Night Live Research Articles

How Many Students Does it Take to Write a Joke? Humor Writing in Composition Courses

A s writing teachers we have serious objectives. In a limited number of weeks we want our students to feel more comfortable with the writing process, more aware of language, more flexible in the way they engage ideas, and more attentive to audience. Insofar as humor depends on unusual combinations of ideas, insofar as it hinges on unexpected meanings and associations of words and phrases, insofar as it both reveals and conceals values and triggers instantaneous responses (laughter, groaning)-it can advance these pedagogical goals. Given the widely shared interest in comedy among our students-a generation that grew up on sitcoms, standup routines, and infinitely recycled jokes-the wonder is that humor writing is not common in composition courses. Indeed, if composition pedagogy were rooted in student interest, every first-year course and advanced writing elective would include humor writing. Ask our students whom they admire more-John McPhee or Jim Carrey, Annie Dillard or Dana Carvey. And, even after we have explained who McPhee and Dillard are, most will not hesitate in choosing Carrey and Carvey. Still, rather than tapping into this energy, many English instructors tend to regard it as part of the problem-a sign of poor taste or cultural poverty-or simply as a matter that is irrelevant to academic writing. Perversely, many writing teachers behave like the unsympathetic potential lovers in Woody Allen's Annie Hall ( 1977). Noting a pun or witticism in a student paper, these chilly evaluators pause only long enough to jot a question in the margin : Pun intended? or Are you trying to be funny? Similarly, humor is ignored, discouraged, or barely tolerated in many com­ position texts and in much scholarship in the fieid. A survey of current texts reveals a seriousness of tone, a style characterized by projective and vigorous determination. Texts such as Writing as Thinking and Writing in the Disciplines, Strategies: A Rhetoric and Reader have no heading for humor in their indexes. No wonder this is so, since their titles appear to announce military campaigns or profound philosophic inquiries that, however unintentionally, bring the macho lumberjacks of the Monty Python sketch or Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live's Deep Thoughts gag to mind. In the same way, the text, Rhetoric and Style: Strategies for Advanced Writers seems to assume that advanced writers do not need to work on humor, while Writing as Revelation suggests by way of omission

The City as Playground: Culture, Conflict, and Race

The City as Playground: Culture, Conflict, and Race Elaine S. Abelson (bio) Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. By David Nasaw. New York: Basic Books, 1993. 312 pages. $25.00 (cloth), $14.00 (paper). Popular culture has been one of the most significant and enduring American exports in the second half of the twentieth century. Music, movies, television sitcoms and MTV, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, even the Levi’s that are no longer manufactured in this country, all carry the American label and, for better or worse, convey American cultural influence from one corner of the globe to the other. Although our cultural exports reflect our contemporary diversity and distinctive social conditions, they also reflect the contradictions and structures of historical con-flict in this country. Warren Susman wrote that the past is among the most important things about the present, and it is a segment of cultural past, the era of public amusements, that David Nasaw so ably elicits in his most recent book, Going Out. 1 A work of synthesis that freely incorporates and credits the recent scholarship of a number of well-known American social and cultural historians, Going Out recenters the historical narrative both to be [End Page 523] more inclusive and to focus on the complex interplay between popular culture and the ongoing social-racial tensions of American life. “They are all gone now,” Nasaw laments in his introduction—the vaudeville houses, movie palaces, world’s fair midways, the Coney Island Dreamlands and the Ebbets Fields—replaced by theme parks, shopping cum entertainment malls, and increasingly, suburban sports stadiums. The vital era of public amusements, born in the second half of the nineteenth century, comes to an end in this telling in the decades after the Second World War. Huge, general-interest audiences of another era fracture in this narrative of loss. What we have really lost, Nasaw suggests, and what are major themes of this book, is civic sociability and the public quality of urban leisure. Public, commercial, and decidedly urban, the new mass entertainments were the product of several independent but overlapping factors: the growth of the “downtown” and tourism, the development of rapid transit and electric street lighting, the mutual interests of real estate men and city officials, and rising wages and a shortened work day. Crucial to the creation of audiences for entertainment was a growing tolerance for amusement on the part of many liberal American Protestants and the grudging acceptance by many other Americans of the idea of pleasure and enjoyment without the protective coloration of education and self-improvement. 2 By the early 1890s, a night life that, according to Nasaw, had once comprised two extremes—opera, concerts, and legitimate theater for well-to-do patrons, or saloons and cheap entertainment for “sporting men”—was transformed by the emergence of vaudeville. The middle class, along with growing masses of first-generation white-collar workers, women as well as men, became avid consumers of vaudeville and similar commercial pleasures in cities across the country. But these pleasures were now morally acceptable and “decent”; drinking, smoking, and the more obviously tawdry ambience of the concert saloons were banished from the vaudeville theaters, as were prostitutes from the third tier. “Respectable” became the operative word for the new world of live, affordable, heterosexual entertainment, and suddenly, urban people, young people in particular, had some place “to go at night.” Going Out documents the “something for everybody” philosophy that took hold of commercial entertainment. Borrowing from almost every previous entertainment form, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and early moving pictures consciously and successfully sought to broaden their appeal and reach out to untapped audiences, particularly white middle-class [End Page 524] women. Shoppers at the large and centrally located department stores were particular targets for afternoon performances. Nasaw demonstrates that with the institution of the continuous vaudeville show (“After Breakfast Go to Proctors” became the operative slogan), even temporal boundaries became anachronistic. Elites were as necessary to the success of public entertainment as were ordinary wage earners. In a conscious attempt to attract the attention of the most desirable class of patrons while creating distance from earlier forms of popular...

