The Politics of Joking

The Politics of Joking PDF Author: Jana Kopelent Rehak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042985420X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

The Politics of Joking

The Politics of Joking PDF Author: Jana Kopelent Rehak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042985420X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

Strange Bedfellows

Strange Bedfellows PDF Author: Russell Leslie Peterson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813542847
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A significant number of Americans get some of their "news" about politics and national affairs from comedy shows. Is "infotainment" a debasement, or a replacement, for traditional news outlets?

Politics Is a Joke!

Politics Is a Joke! PDF Author: S. Robert Lichter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042997292X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Does late night political humor matter? Are late-night comedians merely entertaining, or do they have the power to influence the way we think about politics and politicians? Politics Is a Joke! situates late night comedy in the historical context of political humor and demonstrates how the public turn to this venue for political information, and are in turn affected by it. Using exclusive data collected by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the authors conduct a detailed and exhaustive analysis of political jokes on late night TV shows dating back to 1992 in order to pinpoint the main targets and themes of late-night comedy. Politics Is a Joke! uses a wide range of examples, from jokes about politicians' physical appearance and sex scandals to jokes about Congress and even the news media, to assess and understand the impact of political humor on political institutions, politicians and their policies and behavior. Engagingly written with analysis of jokes from comedians like Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Politics is a Joke! is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the crucial role late night comedy plays in our political universe - and anyone who enjoys a good laugh.

All Joking Aside

All Joking Aside PDF Author: Rebecca Krefting
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421414295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.

POLITICS IS A JOKE

POLITICS IS A JOKE PDF Author: S. ROBERT. LICHTER
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367097608
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description


The Politics of Getting the Joke

The Politics of Getting the Joke PDF Author: Bret Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description


Only Joking

Only Joking PDF Author: Jimmy Carr
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440627207
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Britain’s hottest young comedian presents a seriously funny, up-close look at joking matters—from the social origins of laughter, to the art and craft of humor, to why we can never remember the punch line—featuring over 300 jokes. As the host of the hit game show Distraction (now in its third season on Comedy Central) and one of the premier stand-up acts working today, award-winning comedian Jimmy Carr has won over millions of fans around the world with his trademark rapier wit, laced with "exquisitely economical and perfectly timed one-liners" (The Guardian). For this book he teams up with friend and fellow comedy writer Lucy Greeves to take an in-depth look at where humor comes from and how it works, through exploring its purest form: the joke. Only Joking begins with the mechanism of laughter—how it happens and why even infants do it—then delves into the power of the punch line, exploring the basics of all jokes, from the use of shock and surprise to advanced stand-up techniques such as the "pull-back/reveal." Carr and Greeves go on to explore taboo humor, jokes that bomb, and the psychology of finding something funny. They look into the long-standing connection between politics and humor, and discuss the survival prospects for contentious jokes in the current political climate. Throughout the book they conjure up a supporting cast of colorful joke enthusiasts, from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bruce, and discuss their influence on the jokes we tell today. Surveying across national, ethnic, and gender divides, this rollicking analysis of why joking will always be close to the human heart is an irresistible exploration of humor that makes clear why we need a good laugh now more than ever.

Seriously Funny

Seriously Funny PDF Author: Samuel Schmidt
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816598819
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Political jokes exist around the world and across many types of political systems. But what purposes do they serve? Do they have an impact on politics—or on politicians? Surprisingly, scholars have paid scant attention to these significant questions. And, until the publication of this book, no one had ever systematically studied political humor in Mexico. When the first edition of this work was published in Mexico, it caused a stir. Elected officials, it turned out, had grudgingly accepted that they and their politics could be the target of jokes uttered in public, and even on television, but they were incensed that a leading academic had collected political jokes into a book and analyzed their function in a country that had experienced nearly a century of one-party rule. Now available in English for the first time, Seriously Funny is a groundbreaking work. Its goal is to examine the ways in which political humor—including nicknames, anagrams, poems, and parodies of religious prayers, in addition to jokes—has developed and operated in one country over more than four centuries. Although political humor thrives in Mexico, it is often cleverly encoded so that it doesn’t appear to be critical of government policies or officials. But, writes Samuel Schmidt, that is precisely its purpose: to question the actions and assumptions of the party in power. Schmidt argues persuasively that political jokes are acts of minor rebellion: their objective is not to overthrow a government but to correct its mistakes.

Politics Jokes

Politics Jokes PDF Author: Peter Crumpton
Publisher: PeteyRF Creative
ISBN:
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description


The Joke Is on Us

The Joke Is on Us PDF Author: Julie A. Webber
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498569854
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This edited volume brings together scholars of comedy to assess how political comedy encounters neoliberal themes in contemporary media. Central to this task is the notion of genre; under neoliberal conditions (where market logics motivate most actions) genre becomes “mixed.” Once stable, discreet categories such as comedy, horror, drama and news and entertainment have become blurred so as to be indistinguishable. The classic modern paradigm of comedy/tragedy no longer holds, if it ever did. Moreover, as politics becomes more economic and less moral or normative under neoliberalism, we are able to see new resistance to comedic genres that support neoliberal strategies to hide racial and gender injustice such as unlaughter, ambiguity, and anti-comedy. There is also an increasing interest with comedy as a form of entertainment on the political right following both Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the U.S. Several essays confront this conservative comedy and place it in context of the larger humor history of these debates over free speech and political correctness. For comedians too, entry into popular media now follows the familiar neoliberal script of the celebration of self-help with the increasing admonishment of those who fail to win in market terms. Laughter plays an important role in shaming and valorizing (often at the same time!) the precarious subject in the aftermath of global recession. Doubling down on austerity, self-help policies and equivocation in the face of extremist challenges (right and left), politics foils the critical comedian’s attempt to satirize and parody its object. Characterized by ambiguity, mixed genre and the increasing use of anti-humor, political comedy mirrors the social and political world it mocks, parodies and celebrates often with lackluster results suggesting that the joke might be on us, as audiences.