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As a writer, editor, scholar, and activist, Toni Cade Bambara left an indelible imprint on African American literature and Black feminist thought. This article elucidates Bambara's significance to Black women's humorous practice and articulates the mutuality between Black feminism's ongoing project to render Black women visible and to recover and engage in the bounty of Black women's humorous expression. Through her "cut on the bias" approach to using humor in the short story "Medley," Bambara offers an "alternate design sensibility" of racial and gender difference that illuminates the perspective of being Black and female. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frances McDonald's book, "Posthumorism: The Modernist Affect of Laughter," challenges the premise of humor studies by exploring posthumorist laughter, which she argues lies outside the field. McDonald draws on affect studies to analyze various texts, including Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust" and Hélène Cixous' "The Book of Promethea," to demonstrate how writers use language to make laughter a central focus. She also incorporates philosophical concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to present posthumorist laughter as a disruptive force that goes beyond individual emotions and traditional notions of humor. While McDonald's book has been criticized for its totalizing rhetoric and overlooking the diversity of modernist art, it offers a thought-provoking critique of humor studies and opens up new possibilities for understanding laughter. [Extracted from the article]

"Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror" by David Gillota is a book that explores the relationship between humor and horror in American horror films. The author argues that humor is a prominent aspect of horror and contributes to the tone, themes, and structure of the genre. The book examines various humorous modes and devices used in horror, such as parody, comic monsters, body humor, camp, awkward humor, and satire. It offers close readings of films and analyzes their use of humor to provide social critique and commentary. Overall, the book provides new perspectives on the intersection of humor and horror in American cinema. [Extracted from the article]

"Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change" by Aaron Sachs explores how dark humor can help us confront the climate crisis. Sachs argues that dark humor serves as a coping strategy, creates distance in heated debates, and builds camaraderie among those who share similar concerns. The book also examines the intersections between African American and Jewish traditions of dark humor and climate change humor. While the book offers lively anecdotes and a personable voice, it may overlook social justice concerns and lacks in-depth analysis and theoretical exploration. [Extracted from the article]

This observation about the connection between power and audience laughter provides a fascinating perspective, one that is well illuminated by Noé's analysis of Kristen Schaal's special. Noé presents this dynamic between Schaal and the audience as a critical defining element of alternative comedy and reasons that the audience is receptive to a woman "performing disengagement with power" (67); Schaal is popular because she is willing to give up, take back, and exchange power with the audience throughout the performance. While the women comedians do escape the mainstream audience's traditional views of gender by performing in alternative spaces, it is alternative comedy's potential to play with power that shapes their comedic mode, particularly the power to control people's laughter. [Extracted from the article]

From the start, Clements reminds readers that dominant classes in society have used and continue to use humor and art to keep lower classes in their place. One wonders about the humor Clements might have encountered in totalitarian societies such as those in in North Korea, Taliban/Isis-controlled Afghanistan, or Communist-controlled Uyghur China. Clements is at pains to note humor's benefits in any culture and speaks of the humanizing role of humor in culture even as he emphasizes its limits. [Extracted from the article]

Wood shows how Sykes's comedy in her performances at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and in her two comedy specials ( I I'ma Be Me i and I What Happened, Ms. Sykes? Wood honors Mabley while telling a more complex story about Black women in stand-up comedy. Graph From the outset, Katelyn Hale Wood's book on stand-up comedy, I Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States i , prioritizes Black feminist joy. [Extracted from the article]

Gehring is clearly more interested in writing an entertaining book for Hitchcock aficionados than he is in critically intervening in either humor or Hitchcock studies. In his prologue, Gehring explains that Hitchcock's humor has a "dark comedy base" on which several other genres of comedy stand (22). The endnotes tied to Gehring's discussion of "dark comedy" and "screwball comedy" also led me to references to Gehring's own books on those topics. [Extracted from the article]

Humor by African American women writers has been largely overlooked and undervalued owing in part to the misguided expectation of feminine, subordinate behavior that precludes the expression of aggression and irreverence associated with humor. This article reappraises Jessie Redmon Fauset's reputation as a sentimental, bourgeois female writer, looking at how she uses irony and satire to challenge racial and gender stereotypes and become a pioneering female humorist of the Harlem Renaissance. In her essay "The Gift of Laughter" and her best-known novel, Plum Bun (1928), Fauset uses humor as an indirect form of social protest to subvert racial and gender stereotypes of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman and to unsettle bourgeois, sentimental conventions of the marriage plot and the passing plot. Through a reframing of Fauset's novel in light of recent theories of Black feminist humor, this article helps to restore Fauset's rightful place among the leading and lasting voices of the Harlem Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burge's reminder of a forgotten figure is also a reminder that American politics in the nineteenth century was even more polarized and uncivil than ours, with nearly every one of the many newspapers of the time house organs for particular parties, many of them indulging in the kind of acerbic personal attacks Burge recovers for us. Editors: I greatly enjoyed reading Kirsten Leng's article "Comedy as a Practice of Care: Restorative Laughter and Reciprocal Empathy in the Pandemic", in which she argues that comedy can be understood as a practice of care, meaning that it has affective and nurturing dimensions.[1] She draws on the statements and comments of late-night comedians during the COVID-19 pandemic, who, although professionally paid, offered their comedy as a form of care for their audiences under difficult conditions in an attempt to establish genuine connection. Day also observes that feminist comics use anger to generate comic catharsis. [Extracted from the article]

Woody Allen's short fiction has received much less scholarly attention than his films. Scholars who have investigated the humorous qualities of Allen's short stories and casual pieces have noted his penchant for absurdity and non sequitur, his use of the Little Man as a vehicle for humor, and the linguistic dimensions of his joke scripts rather than his Jewish comic sensibilities. Beginning with a brief overview on how Jewish humor has contributed to the comic achievements of American culture and drawing on analyses of the main characteristics of Jewish humor, this article adds to the scholarship by exploring the influence of Jewish humorous traditions on Woody Allen's short fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the use of masculinity and dark humor in the book "Slaughterhouse-Five," by Kurt Vonnegut. The author explores how Vonnegut was able to use black humor in a way that was optimistic, calling this "gray humor." The book's depiction of World War II and the bombing of Dresden, Germany is examined. The author discusses how the Vietnam War impacted the book's reception and examines how the book attempts to portray the dehumanizing effects of war, especially on boys.

The article focuses on how American writer Kurt Vonnegut used satire in his published works, including the books "A Man Without a Country," "Fates Worse Than Death," and "Palm Sunday." The author explores Vonnegut's radical humor, explains that it was often misunderstood, and argues that it was misrepresented in several film adaptations of his work, including "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Breakfast of Champions," and "2081."

The article focuses on the humor of American writer Kurt Vonnegut. The author argues that Vonnegut should not be classified as a black humorist because he had a sense of compassion in his comedy. He discusses Vonnegut's background in writing science fiction, explores his work writing for magazines, and analyzes several his book "The Sirens of Titan." He examines how Vonnegut was able to incorporate elements of sadness into his humor and describes the impact his comic parables had on American culture.