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Abstract: More has probably been written about Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre than about that of any other filmmaker. Hitchcock’s humor, however, has long been an underexplored topic in Hitchcock criticism. Wes D. Gehring’s recent book, Hitchcock and Humor: Modes of Comedy in Twelve Defining Films, does not quite offer the comprehensive study of Hitchcock and humor that I had been hoping for, but it is an insightful and entertaining book and a strong step in the right direction. In tracing Hitchcock’s comic elements, Gehring makes a strong case for humor being intrinsic to the auteur’s work rather than functioning as simple “comic relief” (1).As the title suggests, Hitchcock and Humor offers an analysis of twelve specific films ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Am I healthier because I laugh frequently' What parts of my brain respond to humor—the amygdala or the frontal cortex' Which personality type is most likely to become the class clown' These preoccupations drive G. Neil Martin’s The Psychology of Comedy, part of Routledge’s the Psychology of Everything series. A better title would have been The Psychology of Humor, as the book deals strictly with the psychological fields that study humor rather than the genre of comedy. Because it is a survey of psychological humor studies, the book reads as a long literature review, an engaging one at that. Martin shares the results of hypotheses that we intuitively feel to be true and that now have been verified. Are extroverted ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This volume appears at just the right time in recent history. After the election and presidency of Donald Trump, many pundits said over and over again that his speeches and policies were immune to comedic resistance, at least on the surface level of social media and entertainment television. However, this volume poses a different question: Are certain comedians American versions of the public intellectual' It’s a fascinating question, and anyone interested in public intellectualism in its present forms should definitely check out this volume whose editors stress that comedians were afforded power “in the public sphere as knowledgeable and creditable articulators” of ideas in the early days of humor (4). Are they ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Outsider, Art, and Humour delivers on the promise of its title. Rich in its account of connections between humor and forces contending for power in society, the text explores via humor how both the weak and the strong in society strive to achieve an upper hand. Necessarily cross-disciplinary, the book bolsters its arguments with significant quantities of social science as well humor and art theory.Clements illustrates how these theories play out through dozens of examples of visual and literary, high and popular, comic art. His visual illustrations range from Peter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559–60 The Fight between Carnival and Lent through undated contemporary alternative art. These visual and literary ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s 2018 literary debut Friday Black is a collection of twelve painfully funny stories that explore the violence wrought on Black bodies by the discursive practices of postracialism. Released to effusive positive reviews from such acclaimed authors as Tommy Orange and Colson Whitehead, Friday Black exemplifies how contemporary Black satire can unsettle both racial essentialism and the disavowal of race as meaningful social categories.1 Throughout Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah pushes back on the notion that the United States has moved temporally “beyond” racial hierarchy by weaving together stories of recursive violence whose protagonists are trapped within new iterations of white supremacy that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The basic tenet of Becoming Carole Lombard: Stardom, Comedy, and Legacy is that “Lombard was more than just a screwball comedian” (1); even though her greatest successes and best-known roles were her screwball comedies, the author argues, Lombard made a much more complex contribution to the film industry and American culture at large. Kiriakou further argues that scholars of comedy who jump directly from Lombard’s work in silent slapstick films to her later stellar success in screwball comedies miss the brief period between these two phases (and later as well) when she also successfully experimented in other genres. Kiriakou also emphasizes the disparity between Lombard’s fragile, flower-like image and her athletic ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1999, the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson asserted that “nigger has never been cool when spit from white lips.”1 In a 2002 interview in the Atlantic, Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy offered a counterpoint, noting that he was “glad the word nigger is a stigmatized word” and that its use was almost always “presumptively wrongful,” but he also argued that whites ought not be prohibited from uttering it.2 Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word contends that “to condemn whites who use the N-word without regard to context is simply to make a fetish of nigger” (52). Though many maintain that the word is the exclusive property of Black Americans, justified by an “equity earned through ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Well, at the beginning of my career, I don’t think I was using [writing] as therapy the way [Richard] Wright was. My approach to literature is different. Even now my writing isn’t therapeutic. It’s just an attempt on my part to illustrate the absurdities of life.Jokes and humor and laughter in general provide a crucial line of inquiry for understanding Chester Himes’s 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go. My focus on humor departs from the prevailing critical interest, which sees Himes’s novel as squarely within the social protest tradition. Most readers recognize the many elements of the genre at play in If He Hollers, especially its focus on the myriad structural impediments its protagonist faces living as a Black ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In season 1, episode 6 of Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, Jordan Peele declares that white people are terrified of being called racist. Keegan Michael Key nods in agreement and states, “Racist is the N-word for white people.”1 Key and Peele proceed to act out a scene in front of the audience in which any charge of racism toward a white person is met with an immediate apology and subsequent acquiescence to any request. Although the humor in this exchange rests on Key’s hyperbolic claim, he nevertheless demonstrates the deep offense white people take to being called racist.More recently, Donald Trump asserted that he was “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world” after he was accused again of being racist ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: At levels beyond the reach of recent handbooks and encyclopedias (reviewed in this journal) on classifications and patterns of comic utterance, Roger Kreuz’s pocket-sized introduction, in the excellent MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, offers clarity, plain-language insights, stylistic grace, and merciful freedom from restrictive