Wise Fools Speaking Truth to Power
When talking about stand-up comedy, a lot of attention is given to the figure of the wise fool. This concept is traceable back to at least the middle ages (for...
Tag: humor theories
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...
Dick Jokes Vs. Sexual Jokes
Betsy Borns differentiates the dick joke from sexual jokes as based on “what makes the joke funny: if people laugh because the word ‘fuck’ is used, that’s a dic...
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...
Play Space – Johan Huizinga
Several theories of humor address the idea of the spaces where it takes place as being in part, how we approach it. Johan Huizinga has one such theory. Play an...
Political, Social and Entertainment Comedians
Comic and internet sensation Kenny Sebastian, in an interview with Letty Mariam Abraham of Mid-day (5/14/2017) about his recent special, Don’t Be That Guy...
Narrators: Unreliable and Discordant
The idea that we can influence people with words (rhetoric) depends on the notion that the speaker is who they appear to be and mean what they say. Scholars ca...
Comic Intent
You hear it time and time again, from both comics and scholars: in stand-up comedy the only goal is laughter by any means available (Borns; Gilbert; Horowitz; L...
Spatial Theories
The basic idea of a space for ideas comes from Aristotle, who argues that we organize ideas spatially in our mind. We group like with like into genres, topics,...
Why You Should Ask an Academic
An article published last July in the Chronicle of Higher Education reappeared in my FB news feed the other day, and it says basically what I’ve been on a...