Search

Through an analysis of comedian Julio Torres's streaming special My Favorite Shapes (2019), this paper focuses on how Torres uses comedy to critique the US immigration system and its dehumanization of Central American migrants and explores Torres's material engagement with shapes. Because the word shapes recalls structures and structural conditions, I turn to shapes to analyze Torres's phenomenological critique of structural inequities rooted in racism and xenophobia. By drawing on phenomenology's attention to figure/ground structure, Torres develops a critique of the US by focusing on what and who resides in the background versus the foreground of socio-cultural-political imaginaries. By developing his critiques through comedy, Torres uses the collective, embodied force of laughter to unsettle habitual narratives pertaining to labor and citizenship. Because Torres's My Favorite Shapes embodies the stakes for being a queer Salvadoran immigrant in the US, I suggest that Torres's worldmaking project centers queer-immigrant imagination as the site beyond the literal structures that shape and objectify the lives of those who are most vulnerable and who therefore hold the clearest vision of what is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the scholarly work of Paul Cantor and David Lowenthal, this paper argues that the 1981 war-comedy, Stripes, constitutes a democratic appropriation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Drawing on what is arguably Shakespeare's most political drama, Cantor and Lowenthal argue, respectively, that both Rome and its martial warrior tragically aspire to a wholeness that will always elude them; Rome's republic depends on a mixing of political classes that presume to be distinct from and independent of the other while the work's eponymous figure believes he can exist above and apart from the city he alternately seeks to save and to destroy. Because tragedies show the self-defeating flaws that plague their protagonists, they allow us to see the impossibilities such characters represent as absurd. But, in seeing them as absurd, they should also appear as the proper subjects of comedy. Viewed as a democratic reworking of this Elizabethan tragedy, Stripes shows us how the wisdom that allows us to appreciate both the need for and the shortcomings of republican politics, as the scholarship of Cantor and Lowenthal reveal them, may yet be made available without leading us to despair of the possibility a genuinely free and healthy civic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Buster Keaton's sporadic but crucial presence in Elizabeth Bishop's writing, this paper examines her artistic ideal of comic surrealism through the lens of queer phenomenology. Keaton's slapstick comedy serves as a nice cinematic parallel to Bishop's understanding of 'real wit' as 'usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous'. Taking the oft-cited 1964 letter and Bishop's 'Keaton' (late 1950s) as points of departure, I carry out an intermedial analysis of the Keatonesque elements in Bishop's comic surrealist poems that blur the demarcation between a brutal reality and a dream world of endless possibilities. These poems bring about a sudden flash of self-awareness of our own contingency, ultimately to reorient us towards what I call queer love. The formal, thematic associations that I draw between the two artists illuminate not only the poet's surprisingly quirky, experimental sides, but her subtle deftness in addressing political issues around gender, sexuality, class, and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Íkala: Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aristophanes' Frogs was first performed at the Lenaea festival of 405 in competition with Plato's Cleophon and Phrynichus' Muses. This paper argues that Frogs contains a series of agonistic jokes against Phrynichus, most of which have gone unnoticed because he shares his name with a tragic poet and a politician; Aristophanes plays with the ambiguity of the name Phrynichus to mock his Lenaean rival by comparing him unfavourably with his namesakes. Aristophanes ultimately claims that his comedy is superior to that of Phrynichus because he is more successful than his rival in appropriating and redeploying other comedians' material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a re-reading of Aristophanes's comedy Ekklesiazusai (Assembly Women). It shows that this play exhibits the aporias of the binary gender order, which had evolved in classical fifth-century Athens, along with other dualisms typical of the period, such as the opposition of pólis and oíkos. The paper argues that Aristophanes negotiates these dualisms against the background of changing epistemological conditions of the fifth century, i. e. the establishment of the "principle of bivalence". From the perspective of theater and literary history, this development made the chorus increasingly unrecognizable, since it was primarily a figure of non-binary (and also cosmological) relations. The chorus becomes newly legible today precisely where dualisms erode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents Polish equivalents of William Shakespeare's food vocabulary based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. The analysis entails all Polish versions of the comedy, both its nineteenth-century renditions and contemporary post-war readings. The research aims to demonstrate how the lexical choices of Polish authors affect the interpretation of the play; in particular, it seeks to answer the question of how the imagery and symbolism of Shakespeare's food vocabulary were altered in the process of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The