Mike Birbiglia on Jokes
I’ve been a fan of Mike Birbiglia for a long time now, bought his merchandise, watched all his specials and both his movies (Sleepwalk with Me, 2012 and D...
Month: June 2017
Why Academics Should Listen to Comics
Comics are critics One of the premises of my work is that comics are social and cultural critics. Comics frequently operate in a critical mode, and they home in...
Victor Raskin’s Script Theory
Presuppositions, “common sense,” and scripts In proposing Script Theory, a major model seen to support Incongruity theory, Linguist Victor Raskin no...
Comic Intent II: Getting it
My problem with a number of different theories is that they assume certain elements of intentionality, which I’ve discussed before as assuming the comic&#...
Conscious Laughter: Fake Laughs and Guffaws
As I’ve noted, John C. Meyer draws a useful distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when...
Laughing With Victims At Butts
Apologies for reposting, but in trying to organize the site I think it will be more useful to break the theory out from the cases. This enables me to just link ...
John C. Meyer’s Four Functions of Humor
John C. Meyer was interested in how people use humor – what their purpose is. Meyer’s first conception is that people can use humor to unite us or t...
Common Interpretations of Laughter
I have previously discussed John Limon’s theory of absolute stand-up. This theory states that the audience “[makes the comic’s] jokes into jokes, or refuse[s] t...
Jay Leno on Anti-Political Funny Stuff
Tim O’Shei interviewed Jay Leno for The Buffalo News (6/23/2017) about his philosophy on stand-up, and in Leno’s responses I see a few popular notio...
John Limon on Laughter: Is It Crucial?
I’ve talked a bit about how John Limon defines a genre of “absolute stand-up,” as marked, in part, by authorial intent. Yet he also distinguishes his abs...