Self-deprecating Humor Research Articles

Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (review)

Reviewed by: Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch Rachel S. Harris Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld , trans. Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Pp. 271. Cloth $18.95. ISBN 978-0-393-06524-4. Award-winning Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) was a paradox in life and in her art. Reclusive and private, she was also the source of media sensationalism in Israel, often featuring in gossip columns for her wardrobe, politics, and personal life. Her poetry employed biblical language in a modern Hebrew vernacular and brought together aspects of her personal biography and her strong political consciousness. "Her status as a beloved, unofficial poet laureate allowed her protest to carry some weight with the Israeli public." (17) Well-known in translation for her vocal opposition to the Israeli war in Lebanon from 1978 onwards with poems like "You Can't Kill a Baby Twice," in Israel her fame began earlier with the publication of her first volume of poetry "The Love of an Orange." (1959) She is associated with the State Generation of poets, which includes renowned figures such as Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach and Haim Gouri, though she is often paralleled with her contemporary Yona Wallach, another leading female poet of the 1960s and 1970s. With this volume, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld showcase a broad selection of Ravikovitch's oeuvre and provide the most comprehensive collection in English translation to date. In this impressive book they provide a helpful introduction to Ravikovitch's work, which places the poet in the context of her peers and the history of Israeli society to which her verse often responds. Best known as a poet, Ravikovitch also wrote short stories and children's poetry. In addition she translated English poetry and numerous children's literary classics. According to Bloch and Kronfeld, Ravikovitch's "defining subject" in her own poetry is "the devastating consequences of unequal power relations for the individual and for society, the self in a state of crisis refracting the state of the nation." (19) The editors explain the reach and variety of her poetry, her style: "restrained pathos to prickly ambivalence, ebullient playfulness, and self-deprecating humor;" the devices that mark the virtuosity of her talent: "irony" and her ability to "hold pathos in check;" and her failure to "shy away from the astringent or irreverent." (21) While the introduction is certainly indispensable, it is somewhat bother some that the authors chose to refer to the poet by her first name Dahlia, rather [End Page 91] than the more traditional approach of referring to an author by his or her surname. Though dissonant, this artifice seems an attempt to link Ravikovitch with other key figures in Jewish history (both secular and religious) such as the biblical matriarchs, or author and poetess Rahel Bluwestein, who is also known only by her first name. The collection is organized by date, and subdivided by publication. This helpful order gives us a flavor of the thematic cohesion of independent volumes and provides a feel for the development of Ravikovitch's subject matter and style over the course of her life and career. Through her invocation of exotic locales such as Zanzibar, Australia, Byzantium, and the world of the Thousand and One Nights, Ravikovitch's poetry has a fairy-tale quality. Rather than foreground Jewish themes, she invokes the Bible as a mythical landscape. Similarly, she calls on images from Greek legend and crusader narratives. Modernist in its construction, the poetry ranges thematically through more ethereal themes conjuring a romantic and indeterminate world. The poetry's energy often comes from the power of nature: the sun, the sea, ants, wasps, and other creatures occupy her verse. There is a constant sense of the desire to escape, longing for adventure and for the world beyond the horizon. In "The Blue West," she writes: I want to reach the ends of thoughtWhose very beginningsSlash like a knife.I want to ascend to the fringes of the sunAnd not fall prey to the fire. "Love," Ravikovitch's poem of romantic passion, brings together this desire...

Hex Hall (review)

