Irreverent Humor Research Articles

The Terra Comica between Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie

Abstract Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie are at once an unlikely and a likely duo. A vast gulf of time, culture, and heritage separates them. What likens them is their shared celebrity status and iconic, irreverent humor. This paper undertakes a comparison between Twain and Alexie, not to diminish the important and idiosyncratic role of Native American humor, but rather to bring it into conversation with white humor, perhaps approaching a multiplex American humor. A comparison of two of their early works, Roughing It for Twain and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for Alexie, to illuminate the ways in which both authors eschew the physical terrain of the West, instead monumentalizing a cacophonous, comical verbal landscape. Both authors, as public figures, also raise questions of what it means to monumentalize authors, and this paper gestures toward that dual pitfall and potential.

Don’t Eat Bees (Life Lessons from Chip the Dog) by Dev Petty

Reviewed by: Don’t Eat Bees (Life Lessons from Chip the Dog) by Dev Petty Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Petty, Dev Don’t Eat Bees (Life Lessons from Chip the Dog); illus. by Mike Boldt. Doubleday, 2022 [32p] Library ed. ISBN 9780593433133 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 9780593433126 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593433140 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 3-7 yrs Self-proclaimed smart dog Chip knows lots of things, but he’s specifically an expert on what to eat and what not to eat. Socks, yes, bees no. Important papers “like the ones the small persons work on when they finally come home after forever” are definitely meant to be chewed on; again, bees, not so much. Thanksgiving dinner, Grandpa’s teeth, the cat’s food, all are just waiting and ready to be eaten; stay away [End Page 226] from bees, though, and probably lemons and fire, but Mittens the cat has been telling Chip good things about cactuses. Clever, irreverent humor keeps this from becoming a one-note joke, and Chip’s gleeful narration has an edge of snark that avoids total buffoonery (“Cats are awfully self-important for animals who poop in a box”). Quick jumps in perspective, painterly textures, and a dominating focus on Chip’s frenzied antics call up Shannon’s No, David! (BCCB 9/98), and this absolutely ensures a lively storytime. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal

Reviewed by: Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal Kate Rose (bio) Melissa Michal. Living on the Borderlines. Feminist Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-9369-3246-7. 175 pp. Adeptly navigating between individual and collective traumas ("borderline" personalities due to imposed borders defying tribal autonomy …), Michal's work is distinctly poetic, poignant, and political. It traces the thin line between enough and not enough, and the subtle boundaries between people, especially those who love each other. With an impressive span of characters and tribal affiliations (sometimes reminiscent of Sherman Alexie's much acclaimed collection, Ten Little Indians), she portrays contemporary American Indian identities with irreverent humor and astute sensitivity: "Some white person's legend says that [End Page 237] there's a white doe, a woman who jumps over the edge with her man and turns into a deer. Who does that? Certainly not a Seneca woman" ("The Crack in the Bridge," 140). Both Michal and Alexie universalize American Indian experiences, mocking and overturning stereotypes along the way. Michal has a particularly effective way of doing this, often not mentioning that her protagonists are Indian at all until well into the story. This is the literary Trojan Horse approach advocated by Monique Wittig, through which authors universalize the particular and through this make the Other, One.1 By the time readers from the dominant group recognize the nature of the literary gift, the shifted identification has already crept inside their minds. Readers of any Indigenous identity, and particularly American Indians, may approach Borderlines as a work of healing, inspired (as the author states) from storytelling traditions. Trauma survivors will appreciate how accurately Michal depicts trauma's lingering effects on the body, mind, and spirit. The thirteen stories included in the book vary in length and form. Often the evolution of more than one person is central, rather than an individualistic focus on a single protagonist. The use of sounds, short phrases, and exclamations, even outside of dialogue, heighten the perception of orality, of being told a story. The language, clean, straight, and forceful as a mountain stream, is at times delicately figurative: "The liquid trickled down her throat, burning in the way she liked, filled with her grandmother's choices" ("The Long Goodbye," 18). Indeed, food is often a theme with deeper meanings, for example the young protagonist Nala's rejection of fried bread: "Why do we make this? … It only carries pain, you know … We sell that stuff to white people at festivals, powwows. They eat our past. We didn't have that flour or lard before them or before the long trails" ("The Long Goodbye," 17). There is a poetic frugality to the descriptions; a little goes a long way, nothing wasted: "They weren't the kind of couple who finished each other's sentences. But thoughts they read by a simple gesture or look. A familiarity from years of listening when there were more words" ("The Carver and the Chilkat Weaver," 48). The woman of the couple described is white, but Michal has significantly given her the title "Chilkat Weaver" as she spent a lifetime with her husband's tribe, honoring traditions even while innovating together with her (carver) husband. Women traditionally do not make the designs for their weaving, but in a graceful dance, the couple work together. The everyday poetry of the couple's lives is by no means [End Page 238] romanticized: the opening scene has this aging pair walking hand-in-hand down the cleaning supplies aisle. This story also characterizes the extended family (and her relationship with them) with a stroke that is sharp, bold, and true: "She told them, 'Don't bring anything.' They always did. They came bundled down with children and some type of food or paper product, making the tables multicolored and full of flavors" (58). Though each story is distinct, they seem to fall into three intertwined categories: trauma, poverty, and the living world. Michal portrays the much neglected and misconstrued issue of trauma in the body at a time when many professionals still deny the impact of lived experience and provide chemical "cures" to the lived realities of trauma: "'What would you do if you were...

