Source Of Comedy Research Articles

La farce tragique – une réécriture de l’absurdité historique des idéologies communistes et du grotesque des dictatures militaires africaines


 
 
 Matei Vișniec’s dramaturgy perhaps best illustrates the paradox that absurdity and tragic or grotesque farce most adequately depict the destiny of peoples whose history is marked by defeat, derision, and tragedy. The political situation in certain countries and totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Africa, characterized by genocide and inter-ethnic fighting, can hardly be a source of comedy, but the dramatic stakes of the tragic farce seem best suited to express the absurdity and regression of totalitarian ideologies. The comic turn amazes the viewer by its ability to conform the historical truth. In this article,1 2 I aim to identify not so much an ideological but mostly aesthetic, dramaturgical modus operandi of the tragic farce using a corpus consisting of texts by playwrights Matei Vișniec, Sonya Labou Tansi, and Koffi Kwahulé. 
 
 

Humour and Comedy in Digital Game Live Streaming

This article considers the nature and functions of humour in digital game live streaming on Twitch. Most streamers and viewers seem uncomfortable with ‘serious’ in-game narrative content, resulting in weighty or emotional moments in games becoming sources of comedy and humour. Many also subvert the platform’s power dynamics by mocking community standards or the possibility of being banned, while some go even further and treat streamers themselves as fair game for mockery. This article thus examines how the humour of play, games and the Internet combine and evolve in an emerging and distinctive ‘stream-humour’, which can be sometimes playful and supportive yet sometimes shade into antagonism, rule-bending and hostility. Examining these dynamics on Twitch, in turn, provides a valuable window into how platform infrastructures and cultures generate norms and cultures of humour and amusement, and strengthens our understanding of online communities and platform power in this and similar contexts.

Kreatywność językowa jako źródło komizmu (z języka przewodników turystycznych)

The aim of the article is to analyze tourist guides’ utterances in terms of creativity. The creativity of these utterances is a source of comedy. The following research methods were used in the article: research material selection method, definitional method, descriptive method, material classification method, semantic, lexical and quantitative analysis methods. As a result of the research, 9 groups representing appropriate types of linguistic creativity of tourist guides were found.

It All Comes Out: Vomit as a Source of Comedy in Roman Moralizing Texts

AbstractRetching is important for Roman cultural history and medicine; in this article I assess vomit’s appearances in Latin literature. Humor is created by the detailed revelation of habitual, inappropriate, and excessive behaviors by named targets, such as the emperors Claudius and Vitellius, and Mark Antony, accused by Cicero in Philippics 2, especially. Alcohol abuse and gluttony feature in invective against character types who vomit, such as the stock figures of the drunken hostess and faithful wife at sea in Juvenal 6, Martial’s lesbian Philaenis, and the cautionary tale of the patient who relapses and dies to which the hungover Stoic student is subjected in Persius 3. I end with the self-mocking visualizations of (bad) poetry as vomit in several Horatian passages alongside Nero’s voice-training purges.

