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"Etiquette Humor."
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Social Q's : how to survive the quirks, quandaries, and quagmires of today
A series of whimsical essays by the New York Times \"Social Q's\" columnist provides modern advice on navigating today's murky moral waters, sharing recommendations for such everyday situations as texting on the bus to splitting a dinner check.
Book
Compliant Subjects?
The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, remain the most oppressed group in Crimea after the 2014 Russian annexation. The Ukrainian public tends to view them as obedient victims forced to accommodate Russian demands, while scholars mainly avoid the issue. My ethnographic fieldwork in Crimea, however, demonstrates that what might seem like obedient behavior from the outside is, in fact, an expression of agency. This reading is based on close-range observations and conversations with people who speak and behave in ways that initially appear as compliant acts, but which do in fact challenge Russian authorities—arguably more so than other overt forms of resistance in this context. I argue that the ability to decipher many Crimean Tatars’ behavior as tactics of resistance, depends on our understanding of authorities’ contrary expectations. Portrayed as religious fanatics and a security threat, Crimean Tatars are stereotyped as terrorists, likely to engage in extremist activity. In light of this, Crimean Tatars’ compliant behavior, expressed through patience and etiquette, festivity and humor, proves that narrative wrong. Furthermore, other seemingly compliant behaviors—such as accepting Russian passports in order to remain in Crimea—should be interpreted as an act of resistance to the political aims of state actors. By undermining the state’s aim to push out Crimean Tatars and increase the Slavic population, the decision to remain in Crimea in fact challenges state power, rather than affirms it.
Journal Article
Dinosaurs don't, dinosaurs do
Dinosaurs demonstrate the wrong and right ways to interact with others.
Book
Laughter in Occupied Palestine
“Though the current political situation in Palestine is more serious than ever, contemporary Palestinian art and film is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly funny.In Laughter in Occupied Palestine, Chrisoula Lionis analyses both the impetus behind this shift toward laughter and its consequences, arguing that laughter comes as a response to political uncertainty and the decline in nationalist hope. Revealing the crucial role of laughter in responding to the failure of the peace process and ongoing occupation, she unearths the potential of humour to facilitate understanding and empathy in a time of division. This is the first book to provide a combined overview of Palestinian art and film, showing the ways in which both art forms have developed in response to critical moments in Palestinian history over the last century. These key moments, Lionis argues, have radically transformed contemporary Palestinian collective identity and in turn Palestinian cultural output. Mapping these critical junctions - beginning with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the Oslo Accords in 1993 - she explores the historical trajectory of Palestinian art and film, and explains how to the failure of the peace process has led to the present proliferation of humour in Palestinian visual culture.”
eBook
The Stoic Comedy of Elizabeth Bishop and Buster Keaton
Elizabeth Bishop famously asserted in 1964 that poetry “can be cheerful AND profound! – or, how to be grim without groaning,” delineating a form of tragicomic equilibrium which she found embodied by “any of Buster Keaton’s films.” This article explores how Keaton provided Bishop with a model of stoic comedy, one through which she could reimagine worldly tribulation as slapstick poetry. Examining the dramatic monologue “Keaton” alongside “Sandpiper” and other poems, I argue that Bishop’s imaginative investment in slapstick film is most palpable in a recurrent scenario from her poetry, in which a singular figure exists on brinks and limits. In these poems, humor functions as an invitation to read more deeply, while the reserve for which Keaton’s character is famous becomes a self-referential play on Bishop’s own reputation as a reticent poet.
Journal Article
OCCASIONAL POLITENESS AND GENTLEMEN'S LAUGHTER IN 18th C ENGLAND
This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.
Journal Article