Young Women Treating Men with Borderline Personality Disorder: A Challenge for Psychotherapy Integration

Young female therapists may struggle with treating heterosexual men who adhere to traditional masculine role norms. This challenge is exacerbated when these men present with borderline personality disorder. Certain evidence-based therapeutic interventions such as irreverent humor, confrontation, and teaching mentalization may require female therapists to violate typical female gender role expectations, which could be intimidating for some women. The authors use a clinical case study to demonstrate ways in which a young female therapist confronts her client’s devaluing behaviors while working through her conflicted feelings about gender role norms. A qualitative analysis revealed that through integrating therapeutic interventions the therapist addressed the client’s out of control sexual behaviors and interpersonal problems. Outcomes showed that over the course of treatment the client’s presenting problem shifted from managing his out of control sexual behaviors to self-reflecting and understanding his character flaws that interfere with the possibility of maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. The authors conclude with recommendations for new clinicians and supervisors, highlighting the importance of considering gender and implicit biases within the therapeutic relationship.

Not so Authentic Kabuki: An Interview with Brooke O'Harra

Not so Authentic KabukiAn Interview with Brooke O'Harra Brooke O'Harra (bio) and Katherine Brewer Ball (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Brooke O'Harra. Photograph by Katherine Endy. I first saw brooke o'harra's work in 2008 with Room for Cream, the hilarious and shame-filled lesbian serial that she directed and co-wrote with the Dyke Division of the Two-headed Calf (founded by o'harra, jess barbagallo, laryssa husiak, and laura berlin stinger). Set in a coffee shop in Sappho, Massachusetts, RFC was a collaborative work that pulled from the queer, feminist, and avant-garde downtown performance crowd. I remember lea robinson and jibz cameron as dirty agro lezzie cops, faye driscoll as a hypersexed vampire with crotchy dance moves, and sacha yanow with her perfectly aligned bangs and giant [End Page 29] circular glasses. Room for Cream felt simultaneously fresh and anachronistic. And while there was a theatrical precedent for the serial theater form—with works by jeff weiss and others—the serial, like a TV program, struck my twenty-something brain as so unusual and delicious. RFC was like a homosexual Cheers, a place where everyone knows your name. But this was the collaborative, broken-down, queer version of Cheers where things rarely, if ever, find resolution.However, the irreverent humor and exposed quick-change styles that characterized Room for Cream were not new for o'harra. In fact, o'harra's production of the 1707 kabuki play Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, written by chikamatsu monzaemon, which o'harra had developed and directed the year before, used similar tactics, only this time they were focused on the traditional Japanese form. Drum featured American actors performing an English translation of the Japanese play. Yet, instead of reproducing the movements and styles of kabuki masters, as is traditional in kabuki, o'harra and the company chose to study and repeat the gestural vocabulary of punk rock masters such as iggy pop, darby crash, nina hagen, and the slits. Accompanied by the music of her Theater of a Two-headed Calf cofounder brendan connelly, o'harra's production maintained the highly dramatic kabuki form even as the English and American punk style yanked on kabuki's structural integrity. Drum premiered in 2007 at HERE Arts Center and won an Obie Award for acting. For the occasion of this interview, I sat down with o'harra to discuss Japanese performing arts, American fantasies of adaptation, and embodied practice. —Katherine Brewer Ball [End Page 30] katherine brewer ball/ You were saying that the reason you like theater is because you like Japanese