No joke Wisse, Ruth R
2013., 20130521, 2013, 2013-05-21, Volume:
4
eBook
Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks ...by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.
Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew. Among other topics, the book looks at how Jewish humor channeled Jewish learning and wordsmanship into new avenues of creativity, brought relief to liberal non-Jews in repressive societies, and enriched popular culture in the United States.
Even as it invites readers to consider the pleasures and profits of Jewish humor, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? And is "leave 'em laughing" the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?
A National Joke Medhurst, Andy
2007, 2005-01-01, 20070101
eBook
Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging ...from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.
Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.
Conversational humour, which broadly encompasses (sequences of) utterances that are designed to ‘amuse’ participants or are treated as ‘amusing’ by participants across various kinds of social ...interaction, is an inherently social phenomenon involving not only the speaker but at least one recipient. An episode of conversational humour includes (at least) a humour bid proffered by the speaker and the response to it by the recipient. This study focuses on the recipient’s responses to humour and introduces a framework for analysing responses to humour bids which is grounded in a close analysis of the sequential trajectory of humour episodes. Drawing on data from intercultural initial interactions in English, and focusing on the sequential trajectory of humour episodes through the lens of interactional pragmatics, this study proposes a typology of responses to humour bids, offering a basis for operationalisation in talk-ininteraction. Within this framework, there are five sequentially distinct types of responses that can follow a humour bid: 1) disattending humour, 2) minimal response to humour: sequence closure, 3) minimal response to humour: serious response, 4) minimal response to humour: agreement, and 5) post-expanding humour.
•This paper introduces a systematic model for analysing responses to conversational humour in their interactive context.•Humour can be responded to in five distinct sequential ways.•This model makes the study of humour responses more analytically tractable.•It is premised on the assumption that participants are held (normatively) accountable for their responses to humour bids.
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Starting from my former empirical studies but supplemented with fresh fictional “data” from Lars von Trier’s latest TV series Riget Exodus (2022), I first describe how Danes use humour in very ...characteristic ways, also in cross-cultural professional settings. Next, I explain not only Danish humour but all national humour with the notion of humour socialisation, which integrates and combines national humour with the national language on the one hand, and the specific national process of civilisation on the other hand. Moving to Nordic humour, I focus on how Danes and Swedes perceive each other’s humour, and then explain divergences between the humour of these two Nordic countries. These differences, I conclude, are the result mainly of differences in their respective civilising processes, while I am waiting and hoping for deeper comparative linguistic studies of the use of ‘humour warning signals in Danish and Swedish.
This book is the result of almost a decade of research in several related aspects of the linguistics of humor. As such, it is inevitably a composite and the result of a compromise between my desire ...to cover, on the one hand, as much as possible of the scholarship pertaining to humor research in linguistics and, on the other, my own research interests in the field. The book combines a representative, if not exhaustive, survey of the literature in the linguistics of humor, with critical analyses of the more significant approaches and my own original ventures. For the most part, I hope I have provided enough indications to indicate which is which. No chapter is anyone of those three things exclusively, but the beginning of the book clearly tends towards the survey, the middle towards the critique, and the end towards original work.
Tourism and humour Pearce, Philip L; Pabel, Anja
2015., 2015, 2015-06-12, Volume:
68
eBook
This book is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about humour in all kinds of tourism settings. It discusses the many ways in which humour can occur during tourism exchanges including guided ...tours, tourism marketing and promotion and travel narratives. Other themes include the role of humour in enhancing the tourist experience, the benefits of tourism humour, considerations of when humour may appear inappropriate in tourism settings and the development of tourism humour theory. The work includes much original material collected by the authors. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers of tourism as well as humour scholars from other disciplines.
The Language of Humour Ross, Alison
1998, 20050802, 2005-08-02T00:00:00, 2005-08-02, Volume:
16
eBook
The Language of Humour:* examines the importance of the social context for humour* explores the issue of gender and humour in areas such as the New Lad culture in comedy and stand-up comedy* includes ...comic transcripts from TV sketches such as Clive Anderson and Peter Cook
Eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers took interest in humour and, in particular, humorous incongruities. Humour was not necessarily their main interest; however, observations on humour ...could support their more general philosophical theories. Spontaneous and unintentional humour such as anecdotes, witty remarks and absurd events were the styles of humour that they analysed and made part of their theories. Prepared humour such as verbal jokes were rarely included in their observations, likely dismissed as too vulgar and not requiring intellectual effort. Humour, as analysed by several eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers, was seen as part of daily life or life simulated on stage. In the twentieth century, Freud emphasized a possible ‘relief’ function of ‘prepared’ humour such as jokes. Additionally, linguists began developing theories to analyse jokes. A joke has a particular structure that is constructed with the aim of achieving a humorous effect. This structure makes jokes suitable for linguistic analysis. In the present-day humour research, jokes have become a main topic of research. This linguistically oriented joke research neglects many other forms of humour: spontaneous humour, non-verbal humour, physical humour, and many forms of unintentional humour that appear in real life. We want to survey and re-evaluate the contributions to the humour research of these eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and clarify that their more general contributions to the humour research have been neglected in favour of the very restricted form of prepared humour and linguistically expressed and analysed humour as it appears in jokes. We hope that the views expressed in this paper will help to steer the humour research away from joke research and help to integrate humour in the design of human-computer interfaces and smart environments. That is, rather than considering only verbal jokes, we should aim at generating smart environments that understand, facilitate or create humour that goes beyond jokes.
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