Punch Line Research Articles

A threshold theory of the humor response.

The humor response has long been considered mysterious, and it is given relatively little attention in modern experimental psychology, in spite of the fact that numerous studies suggest that it has substantial benefits for mood and health. Existing theories of humor fail to account for some of the most basic humor phenomena. On most occasions when a humor response occurs, certain verbal or visual stimuli (the "setup" stimuli, which function as an establishing operation) must precede a critical stimulus (such as a "punch line" or the final panel or critical feature of a cartoon), which then occasions a sudden "revelation" or "understanding"; this revelation is often accompanied by the humor response. We suggest that the setup stimuli increase the strength of the revelatory response to a point just below the threshold of awareness and that the critical stimulus, properly designed and timed, edges the revelatory response to a point just above threshold. We also suggest that it is this threshold phenomenon that produces most instances of the humor response. We discuss these issues in the context of some notable humor of Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner.

Word, Music, History: A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson. Stanford Slavic Studies, 29-30 by L. s> Fleishman G. Safran M. Wachtel (review)

146 SEER, 85, I, 2007 (P. 158). His own analysisis itself constantlyon the move, searchingfor ideas and patternsthat link and bind the whole together.Throughout, he drawsour attentionto Belyi'suse of contrastin the novel, with the constantinterplayand counterpoint of flesh and spirit,turbulenceand stasis,gesture and the spoken word, Dionysian disintegrationand Apollonian calm, the transcendentaland the quotidian, revealing its hidden connecting threads. At times Langen's analysisdoes not fully convince. In his discussion,for example, of the episode in which Apollon Apollonovich offers to escort a young girl home, Langen arguesthe case for his belief in the primacyof gesture,with his claim that it is the walk in silence that 'carriesthe real meaning here'. And yet, a few lines later, we are told that the verbal element the formal addressto the girl - 'carriesthe same level of significance'as the gesturalelement (p. ii6). We are also told that 'what is unusual is the extent to which [Petersburg's characters] interprettheir world as if it were a book' and that these characters'confront the same interpretivedifficultiesas the novel's readers', except that for the characters'the consequences are much more dire' (p. I5). But this goes without saying and, in any case, is it so unusual for a novel's charactersto be the unwitting victims of circumstancesbeyond their control or to be stumbling around in a fog of uncertainty?What is certainlyless common is the manner in which Belyi shatters expectations that this fog will finally clear when the conclusion to the novel has been reached. As Langen remarks:'No epiphany is recorded, no solution, no tragedy,no punch line' (p. 40). Petersburg indeed is so resistant to final interpretationthat it is hardly surprisingthat it evades Langen here. As is evident from his introduction he is aware that he will not be able to 'produce a master-thesisfrom which the whole novel could be derived' (p. xiv). From this viewpoint the book can be most fruitfullyseen as an exploration and mining of the seemingly limitless ideas and possibilities that the novel presents,reflectingBelyi'sown desire to emphasize the process of arrivingat a goal, rather than the goal itself. If, as might be inferred from the opening acknowledgments, this study started life as a dissertation,then it only rarely betrays its origins;Langen's often informal style is refreshing, even if occasionally jarring. The book contains informative notes and a useful bibliography.Langen may not have fully achieved his aim of demonstrating that Petersburg possesses a sense of organicwholeness, but he has succeeded in producinga challengingand often thought-provokinganalysiswhose greatestvalue is that it acts as a stimulusto read and reread a work of unquestioned genius. Exeter ROGER COCKRELL Fleishman, L., Safran, G. and Wachtel, M. (eds). Word,Music, Histoy: A Festsch7iftfor Cagyl Emerson. Stanford SlavicStudies, 29-30. StanfordUniversity , Stanford, CA, 2005. 777 pp. (2 vols). Notes. Selected bibliography. Price unknown. ONE of the abiding strengthsof Caryl Emerson'swork has been its emphasis on the importance of the interlocutor real, ideal, imaginary in Russian REVIEWS I47 culture. Whether discussing Bakhtin and Dostoevskii, or the canny Russian audiences who watch their operas through the prism of the original works on which they are so often based, Emerson has always carefully explored the dynamics that bind authors, texts and audiences. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that this Festschrift should place such high expectations on its potential readers, who are required to have a mastery of a wide range of primary sources and secondary material, a mastery, moreover, entirely characteristicof its dedicatee. Of course, for the contributors to these two volumes there is the perennial risk of the anxiety of influence;how can they find their own voice, especially when they are treading on the very areas covered by the figure they gather to honour? Yet Emerson's authority also rests on its generosity and grace, as well as its readiness to embrace alterity and debate, characteristicsthat surely explain the willingness of so many of her friendsand colleagues to pay tribute to her here. The forty-fourarticlesand essaysgatheredin these two volumes all attestto Emerson'sinterestsand influence.Most are by leading American Slavists,but there are also voices from Britain and Russia (indeed five are written in Russian...

