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"Laughter Fiction."
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Farce All the Way Down: The Historiographical Use of Satire and Comedy in Moving Histories
[...]the focus of this series 15 not on the political or public response to the scandal, but on the inner workings of the group that undertook the break-ins and the actions of key enablers around them. Frye explains that if the protagonist is superior to other people and to nature, the story operates as myth; if the main character is human but operating in a slightly heightened environment with superior talent, resolve, and morality than other mortals, then the emplotment is a romance. Tragedy may be gut-wrenching for the audience, but it ultimately conveys an undaunted faith in the prospect of a smoldering justice emerging from the ruins. Drawing heavily from John Morreall's detailed study of the approaches of key philosophers to humour dating back to Antiquity, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Simon Critchley synthesizes three theories of the comic.
Journal Article
Laurence Sterne's Letters and Sermons: Glossing the Themes of Tristram Shandy
Here, I shall analyze not only Sterne's letters but his sermons deliberative and judicial discourse to his parishioner-friends. In doing so, Sterne created in such texts a gloss of Tristram Shandy and its thematic center: the diseases of pride and malice as well as the cures for these ills found in laughter and friendship (1:19,32;4:401). Even while my analysis will echo the claims of other scholars that these categories of texts parallel the thematic center of his Sterne's fiction, I shall stress that Sterne created what amounts to a thematic gloss from a stance outside his novel. Unlike his fictionwriting contemporaries, whose used letters to drive plot within their novels, Sterne's letter-and-sermon gloss to Tristram Shandy underscores his abiding intent to challenge traditional boundaries between autobiography and fiction.
Journal Article
Don't laugh, Joe
Mother Possum is in despair because her son cannot learn to play dead without laughing.
Book
'You don't know that country': Mapping space in Randolph Stow's 'To the Islands'
At some point in 1959, stationed in the Trobriand Islands as a Cadet Patrol Officer, Randolph Stow drew a mud-map in the back of his diary, coloured with red and green pastel. Titled 'Forrest River Mission from Memory,' it shows the layout of the Mission near Wyndham in the Kimberley, where he had been based for most of 1957-the space which served as the setting for his Miles Franklin-winning novel To the Islands (1958). The image is out of place within the journal, which is entitled 'Notes and Texts,' one of three which records aspects of Biga- Kiriwina language from the Trobriands. In 'Notes and Texts,' Stow collects word lists and jottings as well as manuscript versions of two short stories (which Ellen Smith discussed so beautifully in the ASAL ECR 2019 keynote and in her 2019 NLA Fellowship Presentation on a related topic). The same journal also includes a map of Kiriwina Island with similar language detail, drawn within the front cover. The Forrest River map is both counterpart and an odd after- note, hidden away behind the back cover, shifting the journal into another space and time.
Journal Article
Laugh-out-loud baby
The first time a baby laughs, his entire extended family gathers for a party in hopes of hearing the sweet sound again.
Book
Patriot, Satirist, Bagman: Picturing John Brougham's Columbus Burlesque
In another of his burlesques, Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), which engages the romantic myths of the seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, Brougham performed as John Smith, who is appropriately described as (among other things) a \"Statesman, Pioneer, and Bagman,\" accompanied by \"a crew of Fillibusters [sic],\" or soldiers of fortune seeking to establish political power in a sovereign nation.10 Certainly, Brougham's Columbus fits the same description, and Brougham prompts laughter through the idea that the revered explorer was also a conman, racketeer, and filibuster who bears little or no resemblance to figure enshrined in American myth. Amy E. Hughes encourages scholars of nineteenth-century theater to look not only to dramatic texts but also to records of actual performances, such as \"playbills, newspaper advertisements, and cast books,\" taking up \"quirky remnants in tandem with other sources\" to \"gain a more nuanced understanding of the content and craft of theatermaking during the 1800s. With the recognition that even more work needs to be done on Brougham's use of music (especially his parody of popular tunes and deployment of patriotic sing-alongs), I bring new focus here on scraps of the visual culture informing the text and the staging of Columbus, hoping to bring us one step closer to the richness Brougham's art and at the same time trouble any conclusions regarding the politics of his art. By the time his performance career ended in 1879, Brougham had \"played at least 477 roles in at least 443 different plays\" in theatres across the country, penned no fewer than 160 theatrical scripts, and published at least thirty-five dramas with Samuel French, in addition to multiple collections of short fiction and poetry.14 As Marc Robinson has it, \"For every form the American theater puts forward-heroic tragedy, romance, history play, melodrama-Brougham counters with plays less poised, less linear, less respectful of polarities of good and evil.
Journal Article
Mr. Happy
The story of someone called 'Mr. Happy' who lived in Happyland, met an unhappy person called 'Mr. Miserable,' and showed him what happiness was.
Book
Laughter in Crime: The Mechanics of Laughter in Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum Series
The author examines how Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series works alongside hard-boiled and soft-boiled conventions to create a hybrid formula of genres seemingly at odds with detective fiction. By infusing romance, adventure, and comedy in the detective genre, Evanovich creates a new female agency and rewrites US founding myths of the pursuit of happiness and self-realization.
Journal Article