theater? brooke o'harra/ I played sports before college. I wasn't a theater kid. But I did have the opportunity to study Japanese language and culture at my public high school in Oregon. I continued studying Japanese in college; that's when I was introduced to Japanese theater. I also started studying Western theater around that time and directed a production in college that was deeply influenced by formal structures of Japanese theater. It was an American play by Jules Feiffer called Little Murders. My production had extra performers that functioned like a version of Japanese stagehands [kuroko]. The play was performed like a typical Western dramatic comedy—except these kuroko would enter the stage at emotional or dramatic moments and manipulate the actors to alter the stage picture. They would do things like literally flip the actor completely upside down. The current Broadway play Harry Potter and The Cursed Child actually uses a similar technique for some of their stage magic—but their stagehands are well concealed. So, I had been planning to move to New York City and pursue theater after college, but then I thought, I should go to Japan. So I went to Japan with a job for the Japanese Ministry of Education and studied kyogen and aikido, and joined a butoh company. I also attended kabuki theater and experimental Japanese theater regularly. That was the true beginning of my theater training. In Japan, I was so stimulated by the theater—both the experimental forms and traditional. Before being introduced to Japanese theater (and some experimental...

Internet activism transforming street politics: South Korea’s 2008 ‘Mad Cow’ protests and new democratic sensibilities

This article examines South Korea’s Internet-born ‘candlelight festivals’ of 2008, with a focus on online movement transforming protesters’ communicative patterns and sensibilities in the street. When the government resumed importation of US beef despite widespread concern about mad cow disease, Korea’s young Internet users criticized the government and mobilized for street protests. In the resulting protests, the festive crowd directly spoke back to authority with irreverent humor and carnivalesque defiance. This novel mode of political participation indicates new democratic sensibilities liberated from authoritarian preconceptions and limits that had dominated Korean politics. The transformation of protest modalities observed in Korea – a nation that has experienced the maturation of Internet activism – suggests that scholars should pay attention to how Internet users traverse online and offline spaces, and to how online politics reshapes local actors’ broader political experiences and expectations.

Dr. Kenneth Plotkin’s myriad contributions to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s supersonic mission

The world as a whole, and NASA, in particular, owes a large debt of gratitude to Dr. Kenneth Plotkin for his decades of service in the field of sonic boom research and advancement of quiet supersonic transportation. This presentation will highlight the contributions of Dr. Plotkin to a myriad of NASA projects. One of the largest efforts was the assembly and continual improvement of sonic boom propagation software tools, collectively called PCBoom, which allowed the analysis of real and imagined vehicles from Mach cutoff conditions to the hypersonic. He was a driving force behind reshaping aircraft to demonstrate quieter sonic booms, first with the plans for a modified Firebee drone and SR-71, and then with the highly successful Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstrator series of flights. Dr. Plotkin’s partnership with NASA Armstrong resulted in the development of the low boom dive maneuver to allow quiet sonic boom testing on structures and people using existing aircraft, as well as a sonic boom cockpit display that has recently been tested in flight. Dr. Plotkin was also instrumental in such research campaigns as SCAMP, WSPR, and FaINT. Throughout all, Dr. Plotkin’s phenomenal intellect, tireless dedication, and irreverent humor made working with him a joy.