A Counter-Sign in the Punch Line : The Tragi-Comic Blending of Identities in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

A Counter-Sign in the Punch Line : The Tragi-Comic Blending of Identities in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

News and Notes

News and Notes

Teaching the distinction between positive and negative reinforcement

Teaching the distinction between positive and negative reinforcement

Revising Theatrical Conventions inA Simple Story: Elizabeth Inchbald's Ambiguous Performance

Sometime in the early 1780s, a beautiful young woman stopped by the home of Thomas Harris, theater manager at Covent Garden. She was an actress in his company, and she had recently given him some plays that she hoped he would produce. Harris, it seems, had hopes of his own:When the consultation was ended, Mr. Harris, who was a handsome man, and had found so little difficulty among the theatrical sisterhood under his government, thought that he might be equally successful in an attack on Mrs. Inchbald; but, instead of regular approaches, he attempted to take the fort by storm, and Mrs. Inchbald found no recourse but in seizing him by the hair, which she pulled with such violence that she forced him to desist. She then rushed out of the house, and proceeded in haste, and under great agitation, to the green-room of the theater, where the company were then rehearsing. She entered the room with so wild an air, and with such that all present were alarmed. She hastily related what had happened as far as her impediment [a recurrent stutter] would permit her, and concluded with the following exclamation: Oh! If he had wo-wo-worn a wig, I had been ru-ruined!1John Taylor, a close friend of Elizabeth Inchbald, includes this story in his memoirs. Though scholars have questioned its veracity, the anecdote was widely circulated, and, legend or truth, it illustrates the singular challenges that faced actresses and hopeful female playwrights. As Taylor suggests, liaisons between theater managers and their supporting casts were common, expected, and accepted. The anecdote also indicates the characteristics that enabled Inchbald to overcome these obstacles and become one of the most successful playwrights, novelists, and drama critics of the late-eighteenth-century: her trademark toughness and persistence, her refusal to be controlled by a male superior, and her determination not to be silenced-despite her rather unique struggles for expression.Inchbald occupies multiple roles in this encounter with Harris. She is at once playwright, victim, and-as indicated by her ability to deliver a comic punch line with theatrical presence-the consummate actress. Inchbald makes us want to laugh at what is obviously a frightening, distinctly un-funny experience; she performs her distress as a joke, and her stutter, which highlights her disturbance, also adds to the humor. Her speech impediment, an involuntary effect caused by and representative of evident emotion, at once complicates the clear, discrete articulation of what her feelings may be and seems positioned voluntarily to highlight and heighten feelings of merriment surrounding this event. So what was Inchbald feeling? Fright? Rage? Relief? Amusement? Confidence? Her account makes it impossible for us to latch on to any one emotion; what it does convey is a sense that multiple feelings are being expressed simultaneously.This feature of Taylor's anecdote is characteristic of Inchbald's treatment of emotions in her fiction: she suggests that multiple emotions may be experienced and expressed all at once. Though this formulation may not sound so innovative to us today, it represents a very different understanding of emotions and expression from the one advocated by the eighteenth-century stage. Eighteenth-century actors and actresses relied on a semantics of gesture in which a specific pose signifies a specific so that emotions could be expressed and interpreted discretely, straightforwardly; Inchbald, as a prominent actress and playwright of the eighteenth century, is commonly assumed to have accepted and implemented these same conventions in her non-dramatic prose. For example, Nora Nachumi asserts that [Inchbald's] knowledge of a widely recognized system of theatrical gesture manifests itself in her criticism and fiction and concludes that Inchbald repeatedly demonstrates that bodies express emotions more authentically and more persuasively than words alone (318). …

