Raising Laughter

Raising Laughter PDF Author: Robert Sellers
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750998377
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The 1970s were the era of the three-day week, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the winter of discontent, trade union Bolshevism and wildcat strikes. Through sitcoms, Raising Laughter provides a fresh look at one of our most divisive and controversial decades. Aside from providing entertainment to millions of people, the sitcom is a window into the culture of the day. Many of these sitcoms tapped into the decade's sense of cynicism, failure and alienation, providing much-needed laughter for the masses. Shows like Rising Damp and Fawlty Towers were classic encapsulations of worn-out, run-down Britain, while the likes of Dad's Army looked back sentimentally at a romanticised English past. For the first time, the stories behind the making of every sitcom from the 1970s are told by the actors, writers, directors and producers who made them all happen. This is nostalgia with a capital N, an oral history, the last word, and an affectionate salute to the kind of comedy programme that just isn't made anymore.

Raising Laughter

Raising Laughter PDF Author: Robert Sellers
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750998377
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The 1970s were the era of the three-day week, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the winter of discontent, trade union Bolshevism and wildcat strikes. Through sitcoms, Raising Laughter provides a fresh look at one of our most divisive and controversial decades. Aside from providing entertainment to millions of people, the sitcom is a window into the culture of the day. Many of these sitcoms tapped into the decade's sense of cynicism, failure and alienation, providing much-needed laughter for the masses. Shows like Rising Damp and Fawlty Towers were classic encapsulations of worn-out, run-down Britain, while the likes of Dad's Army looked back sentimentally at a romanticised English past. For the first time, the stories behind the making of every sitcom from the 1970s are told by the actors, writers, directors and producers who made them all happen. This is nostalgia with a capital N, an oral history, the last word, and an affectionate salute to the kind of comedy programme that just isn't made anymore.

Crying Laughing

Crying Laughing PDF Author: Lance Rubin
Publisher: Ember
ISBN: 0525644709
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A tragicomic story of bad dates, bad news, bad performances, and one girl's determination to find the funny in high school from the author of Denton Little's Deathdate. Winnie Friedman has been waiting for the world to catch on to what she already knows: she's hilarious. It might be a long wait, though. After bombing a stand-up set at her own bat mitzvah, Winnie has kept her jokes to herself. Well, to herself and her dad, a former comedian and her inspiration. Then, on the second day of tenth grade, the funniest guy in school actually laughs at a comment she makes in the lunch line and asks her to join the improv troupe. Maybe he's even . . . flirting? Just when Winnie's ready to say yes to comedy again, her father reveals that he's been diagnosed with ALS. That is . . . not funny. Her dad's still making jokes, though, which feels like a good thing. And Winnie's prepared to be his straight man if that's what he wants. But is it what he needs? Caught up in a spiral of epically bad dates, bad news, and bad performances, Winnie's struggling to see the humor in it all. But finding a way to laugh is exactly what will see her through. **A Junior Library Guild Selection**

Love, Laughter, and Parenting

Love, Laughter, and Parenting PDF Author: Steve Biddulph
Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
ISBN: 9780789471826
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Why parenting is important - Pregnancy and birth - Living with a toddler - Discipline - Role of the father - Pre-school years - Helping a child to change habits - Preparing for school - Motherhood.

Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers

Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers PDF Author: Maurice J. Elias
Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
ISBN: 9780609805251
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The world before September 11, 2001, was challenging enough for parents of teenagers. Now it is more so. Our families, schools, and workplaces need Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers who will not only be knowledgeable, responsible, nonviolent, and caring youths, but who also will grow up to be compassionate, committed, and courageous adults. How can parents accomplish this? Not only do raging hormones make everything more intense for teenagers, but they have their own special issues concerning identity, self-confidence, peer pressure, and responsibility, including individuating from their parents. Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers shows parents how to use a balance of love, laughter, and limits to reach their goals. Drs. Elias, Tobias, and Friedlander, all respected experts in child behavior and parents of teenagers, have written a clear, informative book of sound advice that applies the insights of Daniel Goleman's best- seller, Emotional Intelligence, to unlock teenagers' untapped desire to belong to families and schools that make a difference and to contribute positively to them. Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers is filled with real-life scenarios, practical strategies, and the answers to the questions parents ask most frequently, all drawn from the authors' professional and personal experiences and given with warmth and humor. Guiding the way to compassionate, committed, courageous adults is a serious challenge, but its effective pursuit is a labor of love, a journey of joy, and a path filled with pride.