Seeing Clearly through Fuzzy Speech

����� The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving until one breaks through to the clarity and understanding are known only to him who has himself experienced them. -Einstein Speech is a wonderful capability that only our species possesses. Those who have made speech the focus of their research have added much to human understanding. But others, who seem to suppose that speech and language are two names or aspects of the same thing, have often confounded knowledge. Speech is physical-sound produced by the voice and received by the sense of hearing, but language is mental; it begins in neural activity and integrates sensory and motor systems-plus knowledge, intellect, will, desire, and much else-into thought and social interaction. Failure to see the separation between language and speech has resulted in wasted intellectual effort, because ever since the time of Aristotle, most students of speech and language have attempted to apply crisp categorical logic to something that defies such precise categorization. Speech is by nature imprecise. Not only do speakers of different languages speak differently; speakers of the same language have various ways of making the sounds of their own language. The term labels the speech of speakers from different regions or classes or with different first languages. This kind of difference is often artistically exploited: An actor learns to speak in the dialect used by the character portrayed; a writer uses odd spelling and phrasing to represent the speech habits of a region or class. Individual speech differs at least as much as individual fingerprints. The expert impersonators on Saturday Night Live almost make us believe that we are listening to the prominent personality whose utterances are being turned into high comedy.

Social Criticisms Reflected in TV Commercial Parodies: The Influence of Popular Culture on Advertising

Abstract Advertising has long been criticized for its role in selling products and for its influence on society. Regardless of the viewpoint one takes on advertising, criticism remains a constructive tool for understanding the nature of the discipline. Although the literature is replete with various scholarly criticisms, one viewpoint has been neglected — that of pop culture's perception of advertising. To address this gap, an interpretive analysis of Saturday Night Live commercial parodies aired on prime time television was investigated. Since parody is a form of criticism, an analysis of these commercial parodies can help our discipline to better understand another important view of TV advertising. Further, the potential consequences of advertising parody will be discussed.

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, respectable people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them bad and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, however, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless bad habits, individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham, in this pioneering study. In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many good people engaged in activities that many, including they themselves, considered bad. What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct. Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification--to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how swinging Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society? This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

After Sinead O'Connor Appears on "Saturday Night Live," The Pope

After Sinead O'Connor Appears on "Saturday Night Live," The Pope

Theories of Illusion, and: After Sinead O'Connor Appears on "Saturday Night Live," The Pope, and: Eggshell Seas

