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...
Tag: Lenny Bruce
Stand-Up: Brief History (A.K.A. Chattoo T.L.E. III. D. 2.)
When Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University turns to stand-up, she begins by defining it and giving so...
Jim Breuer and Ali Lerman are Insensitive
I’ll be honest again: I’m not a Jim Breuer fan. He’s one of those comics who just rubs me the wrong way. A big part of it is his hyper-masculi...
Aditi Mittal on the Postmodern, Stand-up’s Power and Free Speech
Some folks would say, don’t you study American stand-up? What’s with the stuff on these Indian and Pan-Asian comics? Stay in your lane! Well, I just...
Elahe Izadi on the Benefits and Evils of Technology
When I teach courses on media theory, I like to point out that whenever a new technology appears, there are some that hail it as the thing that will finally spa...
Misch on Personas, Truth and Ethics
In his article for Splitsider.com (7/6/2017), comic, critic, writer and teacher David Misch notes that there is an idea (held by at least one professional criti...
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 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...
Jay Leno on Anti-Political Funny Stuff
Tim O’Shei interviewed Jay Leno for The Buffalo News (6/23/2017) about his philosophy on stand-up, and in Leno’s responses I see a few popular notio...