Imbolc Poems

1. Imbolc easier if once having given birth the new fawn straggled off to eden so much harder to carry her with her stick legs over snowfi elds if there were a brook a fig left lying in the snow a trickle of sap from a tree to make the journey easier o lady of the well of life have pity on one who bears herself through cold winter show yourself though you dwell beneath frozen water tap the ice until it breaks 2. Festival of Trees When we went to the clearing to visit the trees, the great trees of the clearing, [End Page 75] mother, grandmother, and daughter, sister, and faithful gatekeeper, we blessed them to grow upward, to spread the wealth of earth into the air as a fan scatters a breeze across the face. But when we came to the wise crone, the old dead tree wrapped in vines, escorted by milkweed and tall grass, her we blessed to grow downward to pour her radiance back into the soil so that all would grow from her body. That day in the snow she had the face of an owl, beak and hooded eyes. Her call could not be heard. It was beneath us, under the ground. 3. Snow Queen soft and deep the magician said to me while he ate at my table in winter soft and deep is your wisdom you are snow one can walk through you your voice is dripping water one cannot hear it except in the silence between winds you are the white roof of a stone you round the world's edges you are a wall dividing earth from sky but you are earth and sky together [End Page 76] you are an avalanche you snap the boughs of birches you are a skin on earth you cover each needle of the pines you are a snowdrift no one can move you except a little at a time 4. The Feast of Brigid The red-haired girl draws milk in a pail from the earth. The earth is a spotted cow with teats that are geysers and anthills and rotten logs. The red-haired girl strokes and strokes the dark soil. When the milk rises in spurts she catches its arc of white froth to give out to visitors. At the gate of the farm the world holds out its hand, while in a field rimed with frost the first snowdrop toddles from the ground. 5. Sunna and the Wolf My pretty, I will eat you, and when I eat you you will shine so brightly within me I will tear myself open for the joy of seeing you again. [End Page 77] Then it will be dawn. The blood of my desire will paint the sky. Only you and I will know how in the night you lay in my belly and at daybreak I let you go. 6. Baubo My beloved calls you Vagina Girl. You are her hero, the goddess who speaks with the lips of her vulva, who tells jokes about misery. You are the one who backs her father's words against the wall so her body may speak. In the mists of myth you danced with a grieving mother and made her laugh. You brought the first warm breeze to earth. You are as old as the hills and as young as the need to keep living. You are the patron saint of survivors. Everyone likes you at parties and fears you for telling the truth. When I meet you and your furry ways you tickle me. I would try to become you if I could tell one punch line without crying. 7. Demeter Pauses If I do not find her there will still be mountains and melt coming off the hills in spring and the grain will feel cool and heavy in my hand as I cast it to the hungry earth and the fir boughs will touch my face [End Page...