Reviewed by: Hex Hall Kate Quealy-Gainer Hawkins, Rachel . Hex Hall. Disney/Hyperion, 2010. 323p. ISBN 978-1-4231-2130-5$16.99 R Gr. 7-10 After causing yet another minor disaster with a well-intentioned spell gone awry, sixteen-year-old Sophie Mercer is sent to Hex Hall, a reform school for rebellious witches, fairies, shapeshifters, and the occasional vampire. Sophie's deficiencies in spell-working are not really her fault—after all, she has never even met her mysterious warlock father, from whom she has supposedly inherited a mega amount of [End Page 379] magic—but her lack of magical training, especially her lack of knowledge about the social rules of the Prodigium (the world of supernatural beings), makes fitting in at her new school nearly impossible. When the only friendship she has managed to make is threatened by accusations that her vamp roommate has been attacking students, Sophie sets out to clear her friend's name but instead uncovers a terrible family secret that threatens not only Sophie's life but her very soul. Though a boarding-school drama for the rich and magical is by no means groundbreaking, Hawkins manages to deliver a fresh and humorous take, largely in part to the snarky but perceptive narration of her clever protagonist. As with narrator Maggie Quinn in Clement-Moore's Prom Dates From Hell (BCCB 7/07), Sophie's self-deprecating humor and sardonic wit elevate this story from cliché to laugh-out-loud funny, giving readers overwhelmed with angsty vampires and werewolves a welcome relief. The various plot twists make the mystery all the more intriguing, while the concluding revelation adds a bit of gravity to this mostly frothy tale and makes way for what will be a much-anticipated sequel. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Middlebrow Knowingness in 1950s San Francisco: The Kingston Trio, Beat Counterculture, and the Production of “Authenticity”

The Kingston Trio was among the most commercially successful and influential music groups in American history. The trio's records, beginning in 1958, demonstrated the immense commercial viability of folk songs, paving the way for the folk music revival of the 1960s and the subsequent, folk-inspired singer-songwriter movement that continues to this day. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and other scholars regarding taste culture, this study argues that the trio's meteoric rise in national popularity was due to the group's ability to carve a middlebrow niche between Cold War conservatism and a nascent countercultural movement rooted largely in 1950s San Francisco. Specifically, the trio's music and performance style tapped into counter-cultural anxieties regarding authenticity, masculinity, race, and intellectualism. At the same time, the trio dismissed such issues via self-deprecating humor so that their records were at once provocative and politically acceptable for mass consumption.

More Daring Escapes , and: Practice (review)

Reviewed by: More Daring Escapes, and: Practice Marilyn Krysl (bio) Steven Huff. More Daring Escapes. Red Hen Press. Dan Bellm. Practice. Sixteen Rivers Press. "False words are not only evil in themselves," Plato wrote, "but they infect the soul with evil." In this first decade of the new century, in which the infection of the lie has become commonplace, I look for sustenance in poems that body forth our detailed, multifarious, human truths. Both Steven Huff's and Dan Bellm's books resemble each other in setting a high benchmark, and the two books are also similar in structure. Both order their poems in topical sections, and both include a section that is an extended sequence. I'm drawn to Huff's second collection, More Daring Escapes, which Thom Ward says confronts "the wondrous, suffocating knowledge that work, and work alone, is the only means to whatever we call salvation on this earth." The section called "Travail" is a tour-de-force sequence that lays bare the sinew and bone weariness of the worker in "that damned shirt factory," who concludes that … There's a chain there somewhere, I can feel it snaking around my leg, but I'm afraid to look. In vivid, harrowing detail, Huff renders the hard truths of work's ruthlessness as it existed in the preceding century and still exists in this one. But he is a poet of wise understanding who recognizes in what is arduous the earthy presence of spirit. The laborer bludgeoned by fatigue glimpses the complement to this pain when he sees … the Spirit in a spill on the table, the sigh of shoes on the sod. Good God, bad God. Huff writes this section in sturdy, "common man" language, but he is also a master of articulating the whimsical and amusing. In the final section called "Alabaster," "The Facts" takes three pages, and I wouldn't wish it shortened even a whit. His talent for lyric also appears in several litanies, or "list" poems, one cataloging "miracle workers" who have let him off various hooks, and another the moving "A Bestiary of Continuous Extinctions," in which Huff intones the names of extinct species, and imagines in their going his own. [End Page 161] Are you taking me with you, blue indigo goat fly? Where are we going ruby-tusked Madagascar boar? Reviewers are supposed to both laud and critique. The one fault in this book is the fact that I can't find any fault in it. Huff's articulateness and gentle, self-deprecating humor deliver line after line of soul food, and I want to sit with him and "watch the city turn to alabaster." Bellm prepares us for Practice with an introduction that describes the book as midrash, the ancient practice of "imaginatively explaining or expanding the Old Testament text beyond its apparent literal meaning." This introduction predisposes us to read the collection as a testament of the spiritual life, and it is. In the first section, in which he renders the voice of the supplicant in a poem addressing his mother's decline, he refers to God as "No One." Tell me—No One—now that, mother to son, no more remembrance is to be allowed … Sometimes we sit and lose our memory together, I can almost stop presuming I am here…. The poems in section 2, which addresses gay/lesbian reality, are some of the most moving in the book. Bellm asks the agonizing questions. "How do we forgive ourselves for what / we haven't done?" In "Portal," on a bus with "this friend I had loved seven years," Bellm writes, I was ready to be frightened and took his hand and held my breath, and felt my soul leave me and return as another still myself but not alone … The poems in section 3 (for instance, "Repair," "Milk," and "Sacrifice"), I want to tack to the wall so I can encounter them in the midst of going about living. "Clean" is a skillfully written villanelle in which Bellm renders a portrait of himself as the perfectionist obsessed by cleaning up after his more relaxed lover, calling himself "Miss Mr. Clean, everything just so." The final...