Images: Selected work, 2004–2017

ImagesSelected work, 2004–2017 Goldschmied and Chiari Click for larger view View full resolution IMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari NYMPHEAS #37, 2011 Lambda print, 120 cm (diam.) Click for larger view View full resolution IMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari UNTITLED VIEW, 2017 Digital print on glass and glass mirror, 115 × 70 cm [End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolution Goldschmied & Chiari DUMP QUEEN #1 (triptych panels B and C), 2008 Diasec print, 180 × 180 cm each [End Page 50] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 51] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution Goldschmied & Chiari GENEALOGY OF DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 1965–1981, 2009 Two carved living trees, 450 cm (height)Installation view (left); detail (right) Collection of MACRO (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma) Photo: Altrospazio [End Page 53] Click for larger view View full resolution Goldschmied & Chiari NYMPHEAS #12, 2007 Lambda print, 125 × 333 cm Collection of Michele and Philippe Levy [End Page 55] Click for larger view View full resolution IMAGE: Goldschmied & Chiari WELCOME, 2004 Sheetrock, plaster, cement, paint, 10 × 1.5 × 2.35 mt Collection Ugolini Photo: Gabriele Basilico [End Page 57] Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari are an artist duo from Italy, working with varied media: photography, video, performance, and installation. They work and live in Milan. Girls Just wanna have fun: Goldschmied & Chiari's Irreverent Humor Humor is not a trait for women, even less so for women artists in the Italian art world, where women's creativity has historically focused either on intimacy or on abstraction. In order to be taken into consideration by a male-dominated art scene, women artists working in the Italian peninsula have, since the '70s, consistently been obliged to be extremely serious about their work and its content. This trait can be traced all the way to the present with few exceptions, making Goldschmied & Chiari's (Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari) artistic practice exceptional in its constant employment of a peculiar, irreverent form of humor that functions as subliminal social critique. Humor used as a strategy to reconsider historical events in a post-ideological form of feminism develops in their work in witty installations that articulate a lucid critique of contemporary society and its relationship to history. Radically distancing themselves from the stereotype of authoritative and earnest feminism, Goldschmied & Chiari turn laughter into a metaphor for transformation. Their images trigger subtle political disruptions, allowing them to delve into the complex history of post-Cold War narratives, offering the public a new understanding of the relationships between the symbolic and the social. My first encounter with Goldschmied & Chiari's work (goldiechiari at the time) dates back to 2002 when I was working on a large survey show of emerging Italian art, exIT: Nuove geografie della creatività italiana, curated by Francesco Bonami. I was surprised by their work Senza titolo #17 that portrayed in a full-color photograph two girls dressed as if they were in boarding school, in plaid skirts and colored stockings, with long braids, sitting on the floor helping an elderly "grandmother" knitting in her armchair by making a hank of yarn. Looking closer, one sees that the girls were actually adolescents trapped in a parody that the artists further highlighted by installing in front of the photo what looked like a gigantic ball of yarn but was actually a sphere made of 1,500 cm of barbed wire (Sfera, 2002). The "tableau vivant" quality of the image made it both funny and critical, as visitors could relate as much to the stereotyped enactment of women's domestic roles as to the artists' rebellious desire. Instead of relegating their creativity to the domestic sphere, these "mischievous little girls" had wound a menacing barbed-wire ball that evoked Italy's recent past of social unrest and urban guerrillas. The assumption of ironic activist alter egos in one way referenced feminist practices of the '70s, yet at the same time seemed to mock the violence associated with protest and its success. [End Page 116] This type of atmosphere linked to city barricades and acts of protest is the inspiration for a large...

