In 1939, when the Spanish civil war had recently ended, avant-garde humorists Miguel Mihura and Tono published an absurdist propaganda ‘novel’, María de la Hoz María of the Sickle, about the ...republican zone during the conflict. Unlike other Francoist propaganda pieces of the time, it did not focus on the violence or the alleged moral degeneracy of the ‘reds’ but rather on what its authors perceived as the absurdity of egalitarianism and the progressive ideals. The novel, while not contradicting the emerging official ideology, conspicuously overlooked some of its key tenets, particularly those related to nationalism, Catholicism and Franco’s leadership. This article contextualises María de la Hoz in the development process of Spanish avant-garde humour and in Francoist propaganda fiction during and immediately after the civil war in order to analyse the ideological stance it represented and, potentially, reinforced. As a political piece, the book seems to convey the position of an affluent middle class who did not enthusiastically believe in Francoism but preferred it to the republican alternative, caricatured as a communist regime by nationalist propaganda.
Missing a Beat Cohen, Mark; Wakefield, Dan
03/2010
eBook
In 1961, Beat writer Seymour Krim set Greenwich Village on its ear with a slim volume of essays that featured an unleashed voice, a brash title, and a foreword by Norman Mailer. James Baldwin called ...Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer an "extraordinary volume." Saul Bellow published an excerpt in his journal The Noble Savage, and Mailer saluted Krim’s jazzy prose with its "shifts and shatterings of mood." Despite such praise and critical attention, Krim’s work is excluded from most Beat anthologies and is little known outside literary circles. With Missing a Beat, a collection of eighteen essays by Krim published between 1957 and 1989, Cohen introduces this influential writer to a new generation. In the Village Voice, New York Magazine, New York Times, and elsewhere, Krim pioneered a new style of subjective and personal reporting to write about the postwar American scene from a Jewish angle. Aggressively unacademic, Krim’s journalism displays the "rapid, nervous, breathless tempo" that Irving Howe called a hallmark of Jewish literature. Krim outlived his early literary fame, but he produced an impressive body of work and was a tremendous prose stylist. Missing a Beat resurrects an American original, finding Krim a new literary home among such celebrated writers as Norman Mailer, David Mamet, and Saul Bellow.
Highlights • Damage to the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulated gyrus may underlie alexithymia and humor appreciation deficits. • Olfactory frontal groove meningioma may predispose to ...problems with emotionalizing and humor appreciation processing. • The inclusion of humor assessment may be a valuable tool for clinicians dealing with patients with olfactory meningiomas.
•Humour is a social phenomenon, occurring in social and playful contexts.•The implicit impact of humour in individuals with autism (ASD) is currently unknown.•This study investigated the implicit and ...explicit influence of humour processing in ASD.•An implicit effect of humour was found to be content dependent in ASD.•The altered humorous processing in ASD may be related to social motivation.
Humour is fundamentally a social phenomenon, occurring frequently in social and playful contexts. The positive affect resulting from an experience of enjoyed humour makes it socially rewarding. A lack of sense of humour has been associated with individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however, the existing literature is sparse and inconclusive. In this study, we investigated implicit and explicit humour understanding and appreciation in ASD.
Specifically, an implicit item-item associative task was used, in which participants saw neutral-humorous and neutral-neutral sequences of two pictures in an encoding phase. Following a filler task, sequence recognition was measured in a yes/no test phase. At the end of the task, explicit measures of humour understanding and appreciation were completed by the participants, who rated the picture sequences for humour appreciation and funniness.
Results revealed that, at an explicit level, participants with ASD were able to enjoy and understand the humorous stimuli as much as typically developing (TD) participants. At an implicit level, however, the results suggest that humour processing may be specially content-dependent in ASD. Fine-grained analysis on task performance indeed showed an altered humorous processing for social, but not for non-social humorous content in the ASD group, while that was not the case for the TD group.
These results suggest that participants with ASD may be distinctively motivated to attend to social reward cues such as social humorous stimuli. These findings are discussed within the social motivation hypothesis framework.
Judg. 3.12–30 details the assassination of King Eglon of Moab by the Benjaminite Ehud ben Gera. Many scholars insist that the story was originally meant to be funny, contending that the text casts ...Eglon (i.e. ‘Little Calf’) humorously as a slaughtered bovine. Indeed, some regard the text as ‘satire’, though there remains no consensus as to what, exactly, constitutes the butt of the joke. In this article, I argue that Eglon’s fat and Ehud’s feigned oracle work together to form a comical critique of foreign rulers and their reliance on divination. The argument draws on Victor Raskin’s semantic theory of verbal humour along with a re-examination of fat on elite male bodies in the Hebrew Bible and the practice of ancient oracle giving, as reflected in cuneiform sources. I thus aim to elucidate ways the text would have registered as humorous and meaningful for an ancient West Asian audience.