King of Shadows by Aaron Shurin

colorado review 184 (Perhaps memory is precise but when the room around a favorite object changes objects seem changed, too . . . Schiff places the objects of this book’s concern in a host of poetic rooms. Each stanza is a new room that relocates the object and the reader amid imagery from Glocks to Botticelli. “Project Paperclip,” and the book too, ends with a litany, counted down from 42 to 1, items categorized manically, ordered masterfully, and, somehow, all memorializing Schiff’s mother’s birth during wwii; the b-29 superfortress; September 11, 2001; and designer Tom Ford. If the Romantics were concerned with the sublime, Schiff is concerned with an idea stranger, darker, and eerily more familiar than the sublime. Revolver constantly reorganizes, reorders , and recategorizes, clicking chamber to chamber, even within the space of a single poem, a single stanza. These juxtapositions , these chambers, the bullet of the poem—unlikely and complex—house meanings beautiful, putrid, funny, violent , tender, matrimonial, and martial, and the world thereby is made strange and wonderful. Ad infinitum. King of Shadows, by Aaron Shurin City Lights Books, 2008 reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson Aaron Shurin’s new book of creative nonfiction, King of Shadows , is animated by an infectious enthusiasm. I use “enthusiasm ” here as something of a technical term, referring to its etymology from the Greek enthousiasmos, which means “having a god within” or being inspired. Rather than a single overriding source of inspiration, however, the essays in this book draw inspiration from several enlivening sources, and their humor, drama, curiosity, and pleasure linger with the reader well after the reading is done. Shurin’s nonfiction writing owes much to his shared vocation as a poet, so lushness of language and a honed attention permeate each of the pieces in this book. Note the “rapture of CRSP09 nonfiction.indd 184 1/30/2009 12:55:50 PM 185 Book Notes taxonomy and parental devotion” that suffuses his description of a garden where he was house-sitting: the stalwart artichoke opened its crustacean leaves into a livid heaving crown of scintillating blue, enrapturing the bees who grazed inside the oversized bloom as if it were a meadow; the strawberries dropped their hot, sweet hearts into my hands by the cupful . . . The landscape here, and elsewhere, veritably comes to life. I was practically sniffing the page to capture the essence of the sweet pea that Shurin promised would send tendrils up my hand if I let it hang still for too long. One of the great merits of this book is that it nourishes the reader with that refreshment, delight, so lacking in much of our self-consciously sober contemporary writing. That’s not to say, of course, that this collection is made up entirely of essays that celebrate simple pleasures such as those proffered by a summer garden. Shurin’s project has its social, historical, and literary aspects as well, and he’s an astute and entertaining chronicler of queer life, starting with his own youth in the title essay, “King of Shadows.” Here Shurin relates his own coming out, noting how, as a teen, “sissy sensibility gave nuance to my bearing” gratifying adults “who misperceived me enthusiastically as ‘a little gentleman.’” It’s in many ways a lighthearted account that employs Shurin’s high school drama career as a means of showing that he was never to be Oberon, but was rather to be Puck. Yet in the playing of the part, a deeper and more complex knowledge begins to emerge, for in the tension of performance “one experiences in the body’s echo chamber the language of all the roles.” Later in the book, Shurin’s queer experience becomes linked with the story of his chosen habitat, San Francisco, gay haven, “balm for a wound and the wound’s own inflamer,” as he narrates his entry into the world of bars and sex. Treating his youthful naiveté and eagerness with self-deprecating humor, Shurin nonetheless makes clear that his late sixties forays into bar life were “surrounded by real not imaginary terrors.” This apprehension makes the narrative all the more poignant as Shurin and his peers find an almost-normalcy together. In another...

