Satire (and Litige)
In his 2007 HBO stand-up showcase, Bill Maher: The Decider, after greeting the Boston crowd, Maher begins with a critique of President George W. Bush. Only 50 ...
Category: Stand Up Comedy
My academic “wheelhouse.” This site used to be entirely devoted to stand-up comedy, but as I’ve begin to branch out into my other interests, I’ve collected everything to do with stand-up here.
Irony: Traditional Verbal Irony
Irony has been studied since at least Classical Greece. There are a few different types of irony, including dramatic irony, where the words or actions of the c...
I’m Joking/Just Kidding
A topic on my list of things to cover in this blog are statements of “just kidding” and “I’m joking.” I started on this in my ana...
Tragedy Plus Time
In my analysis of Mike Birbiglia’s Thank God for Jokes, I included this blurb about how, in an off-hand way, Birbiglia mentions that “Comedy equals ...
Carnival II: Real Action
In a previous post, I discussed a common, simple model of carnivalesque that was based off the idea of a Roman Catholic celebration of Carnival prior to Lent wr...
Carnival I: Simple Inversion
It’s fairly common, when talking about humor, to use the word carnivalesque (see for instance Fiske; Gilbert; Miller). The concept was most famously used...
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...
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&#...