Pagan Rhetoric
More information on Lyotard's pagans and what they can tell us about comics and audiences.
Category: Theories About Audiences
These theories try to understand the audience’s role in humor.
Sense of Humor (soh) and Insult Comedy
Daniel Wickberg, in his book, The Sense of Humor, talks about the importance of having one. In Western culture, it has only been since the mid-eighteen hundreds...
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...
Are Audiences Dying Laughing?
Audience Metaphors There’s a lot going on in the series of interviews masquerading as a documentary, Dying Laughing. However, I’d like to start with one I’ve b...
Five Popular Ideas About Audiences
Betsy Borns begins her book, Comic Lives, with a chapter on audience, yet while the motive for audience attendance is clear (tension release, in her opinion), w...
Nathan Mills on Hasan Minhaj and Comedy Audiences
Talking about Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix special, Homecoming King, Nathan Mills of The Joplin Globe has a lot going on, but I want to call attention to th...