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee Benjamin J. Doty (bio) Let those shine now that never shined before,And those that always shone now shine the more. —Advertisement to Hunt’s Blacking. The above epigraph to Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself suggests that it will be a tale of transformation, and indeed its protagonist undergoes profound changes. After Sheppard Lee strikes his foot with a mattock while digging for buried treasure in a New Jersey forest, his spirit exits his body (47). The disembodied Lee wanders the woods until he comes across the corpse of Squire Higginson, a local brewer, and to his surprise, he finds that he can house his spirit in the dead man’s body and reanimate it (52). Upon doing so, he discovers that Higginson’s corpse carries within it an innate character that changes his natural affections and instincts. Drawing on the language of contemporary medicine, he says that the new body’s power over his thought and behavior is such that he becomes a completely different person. Over the course of the novel, he bounces from corpse to corpse—rich and poor, free and slave—reporting throughout that his original identity is overwhelmed by the makeup of others’ physiques. That the bodies Lee inhabits are dead emphasizes the degree to which he views their materiality itself as determinative: “much of the evil and good of man’s nature,” he says, “arise from causes and influences purely physical” (140). Scholars who have written about Sheppard Lee tend to understand Bird as in agreement with Lee’s materialist account of selfhood because this account dovetails with early nineteenth-century medical discourses on character and consciousness. Bird was, after all, a physician. Samuel Otter offers an insightful reading of the ways Lee’s account of embodiment calls attention to the soul’s ties to “the material it inhabits”; this account, Otter asserts, “stem[s] from [Bird’s] medical training” (100, 95). Christopher Looby, similarly, writes in his trenchant introduction to the novel that its [End Page 131] “physiognomic determinism … must owe a good deal to Bird’s experience as a medical doctor” (xvii). Recently, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison have read the novel as having a less straightforward relationship to Lee’s portrayal of embodiment. In particular, both attend to how Bird uses Lee’s materialist metaphysics of consciousness as a source of comedy. Stein notes that Lee’s philosophical materialism “erases the distinction between the willed or chosen, on the one hand, and the inevitable, on the other,” and that the novel plays Lee’s materialism “largely for comedy”; he does not, though, pursue in depth what comedic materialism might mean for how we read the novel (34). Instead, he argues that Lee’s materialism, because it downplays the power of individuals to control their bodies, is part of a wider critique of Jacksonian democracy, a political movement predicated on the idea that the common man is fit to govern himself (36). Justine Murison reads the novel as a satire of “the politics of physiological sympathy” that indicates the absurdity of sympathetically conflating one person with another (27). In this essay I read the novel’s depiction of embodiment as a source of comedy, but my argument differs from prevailing scholarship in that I claim that embodiment itself is the butt of Bird’s joke. I view two comedic forms at play, one of which is satire: like his contemporary and admirer Edgar Allan Poe, who is the likely author of a favorable review of Sheppard Lee in the Southern Literary Messenger, Bird delights in lampooning all elements of Jacksonian life.1 As Murison, especially, emphasizes, Sheppard Lee explores the use of embodiment as a vantage point from which to satirize contemporary politics and culture. Though she and other critics are correct to view Lee as endorsing the view that the body determines the mind, it does not follow to say the same of Bird, as many do; doing so conflates author and narrator. I argue, rather, that Bird finds such views to be laughable. The first part of this essay explores the ways that Lee’s views...

Glee's McKinley High: Following Middle America's sexual taboos

Writers for popular media frequently draw on insights known about social networks in developing their plotlines and character biographies (whether in books, television, movies, etc.). Perhaps most known to network analysts in this respect, Freeman (2000) presents a collection of network concepts represented in comic strips. These depictions often are consistent with the patterns network analysts observe in real-world empirical examples. For example, the long-running sitcom Friends exhibited strong homophily (McPherson et al., 2001) or assortative mixing on race and socioeconomic status among the main characters. Other times the violation of these typical patterns can serve to generate dramatic tension or a source of comedy. For example transitivity—or the tendency of one's friends to also become friends (Holland & Leinhardt, 1972)—is absent in the movie Hush where Jessica Lange's character plots to kill the daughter-in-law she does not like. P-O-X social balance (Heider, 1948) describes the tendency for friends to share common interests, which was violated to comedic effect in the Seinfeld episode where Jerry's character simply cannot accept his date's refusal to try a taste of the pie he finds delicious, bothering him for days and ultimately leading to his ending the relationship.

The Implied Author as an Ethical Buffer: An Argument from Translated and Censored Fiction

