Can Comedy Be Serious?
Philip Stamato of Splitsider.com, talking about late night comedy (6/28/2017) pretty much nails the premise of my humor projects: It seems like nobody can agree...
Tag: Humorous Space
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...
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...
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...
Persona
I’ve already written a bit on the documentary, Dying Laughing, but there’s a lot more to say there [plus, I transcribed quite a bit of stuff, so I&#...
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...
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...
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,...
Incongruity Theory
Incongruity Theory is based on Aristotle’s (and Cicero’s and others’) view of humor as derived from expectancy violation. Proponents of this view include James ...