American Humor

American Humor PDF Author: Constance Rourke
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character," singles out the archetypal figures of the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel to illuminate the fundamental role of popular culture in fashioning a distinctive American sensibility. A memorable performance in its own right, American Humor crackles with the jibes and jokes of generations while presenting a striking picture of a vagabond nation in perpetual self-pursuit. Davy Crockett and Henry James, Jim Crow and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders in a work that inspired such later critics as Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs and which still has much to say about the America of Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

American Humor

American Humor PDF Author: Constance Rourke
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character," singles out the archetypal figures of the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel to illuminate the fundamental role of popular culture in fashioning a distinctive American sensibility. A memorable performance in its own right, American Humor crackles with the jibes and jokes of generations while presenting a striking picture of a vagabond nation in perpetual self-pursuit. Davy Crockett and Henry James, Jim Crow and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders in a work that inspired such later critics as Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs and which still has much to say about the America of Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The Humour of America

The Humour of America PDF Author: Angus Evan Abbott
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description


The Humour of America

The Humour of America PDF Author: Angus Evan Abbott
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Excerpt from The Humour of America: Selected, With an Introduction and Index of American Humorists Hen the unfortunate man standing on the scaffold was asked by a spectator to make a speech, he said that, considering the interesting pro gramme which had been prepared by their good friend the Sheriff, he could not hope to say anything likely to amuse them. The compiler of a book of humour may recognise a like anxiety on the part of the public to push on to the principal attraction. There arises on his mental vision the eager face of the book-buyer, as he hurriedly skims over the leaves at the commencement of the volume, to find the end of the introduction and the beginning of the humour. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Humour of America

The Humour of America PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
"The Humour of America" by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bill Nye, Charles Dudley Warner, Eugene Field, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Whitcomb Riley, Benjamin Franklin, Artemus Ward. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The Wit and Humor of America

The Wit and Humor of America PDF Author: Marshall Pinckney Wilder
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
In this complete 10 Volume set are selections from the pen of "this company of fun-makers" as well as many more, including a number by clever women humorists. This collection is made up of "poems, stories, humorous articles, fables, and fairy tales offered for your choice, with subjects as diverse as the styles ; but however the laugh is gained, in whatever fashion the jest is delivered, the laugh-maker is a public benefactor, for laughter is the salt of life, and keeps the whole dish sweet," (foreword). Authors such as Bret Harte, Henry Ward Beecher, James Whitcomb Riley, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and many more.

The Humour of America

The Humour of America PDF Author: James Barr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780849503078
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television PDF Author: Silas Kaine Ezell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711941X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book examines contemporary American animated humor, focusing on popular animated television shows in order to explore the ways in which they engage with American culture and history, employing a peculiarly American way of using humor to discuss important cultural issues. With attention to the work of American humorists, such as the Southwest humorists, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the question of the extent to which modern animated satire shares the qualities of earlier humor, particularly the use of setting, the carnivalesque, collective memory, racial humor, and irony, Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television concentrates on a particular strand of American humor: the use of satire to expose the gap between the American ideal and the American experience. Taking up the notion of ’The Great American Joke’, the author examines the discursive humor of programmes such as The Simpsons, South Park , Family Guy , King of the Hill, Daria, American Dad!, The Boondocks, The PJs and Futurama . A study of how animated television programmes offer a new discourse on a very traditional strain of American humor, this book will appeal to scholars and students of popular culture, television and media studies, American literature and visual studies, and contemporary humor and satire.

Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America

Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America PDF Author: John Limon
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.

An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor

An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor PDF Author: Bennett Cerf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Senses of Humor

The Senses of Humor PDF Author: Daniel Wickberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801454379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor, and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the relatively short cultural history of the concept to 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? Why do modern Americans say it is a good thing not to take oneself seriously? How is the joke, as a twentieth-century quasi-literary form, different from the traditional folktale? Wickberg addresses these questions among others and in the process uses the history of ideas to throw new light on the way contemporary Americans think and speak about humor and laughter. 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.