Dissing Oneself versus Dissing Rivals: Effects of Status, Personality, and Sex on the Short-Term and Long-Term Attractiveness of Self-Deprecating and Other-Deprecating Humor

This study explores the adaptive functions and design features of self-and other-deprecating humor. Sixty-four female and 32 male college students participated in a two-part study. In the first part, we examined the relationships among participant demographics, personality traits, and preferences for producing different types of humor. Men report using more other-deprecating humor than women do, and the use of other-deprecating humor decreases with age for both sexes. In the second part of the study, each participant listened to tape recordings of opposite-sex people who were described as having different levels of status, and who produced different types of humor; then participants rated each person's attractiveness as a potential short-term and long-term mate. Humor type and presenter status had no effects on short-term attractiveness, but self-deprecating humor by high-status presenters (but not low-status presenters) increased long-term attractiveness for both sexes. These results are discussed in the light of sexual selection theory and costly signaling theory.

The Brothers Torres (review)

Reviewed by: The Brothers Torres Elizabeth Bush Voorhees, Coert; The Brothers Torres;. Hyperion, 2008; [320p] ISBN 978-1-4231-0304-2 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 9-12 Things aren't going too badly for high school sophomore Frankie Torres—he's making romantic headway with beautiful Rebecca, he's got spending money in his pocket from working at his parents' restaurant, he's getting by in his classes, and he's got the loyal friendship of Zach, whose jocular smack talk and ethnic slurs are a match for his own. Frankie's New Mexico small town is a pressure cooker of classism and social expectations, though, and there's no way Frankie—half Anglo and half Latino—can just lay low. His older brother Steve, a soccer star with college scholarship aspirations, is running with the cholos, dating a girl who can most charitably be described as every parent's nightmare, and dabbling in criminal activity. However tough he sounds and bad he tries to be, however, Steve is no match for the big dogs in town, and by insisting that Frankie keep up the family "honor" and act like a "man," he draws his younger brother into a series of violent confrontations with both rich white kids and marginalized Latinos that threaten to drag them both down. This debut novel is solidly plotted and exceptionally well paced; escalating tension keeps the pages flying, while narrator Frankie's self-deprecating humor prevents the action from devolving into Southwestside Story melodrama. YA readers should keep an eye on Voorhees and hope he's got another powerhouse story waiting in the wings. Copyright © 2008 by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

"Ungraspable Phantom": Essays on Moby-Dick (review)