key site in this was a television and film unit at London Zoo administered by the Zoological Society and Granada TV. The Granada unit produced 'Animal expressions', a twenty-five-minute television film based on research on monkeys and apes by the Dutch postgraduate student and soon-to-be-leading-authority Jan van Hooff. Recovering the production and multiple uses of 'Animal expressions', this paper offers the first sustained historical analysis of science on commercial television. I show how Granada patronage helped Van Hooff to support his argument that human expressions such as smiling and laughter shared common evolutionary origins with similar facial movements in nonhuman primates. Emphasizing the mutual shaping of science and ITV, I argue that 'Animal expressions' repurposed televisual conventions of framing talking heads, and blended serious science with the comedy of 'funny faces', thereby epitomizing Granada's public-service strategy at a time when commercial television was defending itself from criticism in the Pilkington report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how, in the midst of changing political times, some characteristics of HIV activism are changing, and suggests the relevance of these shifts for other fields of health activism. Despite the UK achieving UNAIDS's '90–90-90ʹ testing and treatment goals, many in the UK lack up-to-date HIV knowledge and retain stigmatising attitudes, and some areas of testing failure remain. In response, people with HIV and HIV organisations are generating imaginative, collaborative projects that indicate effective contemporary forms of health activism may, as other critical health research suggests, be decentred, participatory, multimodal, affective, and implicit. The paper describes a 2016 HIV NGO-run comedy event directed at HIV awareness which was researched via qualitative pre- and post-measures, and two-month follow-up interviews. Findings pointed to strong effects of comedy, as enjoyment and 'break' in HIV thinking, feeling, and action; of a one-off event's emotionality and particularity; and of performance in generating collectivity and HIV citizenship. The paper discusses the potential transferability of these findings to other health activisms, particularly around stigmatised conditions. It argues that such strategies of emotionality, multi-modality, and solidarity in a performance event can work as implicit activism for changing times, generating social change via a doubled politics of resistance and alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's "The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" is regarded by Freud and by analytic readers and commentators as a prototype of his conception of the oedipus complex. A literary methodology is used to show that the interpretation of the oedipus complex at work in Freud's text in fact differs from Freud's standard view of it. While studying the paper as text, not as case report, may obscure or distort some clinical matters, it is valuable in that it makes legible a sort of theoretical unconscious in the text. In contrast to Freud's typically tragic view of the oedipus complex (in the tradition of ancient Greek tragedy), the Hans study evokes a comic vision (in the tradition of Greek New Comedy). This comic vision allows Hans a happy imaginative ending to the oedipal dilemma, challenges certain epistemic pretensions, and emphasizes the oedipus complex as a set of abiding existential questions. Given the deep link between Freud' oedipus concept and a tragic view of human life, this departure in the Hans paper is a fascinating anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to discover the tragic elements in the History of King Richard the Second. It is worth investigating this play to see the different features of tragedy that have been used in forming the acts and scenes of this play. The play is compared to other tragedies of Shakespeare to display its similarities and differences with them. How do the people around the king behave or seek to get power? The research investigates the ambition of the other characters for the king’s throne which is followed by many murders. At the same time, the characteristics of Richard’s identity and personality are discussed and also compared to the other Shakespeare’s tragic heroes in terms of flow and fate. The play's structure is also investigated to figure out the common characteristics of the tragedy. How does the play start and how does it end? One of the important tools of the play is its language. Almost all of Shakespeare’s Histories and some acts or scenes of Comedies include terrifying scenes and frightening events in this play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifteen years, there has been growing interest in the use of comedy within science communication. This paper seeks to contextualize the emergence of science comedy, analyzing the construction of comedy within academic literature as a means for bolstering the cultural authority of science. Drawing specifically from Mikhail Bakhtin's work on power and language, academic constructions of science comedy might be read as an orchestrated moment of carnival, with humor imagined as a means for engineering public support for science, on the premise that science communicators alone should determine what version of science the public receive. However, results from a pilot study interviewing London-based science comedians suggests that such ambitions are not shared by performers. Performers framed the value of science comedy lying predominantly in the opportunity to challenge other science communicators' own attitudes to science. Framing scientists and science communicators as science