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How can comedy be used as an effective tool and truly help innovate the learning experience? This paper outlines how aspects of comedy have been creatively integrated into primary and secondary academic curricula such as English Language Arts, social studies, drama, as well as in areas of mental health and wellness. The essay demonstrates, for example, how participating in stand-up performances helped sharpen students' critical thinking abilities and presentation skills. It also underscores comedy's pedagogical utility and versatility, its value in the classroom, and its promising potential as a stand-alone option in the domain of arts education.

This paper explores comedy as a "queer pedagogical form" that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating 'form' less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of "formation" that positions these in dynamic relation to the wider context in which comedies are encountered, we mobilise the idea of "queer pedagogical forms" to capture how comedy can foster new modes of thinking about and embodying queerness for, and with, audiences. Drawing on specific examples from "Schitt's Creek" and "Derry Girls," we document the potential of specific comedic modalities (e.g. irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and slapstick) to foster alternative representations of queerness, in which normative tropes are poked fun at, problematised, and reimagined. Through these examples, we demonstrate how comedies can enable us to 'laugh ourselves out of the closets' we live by, feel, navigate, and embody.

Background: Pedagogical approaches to learning about LGBTQI+ themes and experiences remain a largely understudied topic in teacher education. This is partly due to anxieties around exploring these themes in nuanced and sensitive ways, with many teacher educators feeling ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of exploring so-called "difficult knowledge." Purpose: In response to this, the purpose of this paper is to offer reflections on the pedagogical value of comedy for exploring such themes and experiences in teacher education, focusing especially on the situational comedy (sitcom) "Schitt's Creek." We turn to comedy given our interest in the capacity of comedic modalities to offer "slantwise" pedagogical encounters with LGBTQI+ themes and experiences, that is, nonaffronting encounters that resist damage-centered narratives of LGBTQI+ people and are open to multiple queer futures. Research design: In exploring how the sitcom offers teacher educators and student teachers these kinds of encounters, we provide a reading of three episodes of "Schitt's Creek" through a "queer utopian" lens. We analyze a purposive sample of episodes from the series that speak directly to LGBTQI+ themes and experiences. We accompany this analysis with prompts for teacher educators to use in discussing these episodes in the teacher education classroom. Conclusions: We suggest that the sitcom offers teacher education an opportunity for student teachers and teacher educators to access a queer utopianism that can be encountered not only in the specifics of "Schitt's Creek's" plotlines, characters, and/or settings, but also, perhaps more primarily, through the affective dimensions of watching the sitcom itself. The piece comes to a close with some thoughts on the significance of comedy for exploring the relationship among affect, education, and social justice more generally.

The aim of this paper is to explore the violation of Grice's Maxims in the Arabic comedy "Madraset Al- Mushaghbeen" and explain how the violation of the maxims brings about humorous effects in the play. The analysis shows that 61 instances of maxims violation were identified in the play. Maxim of Manner receives the highest percentage of violation i.e., 24 (39.3%) compared to the other maxims. Maxims of Relevance and Quality come next, i.e., 14 (22.9%) and 13 (21.4%). Maxim of Quantity constitutes 10 number of violations (i.e., 21.4%). The study shows that most of maxim violations that create humorous situations are perceived through the following: rhetorical strategy of overstatement and personification, use of misleading conventional-coded expressions, incongruity of conversation-established concepts/ideas, and breaking of communication norms. The study also reveals that cultural and background knowledge significantly contribute to eliciting the humorous implicatures from the characters' utterances. The study concluded with the following implications: humorous implicature depends on the conventions of the speakers' community and the language shared among them; and it arises as a result of speakers' acts and/or expressions that tend to be incongruous with the behavior and concepts established in the culture of the concerned interlocutors.

This paper argues that environmental destruction arises from a discourse rooted in Western Economic and Scientific Theory. This discourse artificially separates individuals from our natural world and argues that competition and utilitarian actions are beneficial to society. It is however, a discourse that is taking us to a Shakespearean tragic end: it is resulting in actions that actively harm our natural world, as all too familiar statistics of environmental damage make clear. It is a discourse that does not match our underlying physical reality, which is why calls for Environmental reform "within" this discourse will not be effective. Hearing about global warming, deaths caused by hunger every two seconds, and the extinction of plants and animals on a scale never seen before can be enough to envelop us in a sense of hopelessness: we are headed, it seems, for an inevitable tragic ending. However, Shakespeare makes clear that this is not necessary the case. We are not yet at our end; we are yet still storying ourselves. We can thus rewrite a better ending by shifting ourselves into a Shakespearean comedy. The potential lies in our discourse which is not truth, but a contingent creation. After describing these ideas in more detail, this paper goes on to present the parameters of a new Ecological discourse rooted, like Shakespeare's Comedy, in care and humanity that dovetails with our natural world and provides for hope through transformed consciousness. It concludes with recommendations on how this new discourse can be spread and taught in schools. (Contains 2 figures.)