The Hertzian Sublime

For anyone who knows Neil Hertz, a great raconteur with an ironic sense of humor, a man of people, able to talk to anyone, he seems a most unlikely theorist of sublime, in line of Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Longinus and Burke display an unbounded admiration for moments of elevation, in expression and nature-not so Hertz. Neither they nor Kant is notable for a sense of humor, and they are all quite snooty about low or trivial. use of trivial words, writes Longinus, terribly disfigures passages in grand style (154). But moments of incongruity that provoke and dismay Longinus are precisely what capture Hertz's attention, and his best stories are likely to have as a punch line something incongruous that somebody said. For Longinus sublimity comes from nobility of soul and manifests itself in elevated language. Hertz, au contraire, is suspicious of those moments when the language rises, as he puts it in The End of Line (62). He has a nose for precisely those moments of tonal heightening, which attract his critical eye and reveal special investments, something suspicious going on-by contrast with moments of less inflated language. It is notjust Hertz raconteur who savors deflation produced by vulgar or overly familiar but also Hertz critic. In Recognizing Casaubon, an essay whose centrality for his work is marked by fact that it appears in George Eliot's Pulse as well as in The End of Line, opening page considers a passage where Eliot asks Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out glory of world and leave

Narrative Terrorism

Schneiderman continuedfrom previous page can't help but be taken in, not by the relative reality of the events, but by the seamlessness of the morethan -obvious threads. Olsen's novel announces its hyper-constructedness on every page, in every crevice, and yet, well, we've seen this movie so many times before that there is a certain satisfaction in seeing it again in this highly-stylized fashion: springs and wires flail prominently away from an inside that is no more real than the most twentieth-century moments of Proust. Marcel's voyage may be a story with no punchline (only more story), but Olsen's set-up is a punch line with no joke—scaled to an über-mall that feeds on the propagation ofpunch lines. At the end of several thousand pages, Marcel, for all his troubles, may quarry a small measure of recaptured time, but Olsen (with his final line: "[t]he film begins"), graces us with a project even more ambitious: a series of (im)precisely timed captures. Davis Schneiderman, chair ofAmerican Studies at Lake Forest College, is a writer and critic. He is coeditor ofRetaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto); and his project, Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader, is forthcomingfrom Spuyten Duyvil. Narrative Terrorism Jeffrey R. Di Leo Terror-Dot-Gov Harold Jaffe Raw Dog Screaming Press http://www.rawdogscreaming.com 154 pages; paper, $13.95 The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe: The Journal of Experimental Fiction, no. 29 Edited by Eckhard Gerdes iUniverse http://www.iUniverse.com 169 pages; paper, $12.95 Terror-Dot-Gov is a tour-de-force rumination on the psychical damage and physical carnage resulting from present day terrorism and war. In his distinctively sparse and cool prose, Harold Jaffe takes on the contemporary cultural and political climate with narrative bravado and ideological courage. At heart, Terror-Dot-Gov is a work of political activism and deep humanity with a sense of outrage at the state of national and international affairs. Terror-Dot-Gov is not a simple straightforward assault on the Bush administration, Western culture and policy, or the nationalistic and xenophobic proclivities oftheAmerican public, but rather a complex mosaic of poignant vignettes that together amount to devastating critique. Jaffe criticizes government policies and the responses of the American public by highlighting the more local effects of them, and only suggests their global flows. His docufiction "Terrorchildren" is a good example ofJaffe's critical technique. "Terrorchildren" begins by recounting Heather Gosling's idea of using weeds as weapons in the war against terror. In Houseplants against Terror, Gosling showsAmericans how to use plants to signal the presence ofbiological and chemical agents in the environment . Writes Jaffe, "IfDr. Gosling's plan works, the technology could be used to turn forest oaks, backyard shrubs, pond algae, even festooned Christmas trees into sentinels in the war against terrorism." Then comes the punchline: "But ifherplant signals anthrax, smallpox or plague, most non-moronic Americans would know they were exposed before displaying symptoms." Jaffe continues, "Which would allow them ample time to ingest potent FDA-approved antibiotics and duct-tape themselves into their condos with their significant other, low-carb snacks, bible, cellphone, TV and Internet." Jaffe satirizes government -instigated paranoia, but also cuts into the culture of fear and consumption. Rather than assailing the Department ofDefense, the Department ofHomeland Security, and the early-warning alert system directly, Jaffe approaches his target through an absurd "human interest" story. And Jaffe is a master of manipulating the inane or absurd story to potent political effect. In "White Terror," Jaffe uses absurd news items to satirize the culture of violence and indiscriminate retaliation. Two interlocutors discuss who should be bombed in response to a list of unusual crimes or tragedies. Following an absurd story about South African beauty queens mauled in Botswana by a hippopotamus , characters respond to the question "Who would you bomb?": Can we bomb the colonizing British retroactively? Regrets, that isn'tpermitted. I'd bomb blonde beauty contest winners who live and thrive in Africa with hyphenated surnames. Me? I'd bomb the safari tourist trade. From an inane if vivid beauty-meets-beast story, Jaffe...