comedy's most relevant audience, rather than the public, performers envisaged comedy as a space in which the unspoken assumptions of science could be exposed and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews with production members and trade magazine articles, the paper discusses how the German comedy drama Drinnen -- Im Internet sind alle gleich (2020) dealt with COVID-19 in its production. The series -- whose title translates to "Inside -- On the Internet All Are Equal" -- is obviously about the pandemic: it tells the story of Charlotte, who is planning to quit her job and leave her marriage when she suddenly has to self-isolate and communicate with others only online. Not only Charlotte's fictional life but also the show's real-life production was very much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. All crew members worked from home, due to Germany's contact restrictions in early 2020. For a fictional production, Drinnen was developed and shot in an extremely fast way -- even more so when one considers its public-service context, usually accompanied by complicated bureaucratic structures. The speed and flexibility of the project-based making of Drinnen points to wider changes within its broadcaster, the public-service ZDF -- Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television), as well as in German drama production in general. Already before the emergence of COVID-19, attempts had been made to produce serial fiction more quickly, flexibly, and cheaply; under the pandemic, these approaches intensified. While Drinnen is often regarded as an innovative role model in this context, such "instant" drama productions also require critical examination. For the practitioners involved in producing Drinnen, the race to quickly fictionalize the COVID-19 pandemic meant immense pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moreana is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper (a) analyses the audience of sports broadcasting from a programme repertoire perspective and (b) clarifies the market structure of sports broadcasting in the television industry by estimating a demand model. We first use item- and user-based modelling to investigate the TV programme repertoires of audiences and conducts cluster analysis to identify sports viewers. Then, we apply econometric choice models to clarify the competition structure of sports broadcasting content on the television market. Based on repertoire clustering, the first part of this study identifies different types of sports fans: fanatic viewers, common viewers, entrainment seekers, and information seekers. The second part shows that sports content is mainly selected by fanatic fans, but has a limited influence on other audiences compared to comedy or drama programmes. The results can help advertisers or sports marketers gain a better understanding of the sports content market and audiences to develop more appropriate marketing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflection on the importance of naming, or of not naming, in New Comedy. It considers factors that may have motivated Menander, Plautus and Terence to assign particular names to persons, places and things in their plays, or to avoid mentioning names and leave as much as possible indefinite. The paper concludes by moving from ancient fictive worlds to the real world of today and the "naming" choices that we all face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Shakespeare's King Lear abounds with features both tragic and bitter. It is, as suggested by many critics, one of the most painful demonstrations of the human predicament in Shakespeare's oeuvre. But with the introduction of the Fool, Shakespeare artistically threads through the tragic elements of his work a delicate strand of comedy. The Fool is described by some Shakespeare scholars as a bitter character and by some as a mysterious and enigmatic one. This paper does not aim to subvert or polemicize such readings, but attempts to look at the Fool from an ethical perspective: he will turn out to be a comically responsible and ethical figure Shakespeare employs to galvanize his audience and enforce the ethical concerns behind this tragedy. The main focus of this paper, then, is to study the bitterly comic, but responsible, role of the Fool in King Lear in the light of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. It is through Levinas's account of "the ethical" which is prior to "the ontological" (e.g. language) that this study tries to analyze features of irony and comicality embedded in this tragedy with regard to the Fool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willing to challenge the classical tradition, Richlin (2005) adapted the Latin play Persa by Plautus to a contemporary context using American slang and pop culture. Richlin aims at making Roman comedy performable, popular and funny again whether onstage or in the classroom. Is her radical modernisation a form of domestication that is often criticized in translation studies for being unfaithful and unethical? Based upon a comparison between the original Latin text and Richlin’s version, this paper questions the ethics of faithfulness which play a major role in translation terminology, a system determined by the traditional polarity between domestication and foreignization. By highlighting the ludic nature of Plautus’ comedy (especially the ongoing joke with Greek culture and language), this paper argues that using modern transposition is a heavily Plautine strategy suitable for recovering the immediacy of comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of College of Languages is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors met when they