This paper discusses a project that used comedy workshops to explore the humour of autistic teenagers, focusing the discussion around three traits often -- and negatively -- associated with autism. The paper will then point to ways of rethinking these traits, and argue that doing so opens up a space for considering the aesthetics of comedy on the spectrum. In this way, I suggest that we can understand autistic humour on a model of difference rather than deficit.

This paper examines the popular representation of childcare in North America. The author argues that the influence of popular culture on society's beliefs about childcare is an unexamined area that should be addressed as part of the larger project to improve the status of childcare educators in North America and internationally. Through the case-study analysis of three comedic films that address centre-based childcare settings--"Daddy Daycare," "The Longest Daycare," and "Toy Story 3"--the author examines how these texts construct, reinforce or challenge societal assumptions about childcare. The comedic genre of the films offers dual potential for the films to either perpetuate or disrupt stereotypical assumptions about childcare, especially in terms of gender identities. Three findings are discussed: the predominant representation of childcare settings as cold and threatening; the reversal of gender roles that offers some opportunity for progress to men, but little for women; and the diverse representation of the child figure as a marker of an adult carer's success. The paper concludes by suggesting that popular comedic films offer viewers an opportunity to develop awareness of their tacit endorsement of societal assumptions about childcare, and encourage citizens to disrupt these dominant conventions through critical media consumption.

Although efforts are being made to bring science closer to secondary school students, science is still mostly perceived within stereotypic frameworks, hindering students' identification with it. In this paper, we claim the role that arts-based approaches can play in science education to break these biased views and understandings and generate a more motivating science learning experience. For that purpose, we analyse research conducted with students from two secondary schools in Barcelona participating in a science education project applying drama-based activities within an inquiry process with early-career researchers. More specifically, we explore students' perceptions of science and their attitudes towards learning science at school and pursuing scientific careers. We then evaluate and discuss how the triad 'researchers' interaction -- scientific inquiry -- artistic creation' can potentially challenge their storylines about science and bring science learning closer to them. Findings suggest that the evaluated approach contributed to progress in this direction through two mechanisms: creating new rapports with science by offering a creative, inclusive and interactive learning experience, and broadening students' perceptions in terms of what implies to do science and who can do it.

This paper examines language stylization in "Aigia Fuxia" ("The Fuchsia Goat"), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural "self" of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of "Aigia Fuxia" is its consistent pinpointing of its intertextual relations to well-established Cypriot comedic media genres, in which the language and the lifestyle of the "rural" part of the speech community is performed following specific generic and linguistic conventions. "Aigia Fuxia" dismantles these conventions through the artful deployment of a medley of content, generic, and filmic choices and, crucially, through extreme dialect stylization, ultimately a "de-authenticizing" move, especially as it goes hand-in-hand with other linguistic choices, which are dissonant both in terms of genre and in terms of the series' baseline stylized dialect register. In this paper we show that such bricolage generates rich interpretive potential: from a filmic perspective, the use of techniques which may befuddle viewer expectations regarding the genre cunningly pinpoint the processes whereby generic and narrative conventions are constructed; from a sociolinguistic perspective, the extreme stylization of the Cypriot Greek dialect may be seen as performative destabilizing of dominant folk linguistic constructs about standard language and dialect in a context of dialect leveling and emergent diglossia resolution. (Contains 11 notes.)

The aim of this paper is to examine the increased potential for language change from the micro-level, given the new domains in which minority languages are present in the global era. Drawing on the theoretical notion of sociolinguistic scales this paper presents a comparative account of the changing positions of the Irish and Inari Sami languages. Specifically, this paper is centred on a comparative study of two media personalities, namely an Irish language stand-up comedian, Des Bishop, and an Inari Sami rap artist, Amoc, whose success as language-planning actors stems from their use of the mediated space to influence micro-level language planning. By identifying both Bishop and Amoc as micro-level language-planning actors, this paper will examine the potential knock on effects of such initiatives for macro-level language-planning agencies, such as the educational domain, thereby pointing to the potential for increased minority language recovery when such languages achieve new values and functions. (Contains 5 notes and 2 figures.)

