Alex Stypula on Pushing the Envelope
It’s a common theme in discussions of comedy, which I haven’t yet gotten around to addressing here: Is comedy all about pushing the envelope, and at...
Author: nwilson
Making Stand-Up More Sensitive
Audrey Carleton writes in an Opinion piece for McGill Tribune.com (9/4/2017) that audiences and comics should be more sensitive, not less. Carleton begins with...
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...
Leighann Lord on Relief and Laughter
It’s sad when I picture it. As some describe it, there are vast masses of people living in a state of constant psychological and emotional pressure, on t...
Tig Notaro on Comedy and Release
Though she gives a brilliant interview to Ashley Hoffman of Time (8/25/2017), Tig Notaro only briefly mentions something that touches on my theme here: the idea...
Reggie Watts, Stand-Up Comedian?
Same ol’, same ol’ I watch stand-up sporadically, sometimes going on binges where everything I watch is stand-up, sometimes taking a long hiatus. S...
Daniel Fernandes on Comedy as Art
A lot of comics express (perhaps unknowingly) the idea that audiences are passive objects that they “make laugh,” and Daniel Fernandes is another on...
Michelle Wolf Isn’t Trying to Change the World
But perhaps she should be. I talk a lot on this blog about what comedy can do, and my main soapbox is that it can do whatever we let it do. If comics tried to...
Marlon Wayans on Truth in Stand-Up
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about whether stand-ups tell the truth about their lives. Of course some do, but most fudge a bit. Even among those who g...
Jeff Foxworthy and Tension Release
In an interview with Edward Pevos of MLive (8/22/2017), Jeff Foxworthy describes his theory of humor in a way that resonates with the Relief theory of humor: I ...