Laughter

Laughter PDF Author: Anca Parvulescu
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262514745
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw. Most of our theories of laughter are not concerned with laughter. Rather, their focus is the laughable object, whether conceived of as the comic, the humorous, jokes, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the materiality of the burst of laughter itself. She sets out to uncover an archive of laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its tones. Historically, laughter—especially the passionate burst of laughter—has often been a faux pas. Manuals for conduct, abetted by philosophical treatises and literary and visual texts, warned against it, offering special injunctions to ladies to avoid jollity that was too boisterous. Returning laughter to the history of the passions, Parvulescu anchors it at the point where the history of the grimacing face meets the history of noise. In the civilizing process that leads to laughter's “falling into disrepute,” as Nietzsche famously put it, we can see the formless, contorted face in laughter being slowly corrected into a calm, social smile. How did the twentieth century laugh? Parvulescu points to a gallery of twentieth-century laughers and friends of laughter, arguing that it is through Georges Bataille that the century laughed its most distinct laugh. In Bataille's wake, laughter becomes the passion at the heart of poststructuralism. Looking back at the century from this vantage point, Parvulescu revisits four of its most challenging projects: modernism, the philosophical avant-gardes, feminism, and cinema. The result is an overview of the twentieth century as seen through the laughs that burst at some of its most convoluted junctures.

The Positive Psychology of Laughter and Humour

The Positive Psychology of Laughter and Humour PDF Author: Freda Gonot-Schoupinsky
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1837538344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Drawing on the authors’ diverse backgrounds and expertise, this is the first academic volume dedicated to the rarely discussed topic of laughter and humour in positive psychology.

It's Nice to Meet Me Too

It's Nice to Meet Me Too PDF Author: Cynthia Rust
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781592987689
Category : Biography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Meet Randy. He was diagnosed with the rare genetic disorder tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in 1979 at just nine months old. Written from the perspective of Randy's mother, Cynthia, it's nice to meet me too provides snapshots of what life is like raising a severely handicapped child. Randy's brought his fair share of heartbreaks but more importantly, endless laughter and joy. By putting down on paper a lifetime's worth of "Randy stories" that have been shared over with friends and family, she shows the comedic side of life with a child with special needs. - p. 4 of cover

Dickensian Laughter

Dickensian Laughter PDF Author: Malcolm Andrews
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191008745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humour? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster declared that: 'His leading quality was Humour.' At the end of Dickens's career he was acclaimed as 'the greatest English Humourist since Shakespeare's time.' In 1971 the critic Philip Collins surveyed recent decades of Dickens criticism and asked 'from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals would one ever guess that (as Dickens himself thought) humour was his leading quality, his highest faculty?' Forty years later, that rhetorical question has lost none of its force. Why? Perhaps Dickens's genius as a humourist is simply taken for granted, and critics prefer to turn to his other achievements; or perhaps humour is too hard to analyse without spoiling the fun? Whatever the reason, there has been very little by way of sustained critical investigation into what for most people has constituted Dickens's special claim to greatness. This book is framed as a series of essays examining and reflecting on Dickens's techniques for making us laugh. How is it that some written incident, or speech, or narrative 'aside' can fire off the page into the reader's conciousness and jolt him or her into a smile, a giggle, or a hearty laugh? That is the core question here. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was acclaimed at the time as having 'opened a fresh vein of humour' in English literature: what was the social nature of the humour that established this trademark 'Dickensian' method of making people laugh? And how many kinds of laughter are there in Dickens? What made Dickens himself laugh? Victorian and contemporary theories of laughter can provide useful insights into these processes - incongruity theory or the 'relief' theory of laughter, laughter's contagiousness (laughter as a 'social glue'), the art of comic timing, the neuroscience of laughter. These and other ideas are brought into play in this short book, which considers not only Dickens's novels but also his letters and journalism. And to that end there are copious quotations. The aim of the book is to make readers laugh and also to prompt them to reflect their laughter. It should have an interest not only for Dickensians but for anyone curious about the nature of laughter and how it is triggered.

Greek Laughter and Tears

Greek Laughter and Tears PDF Author: Margaret Alexiou
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474403808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Explores the range and complexity of human emotions and their transmission across cultural traditionsWhat makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time? How do these two primal, seemingly discrete and non-verbal modes of expression intersect in everyday life and ritual, and what range of emotions do they evoke? How may they be voiced, shaped and coloured in literature and liturgy, art and music?Bringing together scholars from diverse periods and disciplines of Hellenic and Byzantine studies, this volume explores the shifting shapes and functions of laughter and tears. With a focus on the tragic, the comic and the tragicomic dimensions of laughter and tears in art, literature and performance, as well as on their emotional, socio-cultural and religious significance, it breaks new ground in the study of ancient and Byzantine affectivity.Key featuresIncludes an international cast of 25 distinguished contributors Prominence is given to performative arts and to interactions with other cultures Transitions from Late Antiquity to Byzantium, and from Byzantium to the Renaissance, form focal points from which contributors look backwards, forwards and sidewaysHighlights the variety, audacity and quality of the finest Byzantine works and the extent to which they anticipated the renaissance

Laughter At The Foot Of The Cross

Laughter At The Foot Of The Cross PDF Author: M.a. Screech
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429721579
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
"Christian laughter is a maze: you could easily get snarled up within it." So says Michael A. Screech in his note to readers preceding this collection of fifty-three elegant and pithy essays. As Screech reveals, the question of whether laughter is acceptable to the god of the Old and New Testaments is a dangerous one. But we are fortunate in our gu