The article calls for papers for a special issue of the journal "Stand-Up Comedy and Philosophy" that will be published in November 2020.

The central argument of this paper is that adopting some of the techniques practised by stand-up comedians can help teachers in higher education challenge students in ways that will ultimately improve the student learning experience overall. It will suggest that developing co-dependent relationships and over-engaging with students is disabling rather than enabling. Instead it will suggest that it is helpful to use "strategies of omission" that result in challenge to students and promote disjunction in their lives which in turn promotes the development of criticality. However, we need to stress from the outset that the paper has nothing at all to do with comedy. This paper is offered as practitioner investigation, making use of the practitioners' stories of their experience as data.

Post-2000, Zimbabwe has witnessed a gradual shrinking of communicative space. In its efforts to control the narrative about the causes of the country's multi-dimensional crisis, the ruling ZANU-PF government has used a gamut of legal and extra-judicial strategies to stifle press and other related freedoms. In this highly restrictive context, comedy has emerged as a viable source of information about events unfolding in the country as well as an alternative public sphere where counter-hegemonic discourses are ventilated by citizens who were previously excluded from the mainstream public sphere. Building on Mpofu's (2017) and Mano's (2007) studies on art and music as variants of journalism, our paper argues that comedy should be viewed as a variant of journalism in post-2000 Zimbabwe. We employ the normative roles of journalism, and Nancy Fraser's (1990) concept of the alternative public sphere as our framework for examining how comedy, and more specifically Comic Pastor's Monthly Comic Awards, has filled the void created by mainstream journalism by performing the journalistic function of communicating salient issues during the protracted Zimbabwean crisis. Our findings converge with, and broaden, Mpofu's (2017) and Mano's (2007) thesis that alternative sources of expression such as comedy should be viewed as journalism in crisis contexts. These findings also reinforce the need to expand traditional conceptions of journalism that narrowly limit the practice to traditional mass media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a collage of voices and ideas that attempts to move us away from an understanding of philosophy as argument and counterargument toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. (Contains 4 notes.)

From 9/11 to the Boston Marathon, from Charlottesville to the Capitol Riots, from Sandy Hook to Parkland, from Eric Garner to George Floyd, from Hurricane Katrina to widespread wildfires. In the span of just two and a half decades, the United States has been plagued by numerous tragic events. During the same period, the number of late-night shows, a simple though controversial measurement of popular demand for comedic material dealing with or distracting from these crises, proliferated from four shows in 2000 to 17 in 2020. Looking at these shows over the course of two decades (2001–2021), the paper examines if and how late-night hosts addressed tragic events, a topic thus far largely relegated to grey literature. The empirical study draws on theories of comedy and tragedy to inform its content analysis of late-night monologues. The article finds that late-night hosts did address a wide range of tragic events, from mass shootings to environmental catastrophes. However, the ways in which they did so differed, exhibiting shifts over time and comedic genre. Overall, late-night comedians' replies to tragic events became more instantaneous, serious, and civically minded. The article argues that this subversion of genre expectations through the absence of humor and increasing incorporation of political accountability and advocacy frames in comedians' responses to tragedies became particularly pronounced in the late 2010s. The paper suggests potential explanations for these results and concludes that these findings provide valuable insights and implications for the American public and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a cultural critique of the Joe Rogan Experience. Framing the podcast as an adaptive cultural platform, I emphasize how it is ideologically informed by both the established infrastructure and dynamics of communicative capitalism and Joe Rogan's ethos as a comedian. The paper discusses three ways Joe Rogan and his format negotiate their relationship with platform infrastructures. The first is Rogan's relationship with Spotify and his interest in shaping "cancel discourses" and, subsequently, his own role as an embedded, "uncancellable" skeptic. The second is the combination of Rogan's roast universalism and pioneering speech-a-ton format, designed to establish an infrastructure for platforming his cohort of podcasting comedians on YouTube. The third is Rogan's relationship with platform-owner Elon Musk, whose communicative capitalist agenda has political implications. The paper establishes a theoretical connection between studies of platformisation and the under-studied cultural influence of podcasting comedians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay deals with the law and revenge issue, questioning the fundamental assumption according to which the law, by its own nature, should act as a substitute for vengeance. Provided that both law and revenge have their common grounds on the different, and at times conflicting, feelings of resentment and loyalty, the paper maintains that law can prevent revenge only if it is trusted by the victims, being itself a part to a bond of loyalty. Graham Greene's 1958 "entertainment" Our Man in Havana is chosen as a reference scenario. The paper analyses the characters' attitudes towards the law, their resentments, and their bonds of loyalty, and investigates the emotional scenario behind the two revenges mentioned in the novel. Finally, the essay maintains that each person's degree of trust in the law, and therefore their willingness to renounce revenge, depends on that person's own choices and inner feelings about themselves and the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repertoire: (1) a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. (2) the whole body of items that are regularly performed. (3) a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses. [https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+repertoire.] Assessing the impact of teaching on student learning is an educational enterprise that has been going on for many years. Less common, however, is the evaluation of the impact of teaching on the instructor. That is, how does increasing teaching experience both in terms of the number of years doing it and the diversity of teaching experiences improve teaching? This is, of course, an empirical question. This paper focuses on one type of teaching experience and its overall contribution to improving instruction in public administration and policy. I draw from experience in short-term, non-degree teaching in executive programs (EEs). These programs are aimed at middle-level or senior government officials and may be as short as one day or as long as four weeks (on rare occasions longer). I show how this type of teaching can improve one's teaching repertoire much like a young professional trombonist (think of Tommy Dorsey in his early 20s) or a fledgling comedian trying to make the big time developing a professional repertoire. One's repertoire is a combination of pedagogical technique and policy and management substance. Since short-term, non-degree teaching in EEs is different from degree-based, semester-length teaching, it presents specific challenges, especially for the novice EE instructor. As the repertoire improves via EE teaching, it is likely to transfer to more conventional graduate-level professional education. Case examples come from Hungary, the USA, China, Macedonia and Singapore.