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War by Hilary Roberts

Reviewed by: Lee Miller: A Woman’s War by Hilary Roberts Beryl Pong Lee Miller: A Woman’s War. Imperial War Museum, London. October 15, 2015 – April 24, 2016. Lee Miller: A Woman’s War. Hilary Roberts, with an introduction by Antony Penrose. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Pp. 224. $55.00 (cloth). DELIGHTED YOUR WANTING TO JOIN US STOP YOUR INTELLIGENCE FUNDAMENTAL GOOD TASTE SENSITIVENESS ART VALUES MUST ULTIMATELY MAKE YOU GOOD PHOTOGRAPHER STOP SENDING CRITICISMS YOUR TRIAL PHOTOGRAPHS1 Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue who discovered Lee Miller in 1927 and turned her into a fashion model, had by 1940 begun to see her in a different light. As she transformed into a fashion photographer and then a wartime photojournalist, Miller joined Vogue in a different capacity. His telegram is nonetheless unambiguous about her being on “trial.” Indeed, one of Miller’s first photographs of World War II London was perhaps too inflected with those “art values” that Nast disdained. Focused on two young women posing coyly at the entrance to an air raid shelter in Hampstead, it portrays wartime fashion as oddly mechanical and macabre: the accouterments being modeled are not their dresses, but the black metal face masks and eye shields used for protecting against incendiary bombs. Their inhuman and robotic visages are presented with Miller’s characteristic mix of glamor and Surrealist humor. Unsurprisingly, Vogue did not publish the photograph. Not to be deterred, Miller eventually persevered and her insistence on the wartime setting, coupled with her idiosyncratic artistic signature, led to some of the most recognizable images of Blitzed London to appear in the magazine. Encompassing still life, fashion, portraiture, and documentary, her photographs by turns placed models in elegant suiting among bombsites, suggestively punned the shapes of shattered windowpanes with consumer trademarks, or chimed fresh with older ruins to suggest history’s recuperation of modern-day violence. [End Page 905] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Self-portrait with sphinxes, London, England, 1940 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2016. All rights reserved. Miller’s photographs of Blitzed London are arguably her most well known, though they comprised a very limited section of the recent Imperial War Museum exhibition. In four rooms covering some 150 photographs, the focus instead is on images of Miller herself from her modeling days, and on her lesser-exhibited images of war-torn France, Germany, and Eastern Europe. These latter photos were made possible by her accreditation as an official U. S. Army war correspondent in 1942, which gave her access to military transport and to restricted theatres of war. It also enabled her to join the ranks of a small coterie of women correspondents like Martha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh, and Helen Kirkpatrick. Miller’s career in photography is complex and cannot be defined by her gender alone, but curator Hilary Roberts (who also put together the IWM’s 2012 exhibition of Miller’s arch-rival, Cecil Beaton) argues that Miller had a distinctively gendered approach to war journalism. As she notes in the exhibition catalogue, others often viewed Miller in terms of her gender and her femininity both before and after she became a war correspondent. The majority of her photographic subjects also continued to be women (17). There are a myriad of ways that men might not have been able to access the scenes Miller photographed: a group of socializing women in 1930s Egypt, for instance, whom she called the “black satin and white pearl set,” or a fresh laundry line with a nurse’s underwear hanging by a window (44). Yet, to understand her photography, one must also understand something of Miller as a person, especially her irreverent humor and interest in Surrealism. Both are evident in her documentation of the bizarre juxtapositions created by bomb blasts, and in her often-playful portraits of women in wartime. One photograph depicts an American nurse surrounded by a small wonderland of suspended surgical gloves; another, taken before a millinery show in liberated Paris, portrays fashion models resting against chairs, furniture legs protruding from their heads like rifle guns or unicorn horns. Where another recent exhibition of Miller’s work (in 2014 at Nottingham’s Djanogly Art...

‘Minister of Horses’: Samuel Beckett according to Fernando Arrabal

This study takes the form of a chronicle of the life-long friendship between Samuel Beckett and Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal. First, the circumstances in which they became acquainted will be explored. Then, that streak of irreverent humour shared by both writers will be discussed, especially in relation to their interest in Surrealism. Following this, the Spaniard's opinions on Beckett's partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, will be considered. Finally, Arrabal's trial for blasphemy in 1967 is examined in detail, including Beckett's letter in his defence.