Lincoln’s study of Native American humour moves from tribal culture to interethnic literature. He covers the traditional Trickster of origin myths, historical ironies (speeches, treatises, as-told-to ...life stories), Euroamericans ‘playing Indian’, Feminist Indian home humour, contemporary painters and playwrights reinventing Coyote, popular mixed-blood music and Red English, and three Native American novelists, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and N. Scott Momaday, as well as a bicultural novel, The Northern Lights, by Howard Norman.
This article contends performance comedy serves as a mechanism for expressing ethnic and racial stereotypes in public and presents a challenge to studies of contemporary racial discourse which ...suggest overt racetalk in public is on the decline. In this ethnographic study on the training of stand-up comedians, I probe how comedy students learn to use rhetorical performance strategies to couch ethnic and racial stereotypes in more palatable ways, in order to be 'funny' rather than 'offensive' in public. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study illustrates the role elites play in managing racial discourse. It is found that white versus non-white comedy students are taught to engage in racial discourse in different ways. Whites are taught distance and denial strategies which allow them to engage in overt racial commentary and deny racism or racist intent, while non-whites are often encouraged to engage in racial stereotypes uncritically. This study shows how strategic use of humor allows the 'constraints' on current racial discourse, on whites in particular, to be broken, suggesting a new phase of color-blind racism may be underway.
Dans le dernier roman de Miguel de Cervantès, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, le récit se confond avec le pèlerinage qu’effectuent les deux héros éponymes entre les îles des mers ...septentrionales, dont la mythique Thulé, et les terres ibériques d’abord, puis le sud de la France et, enfin, l’Italie avec Rome pour aboutissement heureux et amoureux de ce long parcours. Or, la narration ne reflète pas l’ascension symbolique que devrait constituer l’arrivée dans la ville sainte. Le roman se fait critique et présente de nombreux effets déconcertants. Ce travail se propose d’étudier trois mécanismes d’écriture qui installent une vision parodique de Rome tout en invitant à une facétieuse mise à distance des stéréotypes. En premier lieu, la stratégie de retardement se sert des détours géographiques et narratifs pour étirer le temps du récit. Puis, la rhétorique du contrepoint met en évidence la dualité de la ville de Rome, entre sainteté et décadence. Et enfin, l’alternance brevitas / amplificatio dérange et surprend dans les moments de forte tension. Tout se passe comme si Cervantès, une fois encore, évitant tout discours univoque et grâce au recours à la parodie, nous invitait à une réflexion ludique et à une lecture active qui confirment la modernité de son écriture romanesque.
Human dignity is an absolute inner value possessed by all humans. In the workplace, due to the prevalence of negative behaviors, human dignity often becomes a target for erosion. Accordingly, the ...author argues that human dignity is the most profoundly affected aspect amidst all the
resulting consequences. Through in-depth interviews with 18 working professionals who have experienced the impact of uncivil behavior from superiors, peers, and subordinates, this paper demonstrates how they have employed the strategy of passive resistance responses as a means to restitute
their dignity. The restoration of dignity has, in turn, been shown to significantly enhance their overall wellbeing. On the theoretical front, this paper introduces the concept of 'dignity defense' as a central theme, which has enabled them to adopt a wide range of passive resistance mechanisms
- ranging from temporal deflection, delayed responses, reflective pauses, competence building, the use of humour, knowledge gathering, diplomatic inquiry, to evidence-based communication. Overall, this study distinguishes passive resistance responses from active confrontational responses
and theoretically anchors passive resistance responses within the context of Eastern and Western philosophies.
The role of storybooks in offering an educational resource that promotes young children's cognitive and creative development has been recognised in the previous literature. The small-scale ...exploratory study reported here investigated children's senses of humour through pop-up storybook production. A workshop in Hong Kong, entitled Storybook Production: Your Own Pop-Up Storybook, was conducted with eight participants (girls, aged 7-9 years) as part of a summer programme in the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education at the University of Hong Kong. During the workshop, the children were taught two core aspects of creative expression: narrative techniques and the pop-up effects involved in creating a storybook. The children created their storylines, infusing their senses of humour into scenes on storyboards and illustrations in pop-up books. They introduced humour in the form of the jokes and funny behaviours of their characters. Their final products provided evidence of talented young children's expression and understanding of humour.
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