method. Describing half a dozen varieties of irony and roving through two millennia of culture-specific and near-miss attempts to define them, Kreuz also engages in due course with sarcasm as an all-invasive subspecies of verbal (and usually oral) irony; and along the way, he visits satire, parody, paradox, and other protean modes of disruption. Because he is writing “a biography” of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Dear Readers:We’re very happy to release our special issue “Black Laughs Matter,” which we announced two years ago in active support of AHSA’s statement of solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter. We are fortunate to have Darryl Dickson-Carr as guest editor. His work on Black satire, especially from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary period, is well known to scholars working in the fields of humor and African American rhetoric, literature, and culture. Darryl’s introductory essay will stake out the ground of our special issue, while I am sure that the six fine articles of “Black Laughs Matter” will capture your interest.Our next special issue (9.2, fall 2023) will focus on participation and humor—instances of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I get to do physical comedy! When do women get to do physical comedy' Very rarely.Discourses do actually live in bodies. They lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses as part of their own lifeblood.Epigraphs never have anything to do with the book.So much of Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974) is about communication. It’s a novel deeply concerned with the languages, tools, and means of expression that we use to interact with one another and navigate the world around us. The novel abounds with wordplay, charts, graphs, and all kinds of verbal and visual inventiveness, from Ross’s integration of Yiddish and African American vernacular to the way that she showcases the fabricated languages of Oreo’s family. These include ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The subtitle of David Steinberg’s Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades is wonderfully apt. Steinberg has been a comedian for over fifty years and continues his work today with not only this book but also his TV show Inside Comedy. He was taught by an older generation of comedians, but because of his long career he has influenced a younger one, some members of whom have shown him the same reverence he has for the older greats like Mel Brooks and the Marx Brothers.Steinberg’s collection of more than seventy-five interviews and loving-yet-snarky ruminations captures the rarely seen side of these comedians: their humanity. This background contrasts with the stories ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Funny How' seeks to demonstrate what makes a great sketch funny. The simplicity of the book’s main goal is its great virtue and informs its best part: its summaries of a dozen and more sketches performed by a wide variety of comedians. Guided by a broad sense of what constitutes sketch comedy, Clayton picked these sketches because he loves them. This makes good sense, since the point of the book is to talk straightforwardly about what makes things funny, and not, for instance, to provide a scholarly history of the genre. This simplicity comes with a price, though, insofar as the book does not enter into a dialogue with contemporary humor scholarship or with current theories. If readers want to hear what the author ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: From the outset, Katelyn Hale Wood’s book on stand-up comedy, Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States, prioritizes Black feminist joy. Anchoring a lineage of Black feminist comedians to pioneer comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Wood contends that Black feminist comedic performance and the laughter it elicits are necessary components to feminist, queer, and antiracist protest. Recent scholarship in African American comedy examines Black comedy that resolves or wards off residual traumas from slavery, but Wood situates Black feminist comedic labor within the nexus of community, truth telling, and joy. Cracking Up is a welcome shift toward a focused politics of joy that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I was captain of the high school math team and a proud member of the state math team. This got me into Harvard but didn’t get me any dates, so I dropped math for comedy. This change of direction still didn’t get me any dates, but it did get me a job: I’ve been writing for The Simpsons for thirty years. There are quite a few math majors on the writing staff, and there have been enough math jokes on the show to fill a book. That book is Mathematical Secrets of “The Simpsons” by Simon Singh, and it was an international best-seller.I’ve never figured out the connection between math and comedy—if there is one—but I have noticed a certain subset of jokes structured like algebra. I’m not talking about jokes based on ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In “The Gift of Laughter,” Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset notes the paradoxical doubleness of African American humor, which originates in the suffering of slavery yet can be seen as a source of resistance and overcoming: “The remarkable thing about this gift of ours is that it has its rise, I am convinced, in the very woes which beset us. Just as a person driven by sorrow may finally go into an orgy of laughter, just so an oppressed and too hard driven people breaks into compensating laughter and merriment. It is our emotional salvation.”1 Here Fauset introduces laughter as a coping mechanism, a means of overcoming the suffering of racial oppression, as well as a way of releasing aggression or ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Editors:I greatly enjoyed reading Kirsten Leng’s article “Comedy as a Practice of Care: Restorative Laughter and Reciprocal Empathy in the Pandemic,” in which she argues that comedy can be understood as a practice of care, meaning that it has affective and nurturing dimensions.1 She draws on the statements and comments of late-night comedians during the COVID-19 pandemic, who, although professionally paid, offered their comedy as a form of care for their audiences under difficult conditions in an attempt to establish genuine connection.I love this idea and would go even further to suggest that some forms of care work and comedy are inexorably interconnected. It is not an accident, for example, that the health ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This special issue of Studies in American Humor focuses on African American humor in different media, paying particular attention to literary satire and performance modes of sketch and stand-up comedy. In conceiving this issue, the editors originally wanted to draw contributions that addressed “Black humor,” albeit not the black humor found in mid-twentieth-century works, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) or Kurt Vonnegut’s many novels. While these works tend to focus on the sheer absurdity of living in the post–World War II nuclear age, their authors are white, and they do not often address race. The Black humor—capitalized—analyzed in this issue concerns itself directly with the absurdity of living in a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-27T00:00:00-05:00
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