A Queer Friendship

Jose, me dejaste con la miel en la boca. You left me with honey on my lips. That was an expression my grandmother used when my visits were not long enough. I met Jose in 1994 when he spearheaded a Latino/a Representation in the Media conference at Duke University, a who’s who of Latino/a academics, that included Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez. I was booked to perform “Milk of Amnesia” and my sister Ela, a film director, would show the film “Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen.” When I asked Jose about the performance space, lights and sound, he had a blank look. He’d not thought about tech. I yelled: “I have my period and am angry and I can yell at you because I’m going to a shrink.” Academics mobilize—carry lights, projector, screen—and the performance is a makeshift DIY esthetics befitting a solo about Cuba where people have to “resolver” resolve. And that was the beginning of our queer friendship. Jose and I bonded instantly over Cubanidad, exile, humor, dogs, food, art and the queers—maybe not in that order. Our Cubanidad was a shortcut to our mutual understanding, with our shared national and similar familial baggage. We suffered exile el exilio. His was a southern Florida style, mine a northern New York. He could joder, a Spanish verb that means to fuck, tease, and be a pain in the ass. On one of my birthdays he told me my performances were missing something and gave me what would improve them—a rubber chicken. I used that chicken until it disintegrated. I was one of the lucky queer and people of color artists Jose wrote about. He was the perfect interlocutor, framing the work and putting it in context. Jose wrote about choteo, a Cuban brand of irreverent humor in my work associated

Resolution of Respect: W. Scott Overton

Resolution of Respect: W. Scott Overton

Cuban Miami on the Air: Narratives of Cubanía

Radio has been a fundamental aspect of Cuban culture on and off the island since the first broadcast in Havana in 1922. When Cubans fled the island after the revolution of 1959 for the USA, particularly Miami, radio quickly became a vital medium for navigating a new country and for consolidating a Cuban exile identity. Politically, radio in Miami has been an effective means for articulating hardline exile politics. But with generational turnover and increasingly moderate stances on Cuba by more recent arrivals and US-born Cuban Americans, how is radio changing? How are narratives of what constitutes cubanía – Cubanness – shifting in an increasingly diverse Cuban Miami? This article takes up these questions through an examination of an immensely popular morning program that aired in 2009 in southern Florida called the Enrique y Joe Show. I examine how the Enrique y Joe Show, produced and performed by US-born Cuban Americans, utilized a form of irreverent Cuban humor called choteo to represent and satirize the hardline Cuban exile politics that have been dominant on Miami's radio waves for decades. Ultimately, their performances deploy choteo to articulate Cuban American identity divorced from a particular political orthodoxy. The coda reflects on changes in Miami's radio landscape since 2009.

Memory's Dramas, Modernity's Ghosts: Thornton Wilder, Japanese Theater, and Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home