THEORIES OF ILLUSION / Maureen Seaton The panda has a sixth digit we call a thumb but really it's a greatly enlarged "radial sesamoid," a simple component of the wrist. Also, although the panda is a charter member of the order Carnivora, she eats absolutely nothing but bamboo from the mountains of Western China. As for the orchid, we may think brava! What an amazingly well-thought-out system for attracting insects. But it's no more than a zany arrangement of already existing flower-parts, a jury-rig of pistil and stamen— much like my ex-boyfriend Will in his many disguises in and around America, the chilling fact that he's absolutely Will but can pass for someone or something else. For example, while bodybuilding, Will can be heard grunting in his makeshift gym until his back looks apish, his calves like a goat's leaping on high places. He can easily be mistaken for Chinese, Cherokee, Greek, that might be him right now looking Latino near Montrose. He used to say he'd find me one day and I'd never recognize him until he had me pinned in bed. He said "the strong survive," like the placentals who roamed across the Isthmus of Panama and all but extinguished the marsupials— and then he'd squeeze me for luck and punctuation. Once he was sitting in a saloon after escaping 116 - The Missouri Review from a hospital on the Hudson, and a cop asked him, point blank, if he'd seen himself. Like a slippery hero, a quantum leap of light, energy radiating at different levels of illusion, an insane physics: Mad Max meets Inspector Clouseau. Once the dinosaur was ineluctable as dawn and all the big ones lumbered and the winged ones tried to fly, and for a hundred million years they reigned, fit and fervent as the myth of creation. Now their descendent sparrow zooms above Swan Lake like a fairy spirit of the coelurosaurus, and the orchid continues expensive as silk. Now the panda faces starvation, and some believe Will has taken his life in Montana after a day of fishing. My favorite illusion is the one about the relativity of time. How the humpback with her big slow heart, her contrapuntal biorhythm, weaves a song in the deep— half-hour concert to us, to her a minute waltz. —after Stephen Jay Gould's The Panda's Thumb Maureen Seaton The Missouri Review · 117 AFTER SINEAD O'CONNOR APPEARS ON "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE," THE POPE I Maureen Seaton (for Janet Bloch) The night we baptize the sidewalk outside Our Lady of Sorrows across from Nelson's Funeral Home where the Neo-Futurists spray-paint "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," the only soul in sight is a woman with black eyes and bruises staining her chin like grape juice. Perplexed, she leans above a small figure stenciled on pavement and frowns. Barb and Van and I are moving away from the church like clouds up Clark toward Thybony Paints which I always call "Thy bony," and we're stunned to hear a voice behind us say: "What's that?" "That" is our simple rendering of a fifteenth-century criminal— incantatrix, fascinatrix, maléfica, sortílega, the one who gathers herbs, charms, boxes of gooey sacred ointments. "When an old woman begins to doat and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into ..." a stick-rider, poisoner, magus, hag, kasaph, evil-eye, screech-owl, night monster. When a young woman goes "surfing" on a river in Essex, "to and fro . . . on a board standing firm bolt upright, turning and winding it which way she pleases...," she is a strix, curandera, hocus pocus. When she heals a cold, braids her hair, unbraids it, breathes, disrespects a pope, has freckles, pockmarks, insect bites, cysts, she's charged, raped, starved, robbed, beaten, drowned, burned. 118 · The Missouri Review Maureen Seaton "It's a woman," I say as our interloper gets close enough to touch. The neighborhood looks so bloodless on a Wednesday night, its citizens washed in tv, snug in bungalows and two-flats— a ma and pa world, hard-working-hard-playing-fear...

GCT Review: Night Life: Science in the Dark

GCT Review: Night Life: Science in the Dark

Literary Theorists, Hear My Cry!

This is a true story. I have it tape recorded. It is seventh-grade language arts, and we are reading Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (Taylor 1976). The class has nearly finished the book, and I am interviewing Chris, who is a fairly good reader. And as I do so, I can feel it happening again: I am on the set of Saturday Night Live, the nation is laughing, and I suddenly realize the joke is on me. (Every barb to the pedagogical brainpan has been numbered below.)

NIGHT LIFE: Nocturnal Behavior Patterns Among Hospitalized Elderly

1. In contrast to previous studies where elderly living in an institution were found to demonstrate a consistent, predictable pattern of nocturnal activity, hospitalized elderly were found to be asleep less and awake more over a period of 3 consecutive nights. 2. Medication, treatments, and assessment were scheduled with little regard for the hospitalized elderly's need for restorative sleep. 3. Each time an elderly patient was awakened, it took him or her at least 30 minutes to return to sleep. 4. Nurses are advised to determine and maintain as much as possible the patient's usual bedtime routine, keep interruptions during the night to a minimum, schedule medications and treatments efficiently, decrease noise, and medicate for pain as appropriate.

The Hipster, the Hero, and the Psychic Frontier in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In White Negro Norman Mailer describes the hipster as a philosophical psychopath living on the fringes of society: One is Hip or one is Square, ... one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or a Square cell .. . (339). Mailer's essay is a characteristically American attempt to define possibility as the product of stark opposites. Hip and Square quite explicitly translate into contemporary and psychological terms the opposing forces that have been the basis for much of our greatest literature: civilization and wilderness, Aunt Sally and the Territory. The internalization of geography is an attempt to compensate for the disappearance or degeneration of a literal frontier. The West may still offer freedom, but in addition it frequently represents an exhaustive emptiness, or else (telescoping freedom and repression) inspires madness-both a consequence and a rejection of restrictive society. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) is the classic portrayal of emptiness and despair erupting into violence on what was once the frontier, the California toward which Jack Burden drives, in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), feeling that he is drowning in West, in a motionless ooze of History (288). Five years later, J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951) dreams of fleeing to a rustic cabin to live a sequestered life with his girl. Yet when he goes West it is not to freedom but to recover his shattered nerves in the relative restriction of a Hollywood sanitorium. But if, as these novels suggest, the West provides no ready-made opportunities for escape, there is another intangible and portable frontier which can be maintained by constantly calling attention to the defining extremes of freedom and restriction.1 The modern frontiersman invests his energy in disruption rather than flight: he must be a fighter, not for the sake of violence or of winning permanent victories but for the clearer distinctions and hence greater freedom that conflict engenders. Yet this investment in a conflict from which there is no easy flight often demands an emphasis on personal

From buying beds to upgrading an old rural hospital.