were both standup comedians, and they soon realised that they also had branding in common. After spending their adult lives achieving success in both, they have concluded that they are essentially the same thing. That is what this paper is about. Whether you are branding yourself as a stand-up or your self, product or service for business purposes, if you can communicate your unique capability and your passion to innovate around that capability, and if there is a demand in the marketplace for that capability (whether the market knows it yet or not), you have a formula for success. But if you cannot articulate and communicate it in a clear and confident voice that feels unique, authentic and desirable, then you cannot transcend the noise to even be considered by your buying audience. Stand-ups understand better than anyone else how to deliver a unique, differentiated message around their authentic passion and capabilities. It certainly applies to Jerry Seinfeld and Aziz Ansari, #7 and #49, respectively, on Rolling Stone Magazine's Top 50 Stand-up Comedians of all Time (Love, M. (2017) '50 best stand-up comics of all time'.1 And it also applies to 'Wow' ideas with billion-dollar valuations and carefully calculated grabs of market share that facilitate incremental growth — like Dollar Shave Club and BioTrue Contact lens solution. All four are market leaders who broke out by adhering to an authentic and differentiated offering driven by passion and capability. This paper explores how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism has been suffering a crisis of trust in recent years and in order to re-engage with disconnected audiences, media organisations have turned to creative forms of communication. Some of these draw on the concept of "live journalism", where both journalists and their stories are presented to a live audience. Various examples in the US and Europe have already been examined; this paper looks at the emergence of live journalism in the UK, and its potential in creating engagement in the public sphere. The authors reflect on two online events they produced as part of their "News on Stage" project during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which journalists presented previously unpublished stories, using dramatic techniques such as verbatim theatre, stand-up comedy, and soundscapes. Using creative, practice-based research, considered relevant to the study of journalism today, they discuss the experience of staging these events to analyse themes of dramatisation, truthfulness, and connection. The authors use ethnographic research, supplemented with audience and participant feedback, to show that this kind of fusion of journalism and theatre can increase interest and trust in journalism and build closeness with audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bo Burnham is a critically acclaimed American stand-up comedian and filmmaker. The usual themes in his works are the hypocrisy of artists, the commercialisation of art, and the role of social media in erasing the boundary between the public and the private. However, during the pandemic, he chose to focus on the theme of anxiety, a minor theme in his earlier works. Anxiety has been considered as an integral part of modernity as discussed by Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman. In psychoanalysis, anxiety has been explained in a number of different ways. In current psychological discourse, anxiety is described as an unpleasant state of mind that can cause significant bodily and mental stress. The anxiety that Burnham experienced prior to the pandemic appears to have amplified during the pandemic. Two main types of anxiety are observable in the shows of Burnham-performance anxiety and existential anxiety. This paper seeks to understand Burnham's show Inside (2021) using Anna Segal's contribution to the concept of 'sublimation'. We argue that in doing the show Inside, Burnham discovers a new way to acknowledge and channel his 'depressive' symptoms towards contemporary times, and he achieves sublimation in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Latin subordinate conjunctions quia and quoniam in Plautus' comedies. Previous studies have shown that quia and quoniam play an important role in managing the information flow of a discourse. Clauses introduced by quia typically contain information that is new to the addressee, while quoniam-clauses tend to present information that belongs to the speech participants' common ground. Our analysis shows that in Plautus, quia and quoniam each appear in specific communicative contexts that reflect their information management properties. We also demonstrate how Plautus exploits these characteristics of quia and quoniam to manipulate the information flow on stage for the purpose of audience entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a century, I The Chronicle History of Henry the fift i has been almost universally regarded as a "bad quarto."[2] In fact, it was a charter member of that category, included in the 1909 initial articulation of the distinction between "good" and "bad" quartos by A. W. Pollard.[3] The five original "bad quartos" were I Romeo and Juliet i (1597), I Henry the fift i (1600), I Sir Iohn Falstaff and the Merry Wiues of Windsor i (1602), I Hamlet i (1603), and I Pericles i (1609). However, as we have already noted, the speech prefixes for the princess herself most closely link the quarto (" I Kate i ") to Shakespeare's source for the wooing scene, I The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth i (" I Kate i "), which never uses as a speech prefix the folio's " I Kath i ." or " I Kathe i ." Such marginal additions could be found in an authorial draft or a playhouse manuscript, but the fact that the material is not present in the quarto suggests that the vector of transmission was from something like the quarto to something like the folio: something apparently I added i in the margin of the pre-folio manuscript corresponds to something that the quarto does not contain, and which thus might have been I added i after the pre-quarto manuscript was composed. I The Chronicle History i is not a "bad quarto" (however defined), and I The Life i was not printed from Shakespeare's "foul papers" (or from his literary first draft). [Extracted from the article]

