An important and timely expansion of American racial discourse. Tucker’s demonstration of how the comic is not (just) funny and how rage is not (just) destructive is a welcome reminder that willful ...injustice merits irreverent scorn. --Derek C. Maus, coeditor of Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights
Adroitly explores how comic rage is a skillfully crafted, multifaceted critique of white supremacy and a soaring articulation of African American humanity and possibility. Sparkling and highly readable scholarship.--Keith Gilyard, author of John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism
A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it comic rage, and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America’s racial divide.
In Furiously Funny , Tucker finds that comic rage developed from black oral tradition and first shows up in literature by George Schuyler and Ralph Ellison shortly after World War II. He examines its role in novels and plays, following the growth of the expression into comics and stand-up comedy and film, where Richard Pryor, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock have all used the technique.
Their work, Tucker argues, shares a comic vision that centralizes the African American experience and realigns racial discourse through an unequivocal frustration at white perceptions of blackness. They perpetuate images of black culture that run the risk of confirming stereotypes as a means to ridicule whites for allowing those destructive depictions to reinforce racist hierarchies. At the center of comic rage, then, is a full-throated embrace of African American folk life and cultural traditions that have emerged in defiance of white hegemony’s attempts to devalue, exploit, or distort those traditions. The simultaneous expression of comedy and militancy enables artists to reject the mainstream perspective by confronting white audiences with America’s legacy of racial oppression.
Tucker shows how this important art form continues to expand in new ways in the twenty-first century and how it acts as a form of resistance where audiences can engage in subjects that are otherwise taboo.
Political humour is employed to define the boundaries between opposing political groups and to express discontent against politicians and political acts. The sociopolitical context of its production ...and circulation not only influences its form, content, functions, and targets, but also determines whether it will be accepted, banned, or manipulated to serve the political agendas of certain groups. Hence, political humour becomes a ritual site where political identities are constantly constructed and (re)negotiated. Drawing on studies coming from different sociocultural communities, the authors underline the variety of humorous genres and communicative functions related to political humour, while they point out that humour research needs to look beyond the metapragmatic stereotype often surrounding the use of humour in politics.
•We studied the Covid-19 humor appreciation during Italy's lockdown in March 2020.•Humor inspired by Covid-19 showed a mark of aversiveness, but not of funniness.•With increasing age and in women, ...Covid-19 humor was judged more aversive.•The use of humor as a coping mechanism increased the appreciation of Covid-19 humor.•Perceived risk of contagion raised the disturbing potential of Covid-19 humor.
We often see an upsurge of humor inspired by tragic circumstances: this happened also during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak. However, little is known about the emotional response to tragedy-triggered humor, let alone Covid-19 humor. With a large-scale survey completed during the early stages of Italy's lockdown, we studied the appreciation (funniness and aversiveness) of different formats of Covid-19 humor shared on social media. Results of an analysis of the role of demographic, personality, and psychological distance factors with linear mixed models showed that Covid-19 humor lacks a “signature” of funniness, but displays a mark of aversiveness. Among demographics, age and gender were key factors: with increasing age and in women, Covid-19 humor was judged as more aversive. Individuals using humor to cope with uneasy circumstances judged Covid-19 humor as funnier and less aversive. Furthermore, the perceived risk of infection amplified Covid-19 humor aversiveness, while kilometrical distance from the first Italian contagion hotspot raised the amusement in global terms. These findings expand our knowledge about dark humor and should raise awareness of the great variation in the emotional impact of Covid-19 humor and of the need to ponder where and with whom to share the laugh about the pandemic.
Jokes and Targets takes up an appealing and entertaining topic -- the
social and historical origins of jokes about familiar targets such as rustics,
Jewish spouses, used car salesmen, and dumb ...blondes. Christie Davies explains why
political jokes flourished in the Soviet Union, why Europeans tell jokes about
American lawyers but not about their own lawyers, and why sex jokes often refer to
France rather than to other countries. One of the world's leading experts on the
study of humor, Davies provides a wide-ranging and detailed study of the jokes that
make up an important part of everyday conversation.
Despite popular opinions of the ´dark Middle Ages´ and a ´gloomy early modern age´, many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, enternained and rediculed each other. This volume demonstrates how ...important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.
Pornind de la ideea unui demers cumulativ, Cosmina-Maria Berindei compară imaginarul cu un „muzeu etnografic ce se compune din obiecte care au, fiecare în parte, o poveste: au fost confecţionate de ...către un meşter, au avut unul sau mai mulţi proprietari şi au cunoscut un traseu propriu, înainte de a deveni obiecte de inventar.Iadul este locul în care îşi vor petrece eternitatea cei care nu fac parte din universul social al comunităţii, fiind vinovaţi de practici amendate de către aceasta.CosminaMaria Berindei apreciază că „îngăduinţa nemăsurată privitoare la posibilitatea omului de a avea un destin postum fericit nu vine (...) dintr-o atitudine identică cu aceea care se articulează în modernitatea noastră, în care iadul aproape că a dispărut din imaginar" (p. 351), ci din faptul că, bazându-se pe o religiozitate arhaică, imaginarul culturii tradiţionale româneşti nu conţine ideea judecăţii morale prin care să fie legitimat accesul la un destin fericit.Sunt reprezentări iconografice ale temelor enumerate mai sus, realizare pe pereţii unor biserici din România: biserica de lemn din Şurdeşti (MM), biserica de lemn din Ieud-Deal (MM), Biserica reformată din Mungeni (HR), Mănăstirea Voroneţ (SV), biserica de lemn din Fereşti (MM), Mănăstirea Humor (SV), biserica de lemn din Pojori-Cema (VL), biserica din Fârtăţeşti (VL), Biserica din Dozeşti (VL), Mănăstirea Hurezi (VL) şi alte câteva.
Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the cultural history of the concept from its British origins as a way ...to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the history of an idea, Wickberg's study provides new insights into a peculiarly modern cultural sensibility.
The expression "sense of humor" was first coined in the 1840s and the idea that such a sense was a personality trait to be valued developed only in the 1870s. What is the relationship between Medieval humoral medicine and this distinctively modern idea of the sense of humor? What has it meant in the past 125 years to declare that someone lacks a sense of humor? How is the joke, as a twentieth-century quasi-literary form, different from the traditional folktale? Wickberg addresses these questions, among others, using the history of ideas to throw new light on the way contemporary Americans think and speak.
The context of Wickberg's analysis is Anglo-American; the specifically British meanings of humor and laughter from the sixteenth century forward provide the framework for understanding American cultural values in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The genealogy of the sense of humor is, like the study of keywords, an avenue into a significant aspect of the cultural history of modernity. Drawing on a wide range of sources and disciplinary perspectives, Wickberg's analysis challenges many of the prevailing views of modern American culture and suggests a new model for cultural historians.
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