The close relationships between theatre and memory have been recognized many cultures and many different fashions.... Central to Noh of Japan, one of world's oldest and most venerated dramatic traditions, is image of play as a story of past recounted by a ghost, but ghostly storytellers and recalled events common coin of theatre everywhere world at every period. --Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (1) For an American dramatist, all roads lead back to Thornton Wilder. --Paula Vogel, Forward, The Skin of Our Teeth (2) Whether explicitly or obliquely, Paula Vogel's plays often respond to and rewrite works by canonical writers from Shakespeare to David Mamet. In her 2003 play The Long Christmas Ride Home (hereafter LCRH), Vogel revises Thornton Wilder's one-act plays The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas Dinner, while incorporating aspects of Japanese No and Bunraku puppet theater. Like her 1992 break-out play The Baltimore Waltz, LCRH commemorates Vogel's brother Carl, who died of AIDS 1987. And like return of Uncle Peck's ghost at end of her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play I Learned to Drive, LCRH is haunted by ghosts--of Carl, of Thornton Wilder, and of a social history that is both personal and collective. LCRH bears all Vogel trademarks--sharp juxtapositions, a combination of humor and pathos, use of circular form, and a focus on a political issue examined through lens of American family--but it is also markedly distinct from her previous work. It is a highly conceptual, poetic, and formally complex piece, and contrast to embodied historicity and social specificity of her other plays, LCRH invokes notions of time and place that are, at once, more abstracted and more immediate. It marks a shift her oeuvre away from a central female character and toward a more diffuse ensemble of perspectives, striking notes of solemnity and reverence contrast to irreverent humor of her previous plays. In its use of Japanese theater techniques, LCRH also marks Vogel's first experiment with a non-Western theatrical tradition. Given these differences, I would like to examine LCRH relation to Elin Diamond's provocative question: How does one of key features--its way of inventing/thinking about historical time--get dramatized, and what would 'modernity's drama' as a configuration do to ways we think about drama? (3) Whether conceived of as linear progression, cyclical repetitions, or postmodern ruptures, time has been invented, various ways, as a method for organizing human experience and making sense of relationship between past and present. Likewise, has been invented as a body of legitimized, canonical texts and performances that hierarchically organize theater history and construct value and meaning we associate with certain plays. Modern time and neither disinterested nor universal, but rather human constructs bound up with broader technological, scientific, political, imperial, and ideological developments that characterize era. And since performance contains an irreducible historicity, thinking terms of modernity's drama rather than modern drama invites a method of interpretation that examines way theater and its literature register the new modes of historical thinking that modernity fostered. (4) Diamond's argument dovetails interesting ways with Marvin Carlson's theory of ghosting, which he defines as uncanny effect created by theater's recycling of specific material which generates repetition, memory, and as effects that are deeply involved nature of theatrical experience itself and yet that also manifest in a very different manner different periods and cultures. (5) The plays of both Wilder and Vogel represent time ways that generate a ghosting effect and that complicate cause-effect narrative logic and naturalistic characterizations of Western realist drama. …

The Research Works Act: a comment

It’s been a tale of two ‘opens’; recent events in US political life suggest a reconciliation with the concept of open marriage but a relationship with open access to scientific research that may be headed for splitsville. In a rare feat of bipartisanship during a Congress famed for partisan pettiness, the Research Works Act (RWA) has received cross-party sponsorship in the House and is now being heard in Committee. The Act, in its own words, seeks to prevent Federal agencies from requiring that authors ‘assent to network dissemination of a privatesector research work’. Translation? It will be illegal for Federally funded research grants to have open access strings attached. This includes a bar on policies insisting on deposition in public repositories; in fact, it will be illegal to ‘cause’, ‘permit’ or ‘authorize’ such a deposition. RWA has not attracted the same volume of headlines as the equally controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which was another recent bill pertaining to internet freedoms. But although the opponents of RWA cannot rival the political and global reach of the likes of Google and Wikipedia, a spirited, academia-led campaign against RWA is underway on the blogosphere and Twitter. As with many grassroots protests in the social media era, the RWA rebutters have mixed a sense of genuine outrage with mischievous and irreverent humor.

Death Comes to Town, Irreverent Humour, and Accessibility for the Blind and Low-Visioned

This article focuses on described video (DV), which makes television accessible to persons who are blind or who have low vision by providing voice-over descriptions of shows. The article highlights the lack of DV content in Canada and outlines the factors inhibiting more DV production, including policy, the commercial and organizational structure of television, and the established conventions that were developed for certain genres (e.g., documentary and drama). It uses the described version of the recent CBC mini-series Death Comes to Town, created by the comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, to illustrate how different genres of television, such as comedy, require unconventional styles of description to convey their full cultural meaning. Finally, it argues that true accessibility and participation in national media culture for people who are blind or have low vision, as mandated in Canadian and international law, depend on adequate DV.

Huck and Hank go to the circus: Mark Twain under Barnum's big top

This essay argues that Mark Twain's acquaintance with P. T. Barnum, and more especially Twain's fascination with the world of popular entertainment that Barnum epitomized, provided inspiration and material for some of Twain's most enduring works. In particular, the essay argues that two of Twain's most revered novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) are invested both thematically and generically in the complex cultural associations of the postbellum circus. Embodying the commercial capitalism of industrialized America whilst also offering a romantic liberation from everyday life, the circus becomes a condensation of many of the competing impulses of Twain's life and work: between irreverent humour and sober social critique and between the desire for imaginative freedom and a recognition of financial imperatives.

