The Black Comedy of John Guare

The Black Comedy of John Guare PDF Author: Gene A. Plunka
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137637
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book, the first full-length study of Guare's theater, will make his plays more accessible through an examination of the often unnerving type of black comedy that makes his plays work.".

A Dirty Job

A Dirty Job PDF Author: Christopher Moore
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061801828
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay—until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death. It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.

The Dark Comedy

The Dark Comedy PDF Author: J. L. Styan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521095297
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Anyone who takes an intelligent interest in theatre-going will find profit and stimulus in this book.

A Decade of Dark Humor

A Decade of Dark Humor PDF Author: Ted Gournelos
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030074
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A Decade of Dark Humor analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor-in a variety of forms-to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The volume's contributors cover a broad range of media productions, including news parodies (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Onion), TV roundtable shows (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher), comic strips and cartoons (Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, Jeff Danzinger's editorial cartoons), television drama (Rescue Me), animated satire (South Park), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers), documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11), and other productions. Along with examining the rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques of these productions, the essays place each in specific political and journalistic contexts, showing how corporations, news outlets, and political institutions responded to-and sometimes co-opted-these forms of humor.

American Dark Comedy

American Dark Comedy PDF Author: Wes D. Gehring
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing the movies he discusses in a historical and literary context, Gehring explores the genre's obession with death and the characters' failure to be shocked by it. Movies discussed include: Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-2, Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Heathers, and Natural Born Killers.

Ump

Ump PDF Author: James Cohen
Publisher: Walker & Company
ISBN: 9780802711823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
When he gets into trouble with the Golla brothers, Ump, a Mafia hitman, seeks refuge in a small Midwestern town, but when the townspeople discover Ump's profession, they try to enlist his talents in disposing of unwanted "problems"

Good Omens

Good Omens PDF Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061991120
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The classic collaboration from the internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, soon to be an original series starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant. ?Season 2 of Good Omens coming soon! “Good Omens . . . is something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and Don DeLillo had collaborated. Lots of literary inventiveness in the plotting and chunks of very good writing and characterization. It’s a wow. It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick.” —Washington Post According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas PDF Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780007161232
Category : Experimental fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

The Black Comedy of John Guare

The Black Comedy of John Guare PDF Author: Gene A. Plunka
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137637
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book, the first full-length study of Guare's theater, will make his plays more accessible through an examination of the often unnerving type of black comedy that makes his plays work.".

The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy

The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy PDF Author: Patrice A. Oppliger
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030372146
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.

Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s

Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s PDF Author: Wes D. Gehring
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476622515
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This examination of dark comedies of the 1970s focuses on films which concealed black humor behind a misleading genre label. All That Jazz (1979) is a musical...about death--hardly Fred and Ginger territory. This masking goes beyond misnomer to a breaking of formula that director Robert Altman called "anti-genre." Altman's MASH (1970) ridiculed the military establishment in general--the Vietnam War in particular--under the guise of a standard military service comedy. The picaresque Western Little Big Man (1970) turned the bluecoats vs. Indians formula upside-down--the audience roots for the Indians instead of the cavalry. The book covers 12 essential films, including Harold and Maude (1971), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Being There (1979), with notes on A Clockwork Orange (1971). These films reveal a compounding complexity that reinforces the absurdity at the heart of dark comedy.