Modern black humour represents a rich history of radical innovation stretching back to the antebellum period. Laughing Fit to Kill reveals how black writers, artists, and comedians have used humour ...across two centuries as a uniquely powerful response to forced migration and enslavement. Glenda Carpio traces how, through various modes of “conjuring,” through gothic, grotesque and absurdist slapstick, through stinging satire, hyperbole, and burlesque, and through the strategic expression of racial stereotype itself, black humourists of all sorts have enacted “rituals of redress.” In highlighting the tradition and tropes of black humourists, Carpio illuminates the reach of slavery’s long arm into our contemporary popular culture. She convincingly demonstrates the ways that, for instance, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle’s modes of post-Civil Rights tragicomedy are deeply indebted to that of William Wells Brown and Charles Chesnutt’s 19th-century comedic conjuring. Likewise, she reveals how contemporary iconoclasts such as Ishmael Reed and Suzan-Lori Parks owe much to the intricate satiric grammar of black linguistic expression rooted in slavery. Carpio also demonstrates how Robert Colescott’s 1970s paintings and Kara Walker’s silhouette installations use a visual vocabulary to extend comedy in a visual register. The jokes in this tradition are bawdy, brutal, horrific and insurgent, and they have yet to be fully understood. Laughing Fit to Kill provides a new critical lexicon for understanding the jabbing punch-lines that have followed slavery’s long legacy.
This book explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and ...political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically-charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust.
La Navidad en el trópico Como muchas otras creencias impuestas, era la víspera de Navidad en nuestra casa, de país tropical, donde no cantamos villancicos, ni cae nieve, ni señores gordos y viejos ...vestidos de rojo se encaraman en los techos a tirar regalos a las chimeneas: nuestra idea de chimenea habría hecho que los juguetes terminaran como parte de las brasas y cenizas de la cocina de leña que alguna vez vimos en casa de mi abuela. Yo siempre he sido de sueño pesado, mientras que mamá toda la vida ha padecido de un sueño ligero que la mantenía en vela y de mal humor al día siguiente; el motor de la refrigeradora la despertaba; incluso lo escuchaba a bastantes metros con paredes de por medio. Como en nuestro pueblo la costumbre de los ladrones era la de meterse por el techo y ella, acostumbrada a no dejarse quitar lo que con esfuerzo le había costado conseguir, como buena mujer abandonada con sus hijos, no dudó en cargar la escopeta, salir lo más callada al punto donde pudiera divisar en la oscuridad el techo y tirarle a la primera sombra que viera en movimiento sospechoso.
This title deals with the construction of diverse forms of humour in everyday oral, written, and mediatised interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in ...the production of interactional humour in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The book draws on a variety of up-to-date approaches and methodologies, and will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, and social semiotics.
This book is the first extensive sociological study of the relationship between humor and social background. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it ...explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States. The exploration of social differences in sense of humor starts off from one specific, and not very prestigious, humorous genre: the joke.Good Humor, Bad Tasteexplains why jokes are good humor to some, bad taste to others.
Authoritarian Laughter
explores the political history of the satire and humor
magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists,
writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored
...Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was
incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė
investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet
subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.
Broom was multidirectional-it both facilitated
Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet
regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly
created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for
critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in
anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early
1990s.
Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western
peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While
authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and
seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not
only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other
about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.
This volume presents an in-depth analysis of mock politeness, bringing together research from different academic fields and investigating a range of first-order metapragmatic labels for mock ...politeness in British English and Italian. It is the first book-length theorisation and detailed description of mock politeness and, as such, contributes to the growing field of impoliteness. The approach taken is methodologically innovative because it takes a first-order metalanguage approach, basing the analysis on behaviours which participants themselves have identified as impolite. Furthermore, it exploits the affordances of corpus pragmatics, a rapidly developing field. Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students researching im/politeness and verbal aggression, in particular those interested in im/politeness implicatures and non-conventional meanings.
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