Henry Kaiser, Troy Ruttman, and Madman Muntz: Three Originals

Henry Kaiser, Troy Ruttman, and Madman Muntz:Three Originals Robert C. Post (bio) Two of the men mentioned above appear in the photograph on the cover of this issue. Henry J. Kaiser does not, just his namesake automobile manufactured at his plant near Ypsilanti, Michigan. Of the three, however, only Kaiser's has remained a name to be reckoned with in American history: the entrepreneur behind Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams; builder of a third of the entire World War II U.S. merchant fleet, as well as the world's largest cement plant at Permanente, California, and a steel mill in Fontana that employed as many as 11,000 workers; founder of the Kaiser Medical Care Program in Oakland, which became the template for the HMOs so much in current news; developer of Hawaii Kai, another template, in this case for the luxury resort hotel complex; chief of an industrial firm that made hundreds of different products, from airplanes to dishwashers. In 2004, the Oakland Museum of California staged an exhibition about Kaiser's "impact on the modern economic and cultural landscape" called Henry J. Kaiser: Think Big. Not everything Kaiser created survives today—only a couple of those merchant ships, and the steel mill replaced by California Speedway, a land reuse entailing minimal toxic-waste cleanup. But he certainly left monuments. By comparison, Earl Muntz's fame was fleeting—and yet his name did become a punch line for Jack Benny and Bob Hope, he is enshrined in the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Hall of Fame, and a sports car called the Muntz Jet is a rare treasure among collectors. And, while California's premier historian Kevin Starr is probably correct in calling Henry [End Page 773] Kaiser the most "surprising character" in the state's history because of his "eccentric Wizard of Oz personality," for sheer eccentricity Kaiser was no match at all for Earl Muntz, who was as colorful a character as ever marched to the tune of American enterprise. Muntz and Kaiser may never have actually met, but their lives intersected in 1947 when Muntz became the California distributor for the Kaiser automobile and its companion make named for Kaiser's partner Joseph W. Frazer. With the two of them as president and chairman of the board, respectively, the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation turned out enough cars at Ford's old Willow Run bomber plant to capture 5 percent of the U.S. market before Frazer left the firm in 1949, and Kaiser produced nearly 750,000 autos all told before folding his hand in 1955. These included Kaisers, Frazers, a fiberglass sports car called the Darrin, and one of the first autos later to be dubbed "compact," the Henry J, which, if nothing else, "reinforced the industry's conviction that Americans were not interested in small fuel-efficient cars"—Rudi Volti's words in his new book, Cars and Culture (Westport, Conn., 2004). But the name Henry J brings us back to the photo, taken a couple of years after the end of the war, when Henry Kaiser (1882–1967) and Earl Muntz (1910–1987) had both hit their stride, Kaiser assembling 2,770 Liberty ships, Muntz selling many times that many used cars when Detroit assembly lines were converted to military production. The car shown here is a Kaiser, but it could just as well be a Frazer—later on, with the debut of the "Anatomic" Kaiser, the styling of the two makes differed, but in 1947 they were virtually identical save for chrome trim and interior appointments. Most likely, the track is a half-mile oval called Carrell Speedway in the town of Gardena, which staged weekend events for prewar hot rods called "the roarin' roadsters," and for "late model stocks"—the kind of competition from which NASCAR would flower. These were usually well-established makes like Fords, Mercs, and Oldsmobiles, but on at least this one occasion a car from fledgling Kaiser-Frazer went to the races also. A mechanic has pulled off the brake drum to check the lining or wheel bearing, and a gentleman in dark glasses and bow tie glances at something else, perhaps another car taking qualifying...