The paper probes the Nigerian government's social media campaign to combat the outbreak of COVID-19. Focusing on government's public policy measures to curtail the transmission of the new coronavirus disease through standard infection control measures and social distancing, the research evaluates ordinary Nigerians' perception of social media dramatized coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study assesses the impact of viral comic videos shared on social media platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram etc. on people's critical perception of the pandemic as well as their health behavior. The aim is to establish how the Nigerian government has effectively harnessed the social media entertainment platform in its charge to disseminate credible information to a largely young and semi-literate population which is economically imperiled with limited access to mainstream media. Stressing the deficit of trust between the Nigerian public and the ruling elite, the paper analyses how social media skits interrogate elitism and the counter infection strategy of lockdowns in a struggling economy, The paper emphasizes the crucial roles social media platforms have played in shaping misinformation and prevalent myths about Covid-19 in Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ben Jonson's 1623 poem "An Execration upon Vulcan" responds to a fire in his house, which seemingly destroyed some books and papers. Scholarly interest in this work has largely been confined to what biographical information it reveals. Yet this poem is in dialogue with Cervantes's Don Quixote , Rabelais's Pantagruel , and Donne's The Courtier's Library , and it engages with the genre of the mock library catalogue. By bringing together these works, the essay not only contributes to ongoing study of such Jonsonian concerns as censorship, interpretation, and the value of learning but also highlights his interest in contemporary European comic literature and the closeness of his association with Donne. It sheds light on early modern literature's self-consciousness about the library as a malleable concept, a self-consciousness with important methodological implications for critics and historians of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews current theories of humor development, discusses the interaction of humor with other developmental areas (including cognitive development, personality development, creativity, and moral development), and suggests ways in which research can be applied in the early childhood classroom. (Author/DST)

Examines humorous content of today's television sitcoms in attempt to explain how we got from "Stan and Ollie to Shirley and Laverne" or from exemplary humor to the mundane social commentary of present-day situational comedy. Concludes that the sitcom depends on making comedy out of collision between social change and tradition, exploiting social issues without making sense of them. (JDH)

Assesses the fiction of a prolific children's author, one who wears both comic and tragic masks equally well. (NKA)

Describes how the jokes of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Joan Rivers explore, support, and disrupt different elements of the American social experience. Argues that joking is one strategy for encouraging and sustaining resistance to ideological control. (NKA)

The importance of talk in the drama classroom is described. Students view talk as either development of vocal skills or preexperience for various kinds of social situations. Teacher talk was dominant, however, and emerged in the form of verbal control through closed questions and instructions to students. (JN)

Examines Chaplin's movement from silent films to sound films and his reluctant use of the spoken word and inclination to link human speech to basically sterile functions. (JMF)

Discusses Chaplin's use of satire in his films "Modern Times,""City Lights," and "Limelight" and how these were perceived and misunderstood by his audiences. (JMF)

In support of that claim, Halpern cites Marshall Missner's paper[1] "Why Einstein became famous in America." Missner's paper mentions that Einstein's friendly demeanor and sloppy attire momentarily allayed American xenophobia, but nowhere does it say anything about globally minded Americans and an international outlook. [Extracted from the article]