R E V I E W JOHN BRYANT, MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS, AND TIMOTHY MARR, EDS. “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby-Dick Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Cloth $59.00. 373 pp. I n October 2001 an international group of Melville scholars and aficionados assembled at Hofstra University to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the publication of Moby-Dick. With the World Trade Center still a smoldering ruin in the background twenty miles away, the participants at the conference celebrated the historic appearance of Melville’s masterwork, which now offered tangible proof, at the onset of the nation’s War on Terror , that the author’s thematics of evil and revenge were still relevant to the modern world—indeed, more so than ever. Five years after the Hofstra conference, a selection of twenty-one papers from the event was published, edited by conference organizer John Bryant with Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Timothy Marr. Reflecting the diversity of methodologies and nationalities that informed the conference, the resulting collection offers a barometer of the current state of Melville studies, the global reach of Melville’s celebrated novel, and its continuing vitality as an inspiration to artists in other media. The three editors provide useful orientation to the conference and the collection. In his preface, John Bryant sets forth the rationale of the title, “Ungraspable Phantom,” in the paradoxical interplay of body and spirit, including the irreducible corporeality of human life, that Ishmael postulates in the novel—a concept that Bryant whimsically associates with the fraternal hug that Queequeg bestowed on Melville’s narrator. In their joint introduction, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Timothy Marr then formally review the various headings and individual papers, providing an attractive and fluent overview of the volume’s contents while offering useful interpretive bridges between sections. The first section of the collection, “Constructing Moby-Dick: Breakdown and Redemption,” addresses compositional issues. In the opening essay (which originally appeared in Leviathan), the novelist E. L. Doctorow provides a hypothetical enactment of Melville’s creative process in the writing of MobyDick while mixing the self-deprecating humor of a non-specialist with the C 2008 The Authors Journal compilation C 2008 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 53 R E V I E W occasional insights of a fellow practitioner. Lori Howard then discusses Melville’s digressive style of narration, which includes what she terms the “breakout” chapters on cetology and other non-dramatic topics. After canvassing other critics on the ultimate rationale for these chapters and citing some examples from the text, she disappointingly opts for the theory that “part of Melville’s plan was to cope with and write through his blocks, to keep stabbing at the white page until he could face the next chapter and ultimately the ending . . .” Yet the idea that Melville suffered from writer’s block has no empirical foundation; indeed, it goes against everything we know about Melville’s extraordinary rapidity of composition. According to the testimony of a knowledgeable contemporary, Oakey Hall, White-Jacket was “dashed off in a score of sittings”; and during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote to his friend Duyckinck of the need for “fifty fast-writing youths” to keep up with the flow of his inspiration for new works. Melville’s fact-laden narrative style and encyclopedic erudition in his fiction were the result of a deliberate aesthetic strategy—one might call it mimetic plenitude—that had nothing to do with fear of the blank page. Giorgio Mariani’s ensuing discussion of Father Mapple’s sermon and the book of Jonah draws on René Girard’s theories of sacred violence and the scapegoat. After identifying the biblical Jonah as a scapegoat figure who is anomalously not killed, Mariani focuses on the white whale as Ahab’s “monstrous double,” a sacrificial victim whose death allegedly will restore peace to the world. Extending his analysis, Mariani sees a variety of scapegoat mechanisms and examples in the novel, including Ishmael’s final escape from the wreck of the Pequod. Even...

Humor on the Next Frontier

The author reports results of a two-pronged experimental analysis of the influence of online political humor on the attitudes of 18- to 24-year-old college students. First an analysis of the control group of the relationship between online humor viewing habits and political attitudes of youth is presented. Consistent with the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, online political humor viewership had a negative effect on trust in political institutions and evaluations of President George W. Bush. The author then presents results of the online experiment, measuring the effects of an online first-person parody of Bush starting his second term in office from JibJab.com. The clip had a negative effect on trust in political institutions among members of the experimental group. However, it had a positive effect on evaluations of the president's evaluations. This is likely because the JibJab clip differs in form from most online humor, functioning as a form of self-deprecating humor.

Factors predicting the perceived effectiveness of politicians' use of humor during a debate

AbstractPrior research on humor in the political context has focused primarily on people's reactions to humor about politicians in the form of cartoons or jokes, or on specific politicians' use of humor as a rhetorical strategy. This study provides an empirical test of audience perceptions of the effectiveness of a politician's use of humor during a political debate. Data were collected during the 2004 election cycle; respondents were told a candidate had made a humorous remark during a recent congressional campaign debate. Party affiliation of the candidate and the target of the humor (himself vs. his opponent) were counterbalanced. The results indicated that self-deprecating humor was rated as more effective, and both Democrats and Republicans saw humor from a Democratic candidate as more effective than from a Republican. Being of the same versus opposite party of the candidate did not affect respondents' attributions of the candidate's motives for using humor or its overall effectiveness. Overall, the biggest predictor of perceived effectiveness was respondents' assessment of the quality (timing and funniness) of the humor.