The Blood of the Lamb

Peter De Vries (1910-1993)—writer for the New Yorker, Poetry editor, once widely acknowledged as the top American comic novelist of his era—was best known for his clever wordplay, irreverent humor, and extended riffs on a broad range of human foibles. But despite De Vries’ reputation for puckish wit and for the skewering bon mot, his greatest novel is a tragedy—one that is all the more haunting because it is stuffed with autobiographical detail. The Blood of the Lamb, published in 1961, describes the growing estrangement of the main character (Don Wanderhope) from his origins in a close-knit, blue-collar, Chicagoland Dutch immigrant community. The death of a sibling, parental mental illness, and the strains of a volatile marriage contracted too hastily were heavy stones that stressed the increasingly rickety structure of Wanderhope’s boyhood religious faith, until that faith finally collapsed beneath the crush of a singular and devastating loss, re-emerging as something more ambiguous. Emily De Vries—her literary counterpart is Carol Wanderhope—De Vries’ youngest child and a chief existential consolation, died in September 1960, just a few days before her 11th birthday and 2 years after she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Through the filter of his prodigious literary gifts, De Vries poured out the monstrous, idiosyncratic grief of a bereft father, of a man who has lost something that really matters. The Blood of the Lamb was published just a year after Emily’s death, and the rawness of emotion sears its pages: often bitter, sometimes elegiac, and with scattered patches where the writing is less polished, less subtle than is typical for De Vries. The author’s seething anger over the unfairness of the world is frequently channeled into frustration at a paternalistic and ultimately impotent medical establishment, which provided plenty of facile reassurances, even as it failed to save his innocent “lamb” of a daughter from her own poisoned blood. De Vries eventually returned to writing comic novels after The Blood of the Lamb, but always with darker undertones, echoing the futility and chaotic meaninglessness of life that he felt so acutely during Emily’s terminal illness. These stylistic changes parallel the intellectual evolution of Charles Darwin a century earlier, after a similar event: Darwin lost his beloved daughter Annie in 1851, also at age 10 years from an unexplained illness—possibly tuberculosis, which was just as frightening and incurable in the 1850s as leukemia a century later. Darwin’s great-grandson suggests that the feelings of randomness and lack of ultimate purpose engendered by Annie Darwin’s untimely death pushed the great naturalist towards a reluctant full acknowledgment of the terrifying metaphysical implications of his mechanism of natural selection. The legacy of a child’s premature death can be long indeed.

The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective

The Mighty Sparrow, a calypso performer from Trinidad, sang in 1963, at a perilous juncture during the civil rights movement, “I was born in the USA but because of my color I'm suffering today.” “The white man preaching democracy but in truth and in fact it's hypocrisy,” Sparrow continued, warning that he was “getting vexed.” His proposed solution was the song's up-tempo refrain: “So—we want Martin Luther King for President!” Sparrow put his irreverent humor to deadly serious purpose, his song indicting both temporizing U.S. officials during the Birmingham crisis and a nation far from ready to elect a black president. Recorded for Caribbean audiences, including immigrants to the U.S., Sparrow's topical song reminds us, along with a number of recent studies, that the activities of King and the civil rights movement were keenly observed by audiences from all over the world. Until quite recently, U.S. historians were accustomed to thinking of the civil rights movement within a domestic U.S.-based framework. But in its time, the movement had global dimensions that were abundantly clear to many contemporaries, including Sparrow, King, and many others, as this essay will show. Recent scholarship has engaged the ways in which the consciousness of civil rights leaders and black activists was in fact a worldview, a framework linking local and global events and perspectives. At the same time, that scholarship has yet to make a discernible impact in college and secondary school U.S. history textbooks. If the civil rights movement is covered in undergraduate surveys or high school classes (and sadly, we should not assume that even the most basic history of the movement is routinely taught), its story often remains a nation-based account of the response of presidential administrations to southern racial upheavals, with King as the movement's main protagonist.