If the Implied Author (IA) is the Object of a Belief,1 then let me start by confessing that I am a believer-though an unorthodox one as will become apparent. On the one hand, I will welcome the IA as a tool to analyze a particular comic narrative and its censored translation. On the other hand, and perhaps because I do not belong to any narratological church that takes Wayne C. Booth's notion of the IA as a dogma, I will dare to propose an IA concept that only roughly connects with Booth's and the orthodox believers' many descriptions of the IA. That rough connection is our shared concern for the ethics of fiction, for the role of the IA in this ethics, and for positing an author who is not the flesh-and-bones author (FABA). Yet my proposal should not take its strength as much from continuing a tradition-since my IAguided ethics of reading will also be opposed to Booth's-as from throwing fresh light on the interpretation, translation, and censorship of a comic narrative. To that effect, I will first briefly turn to the concept of the author who seems in need of a conceptual defense too. For both arguments-pro-author and pro-IA-I will mainly refer to the Spanish author Elvira Lindo and her comic narrative Manolito Gafotas (1994), and its American translation Manolito Four-Eyes (2008).It may be true that the IA debate has turned somewhat sterile over time (on which see Lanser, Manifesto 2011 ), but in my view this is mainly so because it has become primarily conceptual. The IA comes to life in specific ethical readings and specific translations of specific literary texts. Indeed, though my argument includes general discussions of genre (viz., fiction and comedy), it is entirely inspired and motivated by a specific censoring translation of a particular work of fiction.The Author Exists-Who Else Does the Comedy?Lindo's Manolito series, of which Manolito Gafotas was the first book to be published, is a comic narrative series immensely popular among Spanish children and adults. Manolito, the protagonist and first-person narrator, is a charming little boy who uses his particular sense of humor as he tells us about life in a workingclass suburb of Madrid. He admits his real name is Manolito Garcia Moreno but also insists that in the suburb everyone knows me as Manolito He then sets out to explain this apparently pleasing fact:I was named Manolito after my dad's truck, and the truck was named after my dad, whose name is Manolo. . . .I like that they call me Four-Eyes. At my school-which is called Diego Velazquezanyone who's a little important has a nickname. Before I had a nickname, I used to cry plenty. When a bully started in on me at recess, he always ended up calling me Four-Eyes or Fat Glasses. Since I've officially become Manolito Four-Eyes, insulting me is a waste of time. (Manolito Four-Eyes 3-5)2The narrator's idiosyncratic explanations and evaluations are not the only source of comedy, as the characters are also responsible for some pretty incongruous behavior-and incongruity is a well-known mechanism of humor.3 We learn for instance that one day Manolito got caught up in a street protest in Madrid. His grandfather, who accompanied him, asked a man to put Manolito up on his shoulders so that he could see what was happening. Manolito then realized that the man had dandruff:I noticed that the guy had dandruff so I decided to brush it off a little. I asked him why he didn't buy one of those shampoos they advertise on TV that gets rid of dandruff (and if you don't watch out, gets you a girlfriend, too). The guy put me down on the ground, all in a huff.... (my translation)4All of this is quite funny, yet so far we have no trouble explaining the comedy without recurring to the concept of the author. The protagonist's actions are incongruous, the dandruff guy feels ridiculed, and Manolito the narrator has his tongue-in-cheek way of telling things.However, as I have argued before (Narrative Humor I, Narrative Humor II), humor in narrative does not spring from the narrator or character only. …

Defining the Formless

An anthropologist and a lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender thanks them for their custom, thoroughly confusing everyone. While this joke shows why legal anthropology has never taken off as a source of comedy, it also illustrates the difficulties in applying custom in a legal setting. Lawyers, needing a term to describe the way colonised societies regulated their affairs through custom and practice, rather than through state law, used 'customary law'. As a term, this has been called 'imprecise' and 'self-contradictory.'

Men in Nursing

The December issue of Nursing and Midwifery Studies Journal contains an interesting article about factors influ-encing men entering the nursing profession, and provides an understanding of the challenges they face. The authors believe that although the number of men entering the nursing profession is on the rise, yet there are still many challenges in front of our male colleagues in this female dominated profession (1). Some may question the caring capabilities of male nurses (2). Others may believe that nursing is not a suitable career choice for men (3). Most of the problems come from stereotypical images around nursing and also around gender roles. A study in the Unit-ed States found that in television series, the male nurses were often subject to questions about their choice of ca-reer, masculinity and sexuality and their role is usually minor or a source of comedy (4). I as a female nurse have been frequently confronted with this stereotypical image around my gender. The belief, that women are not good drivers, and studying engineering is not appropriate for women and so many other bizarre cultural and sometimes universal beliefs are familiar to us. So we as a potential vic-tim of these unrealistic views should understand our male colleagues better and more actively support them.Firstly, we should accept that men are a reality in nurs-ing. In England 10% of nurses are men (1). In Iran, about 23% of nurses were men in 2006 (5). Secondly, we should believe that men could bring a new fuel and insight and energy to the profession. Thirdly, we have to reconsider some traditional beliefs about gender issues. Male partic -ipants in a qualitative study revealed that gender-based stereotypes contributed to their job dissatisfaction, and on the other hand providing care to patients and mak-ing a difference were personal rewards that motivate them to stay in the profession (6). Another study showed that male nurses were highly focused on patient care and transformational potential for personal fulfillment (7). You can see that the picture that some have, could not be farther from reality. I remember a dialogue from a movie where a male character was asking his female colleagues why men die more from heart attacks and he answered himself by saying because they have a suffer-ing heart. Today, educational developments, changes in traditional societies and promotion of gender equality in education and employment have opened doors to both males and females to play their unbiased roles in health-care services and in their communities according to their interests and their abilities. I hope that male nurses will increasingly create their personal core values in health-care teams. In this challenge they should see their female colleagues on their side.