Land Mines in the Field: A Modest Proposal for Improving the Craft of Qualitative Health Research

In this commentary, the authors encourage a renewed enthusiasm for attention to quality criteria in qualitative health research by poking fun at what they understand to be patterns and themes emerging from data collected in their respective extensive "fieldwork" experiences within the genre. Conceptualizing some of the particularly problematic interpretive turns as land mines in the field (or, alternatively, missteps in the dance, cracks in the pottery, wrong turns in the journey, weeds in the garden, or dropped stitches in the quilt), they challenge researchers' collective relationship to both factual and metaphoric empirical claims. With a warning to those unaccustomed to self-deprecating humor, the authors challenge all to pay serious heed to what does and does not constitute rigorous, high-quality, empirical science within the qualitative tradition.

The Lighter Side Of Heavy Medical Problems: Morbid Obesity

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole in his Oxygen monologue described the reason he used oxygen continuously during his life he stated that he needed oxygen to enrich the air he breath with oxygen because his body needed this oxygen so his heart and kidneys would work proper, he needed oxygen awake and asleep. This art work would be without value if a normal person would recitate it. But being morbidly obese patient would make a eye opener to people who do not appreciate the blessing of being enjoying normal body weight OXYGEN MONOLOGUE The performer [Israel Kamakawiwo'ole] says: [... Your body needs oxygen more than you give in air ... Oxygen is a gas Oxygen is needed for the work of heart Heart and kidneys need oxygen to work... When I was in hospital I realized why I need oxygen. I needed oxygen during sleep...] He goes describing the need of the heart and kidneys to oxygen and how heart and kidneys work together and how water get retained in the body. These words are an echo of what a doctor explained to this artist during his illness. This monologue is the last item on his album called: ALONE IN IZ WORLD [1] Israel Kamakawiwo'ole: May 20, 1959 June 26, 1997 (pronounced “Ka-MA-ka-VEE-vo-oh-lay”) was a giant, a man of more than 700 pounds who could make the little ukulele sing as sweetly as his own falsetto. In death, he has emerged as Hawaiian music's gentle ambassador. He passed away in 1997 after succumbing to morbid obesity. He was 38 years of age. He will always be remembered here for his warmth, his self-deprecating humor and his talent as a singer and gifted ukulele player. Shortly before his death, he could only walk with extreme effort and even performed with oxygen. His music has got attention in USA with the release of the movie, Hannibal, in which his version of Somewhere over the Rainbow is heard. He was a gentle soul and Hawaiian through and through [2] Picture of the artist Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (©2005 Hawaiian Music Island) on one of his Album May 20, 1959 June 26, 1997. He suffered from morbid obesity (700) pounds. He used Oxygen prones during his performance and he summarized his adaptation with his medical conditions in “Oxygen” in his last Album: Alone in IZ World.