Much of improvised comedy's appeal comes from the shared acknowledgement between performer and audience that the material is both spontaneous and unrepeatable. But can 'anything' really happen? In the many and varied approaches of Short and Long-Form improvisation are performance structures which inform both the unprepared scenic material and the types of humour which can be produced. Some have argued that the evolution of Long-Form began with the abandonment of game in favour of relational scene. This helpful distinction warrants further discussion; especially since the practice of 'finding the game', popularised by the Upright Citizens Brigade (2013), has blurred the boundary between game and scene. How do such scenic games function within these structures? How do they relate to other notions of game and scene to be found in the performance practice of other improvised traditions? I will explore the paradox of using rules, pre-planned formats and prepared methods of play to open up the ways in which spontaneous comedy is affected by both structure and approach. The research for this paper will come from the literature in the field as well as with interviews with professional improvisers who have trained and worked at Chicago's most influential theatres: The Second City, I.O & The Annoyance. It will also draw on my own training under some of Chicago's most established improvisers and personal experience of staging both Short and Long-Form work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative explication of selected online Zimbabwean comedies as satire. It pursues the revolutionary character of the comedies against an increasingly limiting and impoverishing politico-economic environment. In our rendition, we depart from the general and simplistic thinking that comedy is solely for entertainment's sake to view it as a puissant genre of art that is deployed not only to articulate big national issues but revolutionise consciousness given the danger of pacifying the people that goes along with oppression. The paper pursues the revolutionary agenda in the comedies as the comedians are inadvertently committed to the search for a breakthrough against a limiting and impoverishing politico-economic environment. Emerging out of this elucidation of comedies is that steeped in the comedies, is a sharp sense of resistance against oppression as well as an intense interest in liberating reflection and struggle. The centrepiece of the article is to comparatively engage Pepukai Zvemhari's 'Border phobia' and Prosper Ngomashi's 'Pastor and his wives' against the keen interest in lampooning those in charge of the affairs of the state for breeding trepidation and social phobia among the masses while on their part, life is decorated with profligacy and self-aggrandizement. The two comic skirts perfectly fall into the category of revolutionary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers two South African romantic comedies, Tell Me Sweet Something (Akin Omotoso, 2015) and Happiness is a Four-Letter Word (Thabang Moleya, 2016). Both are set in a wealthy, sophisticated version of Johannesburg and feature black casts that include high profile celebrities. Both emphasize versions of black South African masculinity that deviate from stereotyped depictions of black men as workers, warriors, patriarchs and/or enactors of violence. These films center on an aspirational iteration of black manhood that prioritizes consumption, class and social status. I discuss their representations of the various male characters – Nat in Sweet Something and Thomas, Chris, Bheki, Bongani and Leo in Happiness – including their bodily performances, embeddedness (or lack of) in South African cultural forms and modes of dress and speech. Drawing on ideas about Afropolitanism, I argue that the films update cinematic stereotypes of masculinity, particularly the damaging association of black men and violence. This apparently progressive move is, however, ambivalent, as it privileges a neoliberal and one-dimensional understanding of black masculinity and of contemporary African-ness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) has kept its fascination with the public from the time of its publication to the present for very intricate reasons. While at first sight it may shock the reader as being a huge joke, the intricacy of the joke is so complex that it has often defied numerous attempts at disclosing the profounder meanings it no doubt carries. The present paper is a survey by which we outline some of crucial elements underlying the mazy structure of this surprising literary creation, in which we encounter for the first time in English fiction a comic use of psychological time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can anti-capitalist satire exist within show business, or is this an oxymoron? How can mainstream films claim to be socially conscious and rebellious, when at the same time they are products of an industry which aim to appeal to the masses and maximize profits? These questions were recently raised in relation to the popular and critical success of Hollywood hits like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street, which followed the 2008 financial crash. This paper uses a group of Israeli financial satires as a case study and contributes a significant transnational addition to the debate. During the first half of the 1980s, the Israeli economy struggled with rampant inflation. The crisis inspired comedies such as Million Dollar Madness, The Plumber, and The Man Who Flew in to Grab. Although these films failed, they express a unique zeitgeist in Israeli history, and they are useful to examine the paradox. This analysis of these films provides valuable insights that can guide filmmakers toward overcoming and even resolving the paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of WaC corpora, including Aranea family corpora, with its "close-to-spoken language" writings from different non-formal web pages brought the new options to researchers of sociolects, mainly to those who were previously obliged to observe youth collectives in its spontaneous discourses with its consequent time-consuming transcripts. Non-spontaneous spoken language from rap songs or youth film dialogues also help researchers to describe the level of societal diffusion of some typical features of youth slang. In this paper, we focus on demonstration of these crossed approaches in order to