Toward a History of Statelessness in America

Browsing through an electronic card catalog not long ago, I found a new edition of Edward Everett Hale's A Man Without a Country.1 First published during the Civil War, the novella is a frightening cautionary tale. The fiction begins in 1805, when a young naval officer is seduced (Hale's word, not mine) by Aaron Burr, and drawn into the former vice president's conspiracy to detach the Southwest and reconfigure the United States. The voice of the narrator moves between fact and fiction; many readers are still convinced that they are reading history. In the story, the young officer, Philip Nolan, is tried for treason in a regional imitation of Aaron Burr's trial in Richmond, Virginia. When the chief judge asks him whether he has anything to say that will prove his loyalty to the United States, Nolan blurts out, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" The shocked court, composed of Revolutionary War veterans, grants his wish. Nolan is condemned to perpetual exile, sailing around the globe on American ships for the rest of his life, doomed never to return and never to hear talk of home. He does not question his punishment. Late in life, he cautions another young officer, the narrator, to avoid his fate: "And for your country, boy . . . and for that flag . . . never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you." The punch line is absolute and uncritical. The tale is a densely layered fable. Philip Nolan himself may not step on the earth over which his nation's flag waves or claim his nation's protection, but he lives out his life on a floating nation, a ship that flies the American flag and freely moves across the globe, conveying American claims to authority and influence, and in that way constructing the new nation as a player in an international contest for space and power. Aaron Burr figures in the narrative in only one dimension of his many-dimensioned career: only in the guise of the Devil, whispering temptation, the Aaron Burr who killed the hero Alexander Hamilton in a duel. There is no hint of the Aaron Burr who admired Mary Wollstonecraft, the Aaron Burr who raised his daughter, Theodosia, to be an intellectual (as Thomas Jefferson most assuredly did not raise his daughter, [End Page 727] Martha). There is certainly no hint of the Aaron Burr who eloquently opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts and who called on America to be "an asylum to the oppressed of every nation."2 Edward Everett Hale intended simply to make an intervention into the politics of his own time, hoping to undermine Confederate sympathizer Clement Vallandigham's race for governor in Ohio.3 But Hale's novella has had an extraordinarily long life. Reaching back to the founding era for its setting, published as a patriotic narrative in the midst of the Civil War and as a support to Abraham Lincoln's suspension of civil liberties, it was reprinted steadily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with flurries of new editions during World War I and again during World War II. During World War I several dramatic versions were staged; shortly after World War II a radio adaptation was broadcast, with voice-over narration by Bing Crosby, and in 1973 a sympathetic made-for-TV version appeared, echoing the anxieties of the Vietnam War, starring Cliff Robertson. And then no more reprints until after 9/11. A roughly similar drift in the pace of attention paid to the issue of statelessness can be traced in the lineage of nonfiction books and articles, tracking with chilling accuracy the rise and fall of the threat of statelessness throughout the world. Thus a number of legal and political monographs were published in the aftermath of World War I, then their numbers receded. They reemerged in the 1930s; among them the rare monograph on the subject, published a little...