Wisdom in the Practice of Psychotherapy

Wisdom in the Practice of Psychotherapy

Adrian Nicolae Patrascioiu

Adrian Nicolae Patrascioiu

Reel bad Arabs: how Hollywood vilifies a people

Reel Bad Arabs - How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2006) Directed by Sut Jhally Distributed by Media Education Foundation www . Mediaed . org Run time: 50 minutes Based on his book of same name, author Dr. Jack G. Shaheen's documentary, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, lays claim to an examination of virtually every feature that Hollywood has ever made containing an appearance by an Arab or a depiction of what he calls Arabland: non- specified Middle Eastern setting filled with all tools from Ali Baba Kit (veiled women, sheiks, desert, belly dancers, terrorists, etc. - all stereotypes associated with the Arab). Shaheen, professor of Mass Communication at Southern Illinois University, is no newcomer to politics of representation. A former consultant on Middle Eastern affairs for CBS news, he won Janet Lee Stevens Award from University of Pennsylvania for his outstanding contribution towards a better understanding of our global community as well as being presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee. Shaheen draws on this extensive background for film, situating himself as an authority by intercutting his own commentary with Hollywood's most offensive scenes aimed to vilify Arabs. Beginning in silent era, with films such as Arabia, then moving on to successive key periods in film history - classical Hollywood period (Samson against Sheik, 1962; Invitation to Dance, 1956); action flicks of 1980s (Cannonball Run 2, 1984; Back to Future, 1985; Network, 1984); films of 1990s, (True Lies, 1994; Aladdin, 1992) and finally, 2000 and post-9/11 era (Rules of Engagement, 2000; Syriana, 2005) - he sets up an impressive framework to clarify hostility towards Arab characters, not only throughout film history but also in prevailing times. Shaheen's film argues that visual vilification of Arab people has been going on for more than a century, starting with early European depictions of Orient in art and increasing in visual media after World War II with founding of state of Israel, Arab oil embargo of 1970s, and Iranian Revolution. The documentary successfully illustrates racism inherent in blockbuster cinema, by using popular filmic examples to ensure film's premise resonates with its audience. According to Shaheen, Hollywood injects evil Arabs and slurs demeaning them in films that have nothing to do with Middle East. As an extensive example he discusses Father of Bride II (1995), in which Mr. Habib is manifestation of money-greedy, sleazy Arab caricature who yells at his wife in gibberish whenever she attempts to speak up. Another fixed stereotype Shaheen criticizes is oversexed Arab buffoon who is obsessed with American women that we find in films such as Happy Hooker goes to Washington or Jamie Farr's character in Cannonball Run 11 (I have a weakness for blondes and women without mustaches.) Interestingly, toward end of documentary Shaheen suggests that Arab comedians, such as ArabAmerican Ahmed Ahmed, may be one solution to problem, through their use of humor to reveal and therefore end prejudices. Such self-deprecating humor, for Shaheen, can serve to both counteract stereotypes and neutralize social power inherent in prejudicial humor of others. The film is subdivided into several chapters such as: Myths of Arabland; The Arab Threat: Mideast Politics & Hollywood; Terror Inc. Demonizing Palestinians & Muslims; Islamophobia; and Getting Real. In this way, audiences unfamiliar with visual media studies, or history of U.S. international relations, receive an introduction into highly controversial historical relationship between U.S. and Middle East. According to Shaheen, cinema, as a vehicle which fosters stereotype of evil Arab, is fueled by exhausting repetition of same images on screen. …

Newsletter

Abstract Humor in the news As part of an announcement that he and his siblings were honoring their parents by establishing a lecture series and research institute on humor in public life at Wichita State University, outgoing U. S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman presented “More than Comic Relief: The Importance of Humor in Public Life,” as his farewell speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He recommended self-deprecating humor as a strategic tool of the political trade, a means of puncturing pomposity, defusing tense situations, attracting allies, and even getting people to focus on serious policy issues. He told about his father's “weakness” for the pun…“I went to bed one night worrying about how the sun came up, but then it dawned on me.” and “The other night, I had a nightmare that I swallowed a muffer … the next morning I woke up exhausted.” His father had a collection of jokes “annotated and indexed on note cards,” and he regularly faxed jokes for his son to use in speeches. Many of them Glickman saw only in passing while his staff was on their way to the shredder because they “would've made even Earl Butz blush.”

The pragmatics of humor support

AbstractMany researchers claim joking and laughter to be an adjacency pair. There are, however, a range of strategies used for supporting humor in conversation, of which laughter is just one. This paper uses natural conversational data to illustrate a variety of humor support strategies. Common support strategies include contributing more humor, playing along with the gag, using echo or overlap, offering sympathy and contradicting self-deprecating humor.There are four implicatures associated with full support of humor:recognitionof a humorous frame,understandingthe humor,appreciatingthe humor, and agreeing with any message associated with it. Recognition, understanding and appreciation are in an entailment relationship, and this relationship can be exploited to display recognition and understanding while denying appreciation. The implicature of agreement is particularly salient when teasing or self-deprecating humor is being supported.