describe three types of verbs, used in a successful comedy about Parisian peri-urban post-adolescents Les Kaïra (2012), representing different types of substandard lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While searching for examples of ambiguous storytelling in contemporary Japanese cinema I came across Ogigami Naoko's ultra-light comedy Megane/Glasses (2007). This article combines my personal intercultural viewing experience with an exemplary analysis of the narrative and dramaturgical groundings of the film's extraordinary lightness. A key concept in this reader-response critical approach is the concept of stereotyped reading by Ruth Amossy. Ogigami's playful and humorous stagings of Japanese cultural stereotypes are examined not only in terms of their comic impact, but first and foremost in terms of their use as dramaturgical device. As such, in Glasses they prove successful in designing the viewer's cognitive processes to an extent that in the end, the relief of our common patterns of thought induces a unique and lasting form of catharsis. The feeling of lightness remains in our heads long after the film has concluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how digitalization has affected the role that Finland's Public Service Broadcasting Company (YLE) plays for the popular music culture of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Drawing on theories from popular music and cultural industry studies, the study explores to what extent new technology has changed practices, structures and perspectives of minority artists. The paper, which forms a sub-study of a larger research project on the impact of digitalization on minority music, focuses on two case studies, the comic duo Pleppo and comedian/artist Alfred Backa. The analysis illustrates how important the public service broadcasting company still is for minority culture despite the structural changes caused by digitalization. However, the radio's quality norms have led to a paradoxical situation where the digital productions of the musicians need to compete with the technical standards of the international entertainment industry, whereas the channels' own productions can follow DIY norms. As the broadcasting company is increasingly moving its focus towards the web, it must in the future achieve a balance between the different dynamics of commercial interests, controversial creativity and traditional public broadcasting objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1918, during his period in Bern, on Shakespeare's comedy As you like it and on Le malade imaginaire by Molière. When these texts are considered together, a question arises. What is the role of the comic inside Benjamin's philosophy, in this period and also in the years to follow? Is the comic really only the other side of mourning, as Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, or does it also have another significance, a significance of its own? Moreover, why should Shakespeare's comedy be the opposite of Molière's comedy, as Benjamin writes in the paper on Molière? In order to answer, we are going to set a connection between Shakespeare's «unarmed eye» (As you like it) and the «innocence» (Fate and Character) that Molière's comedy indicates. This will also lead us to another text that was of much significance to Benjamin (GB, 02/02/1920 et al.), Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma. Here too, as in As you like it, there is an innocent protagonist trying to escape from the evil of a court. Yet Shakespeare's As you like it ends with the reconstruction of a court. What does Benjamin mean, then, when he states that in As you like it «everything ends in loneliness»? The answer will provide a point of convergence between Shakespeare's and Molière's comedy. Benjamin's idea of «Weltlichkeit» (ibid.), of which comedy is a necessary part, will prove to be an alternative to the "armed" character of the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2013 during a fractious interview with Jeremy Paxman for the Newsnight TV programme, the comedian Russell Brand called for a revolution against a self-serving political and economic elite. Over the following 18 months Brand became a prominent Left-wing political figure in the UK This paper suggests that Brand's experience was not isolated but forms part of a wider contemporary trend of comedians becoming populist political leaders. Other examples include the French comedian Dieudonné and the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, whose political party Movimento 5 Stelle is currently the largest in the Italian Parliament and part of the governing coalition. Using Brand as a case study the paper examines his political storytelling for its structure and mode of deployment. Whenever Brand ventures forward a sincere statement he always stands ready to ironize it in order to avoid the perception of piety. Using Peter Sloterdijk's discussion of cynical reason and Slajov Zizek's concept of cynical irony I suggest that a post-political ironic detachment has become the dominant mode of ideology. I then argue that this ironic detachment has come under increasing pressure since the economic crisis of 2008 and the increased political engagement it has provoked. It is within this aspect of the conjuncture that we can position the discourse about a Post-Truth era and Post-Truth leaders. The comedian as political leader, I argue, shows a particular route through this problem. They represent transitional figures pioneering the shift from ironic detachment to postironic statements and narratives of political sincerity of the kind that sustained political engagement requires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]