It was indeed quite tiring to consider working in another hospital so far away. I had worked in my present hospital for nearly eight years. It was so familiar that it seemed part of me. I had always worked in the city centre, having been born and bred there. I was used to working in hospitals a few minutes' walk away from my home, and perfectly adapted to the busy hospital fife of operations, seminars, and grand rounds?and to metropolitan night life. A friend of mine had recently been promoted to being the administrator of an old rural hospital that was in the early phase of expansion. It was near the border of Hong Kong, so far away that even sales representatives from the drug companies disliked going there. It had only a few doctors, old and retired. There was no

An English View: An Interview with Bryan Lask

Prior to the Second International Conference of Family Therapy, a meeting of 29 Editors of International Family Therapy Journals was held for a whole day, convened by Alan Gurman, Editor of The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Graham Martin attended as our official representative. One of the most outspoken of the Editors attending was Dr Bryan Lask, Editor of The Journal of Family Therapy. Graham was able to spend a good deal of the subsequent conference with Bryan. The following interview was recorded on the final afternoon when almost all the other attenders had gone home and both the protagonists were exhausted by the formal proceedings and the night life!

Nature's Night Life, by Robert Burton [Review

Nature's Night Life, by Robert Burton [Review

Why Buckwheat Was Shot

Sometime last year, a character called Buckwheat was shot to death on a segment of Saturday Night Live, NBC's popular comedy show geared to the tastes of a college-age audience whose sense of humor has not matured beyond the second year of high school. Who shot Buckwheat? Why would anyone want to shoot an adorable creature like him, with his endearing baby talk, his harmless mental retardation and his big, innocent grin? We shot him, of course. Those of us Black viewers who remembered the original Buckwheat and understood the dangerous implications of his reincarnation on national televison had smoking psychological pistols aimed at the screen every time Eddie Murphy appeared on it with his portrayal of that slow-witted, speech-impaired, unkempt adult male child.

Review of Night life: Explorations in dreaming.

Review of Night life: Explorations in dreaming.

Solid waste management: the metropolitan view.

A RECENT Gallup Poll (New York Times, Sept. 7, 1969) found that typical American citizen regarded New York as the most interesting of nation's large cities, with gayest night life, the best food, and the best looking women. But when it came to cleanliness or health, New York did not score! New York's solid waste problems merit some explanation. Despite a fairly constant population of 8 million, city's annual receipts of solid wastes have risen every year (Figure 1). This rising rate has been aggravated by shutdown of apartment house incinerators required by recent air pollution control regulations. Predictions made by our planning consultants are for a continuing rise to 12 million tons per year by year 2000. When, in 1934, U.S. Supreme Court enjoined city from disposing of its raw garbage at sea, city was forced to embark on a full-scale incinerator program. Despite Great Depression and World War II, by 1962 city did manage to construct 11 incinerators with a total design capacity of almost 9,000 tons per day. Since total amount of refuse delivered to Sanitation Department was more than double department's incinerator capacity, sanitary landfill operations were maintained through years to fill gap. Despite increase in solid waste generation, no incinerator has been built since 1962, and no sanitary landfill site has been established since 1955. Does this indicate apathy, indifference or incompetence in our planning and engineering personnel? Not at all. Several of them are suffering from chronic frustration bordering on psychosis. Our primary problem has been local community resistance to any sanitation facility, be it garage, transfer station, salt shed, sanitary landfill or incinerator site. And politicians who determine priorities for expenditure of city funds have postponed, vitiated, studied, and outrightly rejected projects that might be unpopular with a segment of voting population, however small.

Electroluminescence

It is a curious thing, but the Dawn of Civilization coincides with the beginnings of Night Life. When our ancestors learned how to light their way to bed, they were able, for the first time, to come down out of the trees. The ability to build a fire was one of the early distinguishing marks of Homo sapiens. By reason of the light and heat from the fires he made, he was enabled to establish his career on the ground. The anthropoid ape remained in the trees.

New Orleans Slang in the 1880s

HISTORICAL studies of American slang are not frequently possible because of the relative scarcity and unreliability of the written records of the slang used in earlier periods. A good opportunity for such a study is furnished, however, by The Lantern, a weekly journal published in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the 188os.1 This journal deals with politics, amusements, and commerce, and claims to be primarily interested in the 'correction of existing evils in the political, social, and commercial world.' The important thing, however, from the point of view of this study, is that the idiom used in the journal is regularly that of the streets, saloons, shows, gambling houses, race track, ring, and baseball park of New Orleans. City and state politics occupy the greatest space, though sports and night life receive generous attention. There are also in each issue two gossip columns which are written wholly in the dialect of the uneducated.