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All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.
The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays unfolds as a series of questions, commentaries, and criticisms of the analysis, interpretation, and explanation of folklore. Can we confidently regard jokes as the catharsis of sexual and aggressive impulses? What is the basis for characterizing a joke as Jewish or Scottish or Japanese? What do we really know about “dirty jokes”? How is a text or behavior constructed so that it is perceived as humorous? Can we get a computer to reliably recognize jokes? What is the relevance of memetics and a Darwinian paradigm to understanding folklore change over time? Can we identify laws operating in the realm of folklore? How can the marginalization, extinction, or continuity of traditions be explained? In the course of addressing these questions, Elliott Oring identifies some fundamental problems, brings new evidence and observations to the discussion, and proffers some original and startling insights. While recognizing the study of jokes and other forms of folklore as a humanistic endeavor, Oring believes in the relevance of a scientific perspective to the enterprise. He values clear definitions, tests of hypotheses and theories, empirical evidence, experiment, and the search for laws. Written in a sophisticated yet accessible style, The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays stimulates both scholars and students alike and contributes to the creation of a more robust folkloristics in the twenty-first century.
Personal essays exploring identity, work, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture.
"Men cannot laugh heartily without showing their teeth," quipped Samuel Butler. From St Paul to Descartes to Adorno, scholars and writers have questioned the ethics of laughter - any laughter. In The Pleasure of Fools, Jure Gantar wrestles with our moral right to laugh and the limitations of contemporary critical approaches.The crucial question is not whether or not there is offensive laughter but whether or not all laughter offends. Almost everyone has felt the bitter stab of malicious laughter and knows that laughter can be cruel, but it is more difficult to decide if there is also laughter that can never insult. Through a reading of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Molière, Fielding, and Rostand, Victorian nonsense poetry, and the philosophical texts of Plato, Dante, and More, Gantar explores the reasons for critics' prejudice against comedy, the specific position of laughter in various utopian societies, and self-deprecating laughter and role of the comedian as its primary producer. His conclusions contradict basic postmodern thought and contribute to current debates on the epistemological nature of criticism.
I am not a writer or an author of novels or essays. It always discourages me to see so many authors or writers, some established, others just attempting to make a name for themselves every time I enter a bookstore and see thousands and thousands of titles of novels or books or whatever the writer thinks it is worth writing about. Some are new editions, others neatly arranged in that heap called bargain purchases. It immediately put a stop to my idea of putting what I think is a subject that must be indelible, of everyday events that people talk about after seeing it on TV or coming across it on a page of a local or national newspaper. Something like Charles Krauthammer's seminal essays in Things That Matter, Andy Rooney's astute observations in Common Sense, or the provocative articles in humorist Dave Barry's I Am Not Making This Up. But growing older in age and with the remaining future not so distant anymore, the impulse and the courage to tell anyone who is interested in what you have to say becomes compulsive as magma wanting to erupt from the bowels of the earth's core. That is why these essays compiled and culled from the files of what I have kept these years writing editorials in magazines, from applications to a graduate school I never finished and received a diploma, and from other sources the names I can't recall, from recent and contemporaneous events onerously repeated by pundits and so-called experts, became bound in a form you are holding today. The ideas may be past but still relevant. They might be current and dissecting them with the pros and cons of opinions providing the diversity we strive for. I do not claim originality in the subjects I write about. They might not be original, but I have burnished them with a different patina the reader never thought of colorizing. The research of some of the data was done via websites, different articles read, speeches made, my notes and recollections, and some older versions of articles I have written in some newsmagazines. For privacy reasons, I have changed the names in one essay in particular, as I was not successful in communicating with the persons despite attempts at doing so. I have also, to the best of my ability, adhered to the fair use doctrine using some data or quotations in some of my essays. In any case, I hope it is while your time, effort, and your trip to the bookstore to come up and peruse what is in your hands.
Here's a writer who can put you to sleep each night and be proud of it. Blending a gift for gab with the abstract, amusing, and absurd, George cooks up a hearty hodgepodge of humor, homily, thought and wit. A rich heritage of humor visible in many of his tales from childhood stems from a special relationship with his father, an amateur humorist, and, perhaps, George's greatest humor resource. Believing that anything mirth doing is mirth doing light, George proceeds to demonstrate. George's genuine love for family, friends, and country gives him an edge in reporting on the power of love in a society seemed intent on diluting it. In tale after tale you'll read and appreciate his ability to weave words without being 'wordy, ' recount values without sounding preachy, and poke fun at all without offending. Add humor and practical observations and you've got thoughtful essays 'mirth' reading.