Humor in Life and Letters Series – serie

How do contemporary American female comics perform onstage, and what does this performance reveal about power relations in our culture as well as the existence of a "female" and, more specifically, "feminist" genre of stand-up comedy? In this long overdue study of women and stand-up comedy, Joanne R. Gilbert explores these questions in order to illuminate the social, political, and cultural implications of power and gender in popular entertainment.Gilbert's research recognizes the problems that arise from assumptions made about the genres of "female" and "feminist" humor and ultimately suggests that these are part of a larger genre she calls "marginal humor." Performing Marginality provides a historical overview of female comic performance and offers a taxonomy of comedic postures assumed by contemporary female comics, providing a useful way to categorize this often overlooked genre. Performing Marginality also examines problems in existing studies on the subject, the politics involved with marginal humor, and the role of audience in comic performance.This book develops the notion of "performing marginality" not only as the way female comics perform their gender onstage, but as the means by which all of us construct, contest, and negotiate our gendered, racialized, and otherwise marked identities in everyday life. As a former professional stand-up comic and current scholar of communications and women's studies, Gilbert offers a unique perspective on gender, humor, and power through the lens of contemporary female comic performance.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1985) was an Argentine writer of serious avant-garde poetry and prose. This work studies the humour embedded in the author. The author aims to show how Borges was concerned with making the humour in his work more apparent without abandoning the essential story line.

Providing both theory and praxis, this creative textbook explains how to write humour, comedy, satire, parody, nonsense, and both the literary and the joke monologue. Through its close analyses of short stories, sketches, essays and scripts, it should be useful to serious and not-so-serious writers of every genre. Guiding aspiring writers through the many techniques for creating humour, it illustrates and analyzes what works and what doesn't, suggests ways to energize passages that fall flat, and offers insights into brainstorming, team writing, and revision. The volume includes the history and cultural background of each major genre, followed by an array of writing exercises. There is a wide selection of examples to learn from, including a script from ""M*A*S*H"" and pieces by such humorists as Woody Allen, Ogden Nash and Art Buchwald - and by students as well.

At a time when overt feminist statements could ruin a woman's reputation, comedy enabled certain authors to smuggle feminism into their writing. This work sheds light on the ways in which Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen enlisted the power of comedy in the service of feminism, and in so doing participated in one of the most important ideological movements of the last 300 years. It seeks to offer modern scholars a new look at feminist tactics as it brings to light a lost chapter in the history of comedy.

For many students of Japanese culture and visitors to Japan, Japanese humor seems obscure, difficult to find, and perhaps even nonexistent. By bringing together scholarly insights and original research by both Japanese and non-Japanese experts, Jessica Milner Davis bridges the differences between humor in Japan and the West and examines the entire spectrum of Japanese humor, from ancient traditions and surviving rituals of laughter to the norms of joke-telling in ordinary conversation in Japan and America. For anyone interested in Japan and Japanese culture, or the study of humor, Understanding Humor in Japan is an important teaching tool. It provides accessible, illustrative examples of humor in both Japanese and English with explanations of their meaning and cultural significance. Scholarly yet readable, these essays offer intelligent discussion on such topics as the Japanese delight in wordplay, the hidden comic content of Japanese newspapers, the role of film and television in developing modern Japanese stand-up comedy, and formal censorship and its impact on humorous writing and self-expression in Japan. Understanding Humor in Japan breaks new ground in the study of humor, reveals Japan's rich comic traditions, and sheds light on much that is taken for granted about the role of laughter in civilized societies.