All the Respect They Deserve

In this issue of The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, Lawson uses the story of Dorothy's journey in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900) to illustrate the heroic journey metaphor, which typically begins with a to adventure. When you think of a call to adventure as it relates to the practice of developmental education, you might have a tendency to think of a ropes course, white-water rafting, or camping in the wilderness. But if you're an urban kid growing in New York City, instead of perils far afield, the call to adventure might lead you to Dangerfield's--a popular Manhattan comedy club. That is, children and adolescents who are looking for elements commonly found in adventure-based education, such as risk, challenge, and a break with the familiar (Schoel, Prouty, & Radcliffe, 1988), are attending stand-up comedy classes that are being taught in schools and comedy clubs. Premises, punch lines, and tags--oh my! To gain a better understanding of the phenomenon, I interviewed Karen Bergreen, a professional comedian who has been teaching children the art of stand-up for more than 5 years. The students in her classes range from 7 to 18 years of age, with an average age of approximately 11 years. The age of 11 may be a particularly sensitive period for humor development, as Fuhr (2002) found, because both boys and girls naturally increase their use of coping humor between the ages of 11 and 12. In a similar vein, Karen insists that she does not teach children to be funny; instead, she teaches them to tap into and develop their native abilities. She describes the classes as boy-heavy and wishes that more girls would take the classes to counteract what she describes as a female tendency to be overconforming. I asked her to explain the possible benefits of classes for her students, and she replied, It's great for their self-confidence and self-esteem. No one's ever appreciated their oddness. Audiences just love them! She went on to explain that many of the kids in her classes tend to have sort of a misfit quality and that typically these are not the popular kids. Some are though; she also teaches kids who are very popular and for whom this is just one of many extracurricular activities. I observed Karen one Saturday afternoon as she taught a 3-hour class. Karen has ground rules that prohibit the students from using material that is offensive, makes fun of ethnic or sexual minorities, or makes fun of another person's physical appearance. Furthermore, kids are not merely telling naked, pedestrian jokes (or naked pedestrian jokes for that matter). Instead, they are taught and encouraged to develop reflective humor born out of the contexts of their lives. A primary goal for Karen's students is self-expression. The comic enactments or empower them to stand up to aspects of themselves or roles that they are discouraged from asserting in everyday life. Students also use act-outs to invite audience members to laugh at troubling aspects of themselves that they are courageous enough to publicly portray in the moment but also seek to better understand, accept, or more effectively integrate into their identities (Limon, 2000, pp. 4-7). Thus, stand-up can potentially facilitate identity formation and congruence. I spoke with six of Karen's students and asked them how they hoped to benefit from studying stand-up comedy. All of them expressed a desire to develop their senses of humor, to gain acceptance from others, and to become more socially skilled. A second primary theme related to identity formation issues. There were two girls in the class, and both appeared to be seeking to actualize aspects or sides of themselves that have been constrained by the expectations of others. Elizabeth, age 11, stated that she is perfectionistic, and as a result, her peers and teachers do not recognize her humorous side. She explained, My dad is too serious--I don't want to be like that. …

DEATH BY LAUGHTER IN SADE AND MAUPASSANT

Sade's Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond (1782) and Maupassant's ‘Auprès d'un mort’ (1883) both deal with death in a humorous way. The solemn situations and philosophical tones of these two stories are ‘hijacked’, as it were, by comedy. Both deliver comic relief in a final punch line. The question as to how and why this surprising comic effect functions in both works will be dealt with here. One cannot claim that a link between Sade and Maupassant rests upon intertextuality as such a claim would be unsustainable.1 This comparative study aims to consider parallel themes in relation to the use of comic devices. To begin with, both texts refer to Christian rites concerning death. In Sade's dialogue, a priest comes to administer the last rites to a dying man who is a libertine. ‘Auprès d'un mort’, as the title suggests, presents a traditional funeral vigil. These familiar...

The Unusual Case of Leslie Lapidus: The Purposes of the Remarkably Long Joke in William Styron's Sophie's Choice

In Discussing the humor of William Styron's humor-filled novel Sophie's Choice, I am particularly interested in focusing upon the nature of the joke that fills a huge portion of the novel, the Leslie Lapidus affair. Rarely (if ever) in the history of the written word, I'd be willing to venture, has a joke of the outrageous length of this one been set down. The Leslie Lapidus affair, from start to finish, actually takes up about a full fifth of a long novel. The reader first hears of Leslie as a “hot dish” promised to Stingo, the main character and the narrator, on page 82 of the 1992 Vintage edition, but the punch line doesn't come until page 193, followed by a few pages of denouement. What a buildup! That's a startlingly long joke. The over-length of the Leslie Lapidus affair, as well as its late-in-the-novel resurrection in the briefer “coda” that is the Mary Alice Grimball encounter, should be enough to make the reader take pause. What in the world is a joke of this size doing in a novel about the Holocaust? How does it relate to the major ideas of the novel? At 100+ pages, it's practically a major theme of its own.