An Appreciation of Charles R. Boxer: Teacher, Scholar, and Bibliophile

An Appreciation of Charles R. Boxer: Teacher, Scholar, and Bibliophile

Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary (review)

212Fourth Genre New York and weekends Boris flew up from the city to meet his family, landing on a nearby lake. The young Hochschüd was enamored by this uncle, by his "commanding physical presence. He loomed large above my childhood landscape, an elemental Ufe force." Yet this essay is far more than sentimental homage to his uncle. For juxtaposed with Boris is another Russian, Victor Serge, an anarchist who fought with the Bolsheviks in the Russian CivUWar. "A fine writer and a man ofluminous moral inteUigence, [Victor] spoke out for free speech and democracy, and was harassed, jailed, and exiled by StaUn. Suddenly, reading Serge's memoirs, I reaUzed that on one day in October 1919, at the site of an old observatory just outside Petrograd, Victor Serge and my beloved Russian uncle . . . had fought on opposite sides of the very same battle." In 1978 Hochschüd traveled to Russia to find the battlefield. His essay about these two men he admires, for vasdy different reasons, is the result. And the result teaches us a crucial lesson for our own time. Now, when the media thrives on sound bites and paints pictures in black and white, Hochschüd delves deep into his subjects and never provides the easy answer. And so we, his readers, also pause to understand, for example, the psyche of a lover of czarist Russia ... or that ofa poor white man embroüed in theAryan Nations. Thejourney, Hochschüd writes, "usuaUy changes the writer"; so, too, does the journey, because ofHochschfld's careful guidance, change the reader. In the tide essay Hochschüd describes, with self-deprecating humor, how, at the beginning of his career, he particularly wanted to be a novelist because he yearned to be, for the 1960s, what Fitzgerald and Hemingway were for the 1920s: "the voice of [his] generation." IronicaUy, Adam Hochschüd surpasses this youthful desire and becomes, because he writes nonfiction, a voice for the century. How lucky we are he never pubUshed that first novel. For our world is safer, more beautiful, more moral, better understood , with Hochschild, a muckraking angel, watching and reporting truth. Reviewed by Sue William Silverman Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary by Carl H. Klaus Beacon Press, 1999 256 pages, cloth, $25.00 Carl Klaus, who retired in 1997 after thirty-five years at the University of Iowa, founded the nonfiction writing program there and taught such Book Reviews213 courses as the personal essay and the art ofjournal keeping. His My Vegetable Love and Weathering Winter, Uke the current volume, employ the daybook format—a technique he has mastered. The Klaus touch—keen observation of the natural world, delightful descriptions of his garden and meals prepared at home, doses of humor and irony, talk of health concerns, some musings about mortaUty—is supplemented in this book by emotional depth. In 1992 Klaus, exhausted by a heavy teaching schedule, decided to start phased-in early retirement. When the diary begins in February 1997, he's teaching his last semester and feels conflicted; he intends the dafly writing to help him "cope with the impending loss." To a larger degree than he suspected , his self-identity is intertwined with his work, and he now agonizes over his pending retirement while recognizing the benefits of it. He experiences highs and lows almost dafly as if he "were on drugs or had somehow lost control" of himself. Despite a divorce in his thirties and a triple bypass in his fifties, this seems the biggest crisis of his life. Searching for answers, Klaus considers future activities: writing essays for pubUc radio; teaching his favorite course "gratis under my own auspices" in some cozy setting in Iowa City; and, briefly, even seUing real estate. He prods conversations about retirement from coUeagues, townspeople, and relatives who have retired or are about to and learns, among other things, that women especiaUy might not share his reasons to grieve their retirement. Too, it occurs to him that in retirement the financial benefits ofhis profession are superior. In the meantime, he turns down his department's plans to give him a party, agreeing simply to a tree planted in his honor in a park...