Men in nursing on television: exposing and reinforcing stereotypes

To describe the results of a study of images of men in nursing on television. Previous research has highlighted stereotypical images around nursing, such as the battle-axe, naughty nurse and handmaiden. More recent research focuses on images of nurses who are men, because of the growing numbers of men in the nursing workforce. Given that negative images can harm recruitment and retention in the profession, it is important to interrogate how men in nursing are portrayed in popular culture. Representations on television are particularly critical to explore because of the medium's wide audience. Qualitative study. Five American medical television programmes appearing between 2007 and 2010 were analysed for their construction of men in nursing: Grey's Anatomy, Hawthorne, Mercy, Nurse Jackie and Private Practice. Men in nursing on television were portrayed in ways that engaged with explicit and implicit stereotypes. The men were often subject to questions about their choice of career, masculinity and sexuality and their role usually reduced to that of prop, minority spokesperson or source of comedy. Thus, rather contradictorily, although the programmes often sought to expose common stereotypes about men in nursing, they nonetheless often reinforced stereotypes in more implicit ways. This research has implications for better understanding not only the status of nursing in our society but also for nursing practice and education and attracting more men to the profession.

Music and Dance in the 1905-1906 Satirical Journals

Abstract This essay explores verbal and visual appropriation of contemporary music and dance (both Russian and Western) by the 1905-1906 satirical journals to frame satirical messages and allusions. Considered are visual invocations of music and musicians, representations of music performances as well as song titles, songs, melodies, dance and dance music as framing satirical devices and sources of comedy.

Triangles of the Sacred Sisterhood

In an article entitled “The Structuring of Feminine Empowerment: Gender and Triangular Relationships,” Nora Cottille-Foley discusses how Marie de France sometimes subverts the eternal triangle of husband, wife, and lover and reforms it in order to further the agency and power of the female protagonist. In both the courtly romance and comic fabliau, as Cottille-Foley notes, the adulterous triangle of husband, wife, and lover is a prominent theme. The perspectives, of course, are quite different: in courtly works, the main interest focuses on the illicit love relationship of wife and lover, whereas in the fabliau the focus is on the conflict of the married couple, their relationship being a source of comedy, derived often from the pairing of a lustful, deceitful wife anda rather dim-witted but domineering husband. In both courtly and comic genres, the triangle is a site of conflict. In courtly works, the resolution is generally in favour of the status quo as a courtly adulterous affair rarely works out, while in the fabliau the marriage is generally left intact, although a deceitful wife may be given carte blanche to philander. Cottille-Foley suggests that Marie rewrites these fixed and predictable triangles through a series of Derridean slippages to produce new triangles whose composition enhances women’s agency and leads to a new resolution of peace and harmony for the women involved: “the third character acts as an empowering double to the main protagonists. The figure of the patriarch remains only as an archaic trace in the text and is written over by the figure of the female poet, the providential aunt, or the fellow woman.”.