From Front Porch to Back Seat: A History of the Date

One day, the 1920s story goes, a young man came to call upon a city girl. When he arrived, she had her hat on. The punch line is completely lost on twenty-first-century readers, but people at the time would have gotten it. He came on a “call,” expecting to sit in her parlor, be served some refreshments, perhaps listen to her play the piano. She expected to go out on a date. He, it is fairly safe to surmise, ended up spending a fair amount of money fulfilling her expectations (1). In fact, the unfortunate young man really should have known better. By 1924, when this story was current, “dating” had almost completely replaced “calling” in middle-class American culture. The term appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal, a bastion of middle-class respectability, several times in 1914—set off by quotation marks, but with no explanation of its meaning. One article, written in the then-exotic voice of a college sorority girl, began: One beautiful evening in the spring term, when I was a college girl of eighteen, the boy whom, because of his popularity in every phase of college life, I had been proud gradually to allow the monopoly of my ‘dates,’ took me unexpectedly into his arms. As he kissed me impetuously I was glad, from the bottom of my heart, for the training of that mother who had taught me to hold myself aloof from all personal familiarities of boys and men (2).

High Performance Schooling

As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern notes in her introduction to the collection Audit Cultures, the emergence of audit and assessment procedures that we see in academic practice ‘is part of a global phenomenon. Audit regimes accompany a specific epoch in Western international affairs’.2 The different evaluative procedures found in the US GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and the UK RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) are both culturally specific – and increasingly shared by people around the world. From individuals and small groups to larger institutions, governments and, of late, international and transnational organizations, we find a complex and growing regime of evaluative procedures that accompany, enable and, precisely, account for contemporary processes of globalization. Such procedures are in no way limited to academics, of course, but extend across every social sphere, including those of business, politics, healthcare, the military and even art and culture. Through initiatives such as the United Nation’s Global Compact, the entire world is becoming a giant test site, a colossal ‘audit-orium’ or space of auditing. Perhaps a more fitting punch line to my epigraph will soon be: ‘I’m an Earthling. I was born to be audited’.

The Gossip of Ideology

The Gossip of Ideology

Viagra and 'Getting it up'

Viagra and 'Getting it up'

Textpragmatic impairments of figure-ground distinction in right-brain damaged stroke patients compared with aphasics and healthy controls

Abstract Following previously published work on aphasic texts and unpublished pilot studies on textpragmatic impairments in right-brain damaged stroke patients (RBDs), we present an exploratory study on textpragmatic dimensions of several text classes produced by RBDs as compared with aphasics and healthy controls. In contrast to the main thrust of published research on (text)pragmatic impairments in RBDs, we assume for them the existence of a specific major impairment of figure-ground segregation, with consequences in defective textual organization, in inferencing, and in metalinguistic behavior. In this way we explain the RBDs’ deficits in producing (but not in comprehending) the essential textual core and emotional elements, and essential inferences. Difficulties in figure-ground distinction also result in RBDs’ insecurity about how well they solve discursive problems. These deficits appeared in the tests that we administered to 4 RBDs, 5 controls, 3 Broca and 2 Wernicke aphasics. Subjects had to carry out the following tasks: (a) oral production of a longer and a shorter picture story, (b) oral and written reproduction of a longer and a shorter oral narrative, (c) productions of telegraphic versions, of titles and of punch lines for (a) and (b). Differences in the RBDs’ performances in these distinct tasks are traced back to different cognitive demands on oral vs. written vs. reductive reproduction vs. picture story telling.

The power of storytelling

Nurs Outlook 2003;51:37-42.