Collin Williams on Jokes and Outrage
A lot of ink & pixels is given to the question of what is or is not an appropriate topic for humor. Collin Williams, in an interview with Rachel Jensen of S...
Tag: play
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...
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...
Dick Gregory Fought for Political Stand-Up
I’m a Dick Gregory fan; I saw him at the Kansas City Improv just a few months ago. I avoided interrupting my queue of topics just for his death (or Jerry...
Deon Cole on Stand-Up as Truth Telling
Deon Cole gave an interview to Amy Young of the Phoenix New Times (8/15/2017), and has a few things to say about comics and truth telling (parrhesia). What come...
Chattoo, The Laughter Effect III. D. 3. Comedy Formats: Stand-Up Impacts
In May (2017), Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University and a comedy fan, released “The Laughter E...
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. I. a. – Introduction
This is the first of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to i...
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...
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...