For almost a century, several Egyptian comedies have set up cringe-worthy power-sensitive encounters between struggling low-paid teachers and spoiled rich and powerful students, often leading to negative portrayals of teachers and student-teacher relationship. One play, Madraset el-Moshaghbeen 'School of the Rowdies' (1971), has long been held accountable for student misconduct across the country. A 2008 film with a loosely similar theme, RamaDan Mabrouk Abul-Alamein Hamouda, has received a much warmer welcome as a harmless light comedy. This paper brings these two comedies into focus and probes into the management of cringe in filmic text based on the Benign-Violation Theory of humor as well as Baldry and Thibault's (2006. Multimodal transcription and text analysis: A multimedia toolkit and coursebook with associated on-line course. Equinox) Multimodal Transcription Model. Optimizing for the four dimensions of psychological distance (temporal, social, spatial, and hypothetical) would help control the benignity of embarrassing violations and free the audience to enjoy the humor. Alternatively, minimizing psychological distance would evoke audience empathy with the violated teacher character and may block audience amusement. Audience reactions through the comment field on strategic clips from the film and play on YouTube would reveal whether a cringe-inducing scene has evoked amusement, vicarious embarrassment, or both. The paper proposes an inventory of the features that would contribute to adjusting psychological distance to achieve the desired effect. These features intersect with the four dimensions of psychological distance, narrative and stylistic choices, as well as the multimodal affordances of filmic and embodied expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cringe comedy, wittily disseminating truth through the interplay between the verbal and contextual, centralizes vicarious/embarrassment as its endpoint through levels of para/linguistic incongruity and social superiority. This paper focuses on the stand-up comedian presentation along with paratextual elements that document the sociopolitical situation in two different cultures contributing to the process of perception on the part of the gazing audience. The paper questions the spectatorial gaze through post-millennial media practices that pertain to the visual among other visceral affects thus diminishing the role of the active witness whose role is beyond watching. The act of witnessing, globally foregrounded and requested by the turn of the twenty-first century, is investigated within the structure of stand-up comedy to figure out whether or not the spectator is an active witness or a by-stander. For this purpose, the study applies Andy Lavender's model of performance modalities to stand-up comedy performances by the American Ali Wong and the Egyptian Ali Quandil; Don Wong and Mawdoa Hareemi Shweya (Some Feminine Stuff) in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Lavender's model proposes that four modalities (the emotional, physical, discursive, contextual) turn the actor/performer into the physical medium of communication to the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]