Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on
television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics,
slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas
about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his
theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in
ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors
to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American
humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black
comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture,
tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial
interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and
humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within
comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production
crew and writers for television comedy.
Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and
comedy in media discourse.
eBook
Popular Film and Television Comedy
Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby , from City Limits to Blind Date , from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies . Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python , Hancock , and Steptoe and Son . The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.
eBook