Reviewing the Paradigm: A New Look at Early-Modern Ireland

REVIEWING THE PARADIGM: A NEW LOOK AT EARLY-MODERN IRELAND* ANDREW MURPHY I. BEARINGS (i) white niggers We begin with twentieth-century Dublin and a moment of cultural epiphany. In Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte astonishes his friends Derek Scully and Outspan Foster by declaring that “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.” This information comes as a revelation to Derek and Outspan: “They nearly gasped: it was so true” (9). In the novel Jimmy’s observation is turned to comic effect, as, on the strength of his insight, he goes on to proclaim James Brown’s slogan: “Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud”—a phrase humorously incongruous in the context of a racially homogenous working-class Dublin. For all the scene’s humor, however, the observation itself and the comic incongruity of the situation indicate a deeper resonance at work in the episode. To hear some of the historical and cultural echoes at play here, we must go back to the mid-nineteenth century and to the English writer Charles Kingsley. Visiting Ireland, Kingsley writes back to his wife in England: I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful: if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure , are as white as ours. (Kearney 7) REVIEWING THE PARADIGM: A NEW LOOK AT EARLY-MODERN IRELAND 13 *My thanks to the many people whose feedback and suggestions have helped to shape this article, particularly Eibhlín Evans, Alan Ford, Nicholas Grene, Tom Healy, and Bernhard Klein. Special thanks to Mary Campbell and Gary Taylor. For Doyle, the multiply resonant term “nigger” provides a series of meanings , some of which are applicable to the Irish, but others of which are not, and this disjunction serves finally as a source of comedy—the Irish may be “niggers” of a sort, but they are, for the most part at least, not black.1 For Kingsley, the disjunction serves rather as a source of profound anxiety. A certain kind of racial identity can be imposed upon the Irish, but, disturbingly , they fail adequately to equate to the stereotype—“chimpanzees” they may well be but, “except where tanned by exposure,” their skins are as white as the white skins of the English. Turning back from Kingsley to The Commitments once more, we notice an odd doubleness in Doyle’s phrase: “The Irish are the niggers of Europe .” We might ask ourselves what force the word “of” has in this phrase. The answer, I would argue, is twofold. In the first instance, insofar as the phrase “nigger” can be appropriated as a generic term to describe any group that has been subject to colonial oppression and displacement, then the Irish are “Europe’s niggers”—subjects of the English colonial enterprise. But, in addition to being “Europe’s niggers,” they are “niggers” who happen to be European, who belong to a greater social and cultural world that encompasses both England and Ireland.2 This, of course, is precisely the source of Kingsley’s great anxiety: the Irish can be classed as alien, but not wholly so. The term “nigger” is at one and the same time entirely apposite and altogether inapplicable when characterizing the Irish. It is this area of doubleness that I wish to address in this essay—the gap, we might say, that opens up between the apposite and the inapplicable, or rather, more accurately, the inhering of the inapplicable within the apposite . The territory I wish to explore is precisely that indicated by KingsREVIEWING THE PARADIGM: A NEW LOOK AT EARLY-MODERN IRELAND 14 1 In fact, there is a small, but significant, black community native to Ireland. The question of how this community is represented is itself interesting. The complexities of that representation can be caught in the nickname...

Distaff and pen: producing the Evangiles des Quenouilles

This paper traces the interworkings and conflicts between masculine and feminine modes of producing "textus" in the Evangiles des Quenouilles (c. 1474). Pen and distaff are emblems of writing in this comic work, which features a lone cleric who transcribes and frames the "gospels" (authoritative preaching) of a women's sewing circle, at their request. the women intend their oral text to gain honor and power for their sex; the cleric's facetiously ironic framing of it tries to recuperate feminine speech for comic, misogynistic purposes. Yet the two modes of "writing" are bound together: the illiterate women need the cleric to disseminate their knowledge, while he uses feminine discourse and the foundation of his own authorial project. After considering the content of the feminine "gospels" and how the work's structure associates gender problems with writing problems, I maintain that masculine and feminine modes of "writing" embody differing attitudes towards authority. I conclude that the cleric cannot subvert the women's feminist text completely to his own antifeminist purposes since he, as much as the women, functions as a source of comedy. The Quenouilles is not simply misogynistic (despite the traditional antifeminism it draws upon) but plural.

Sources of Comedy in Boccaccio's "Decameron": The Tale of Frate Cipolla

Sources of Comedy in Boccaccio's "Decameron": The Tale of Frate Cipolla