Search

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.​Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century's development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious.

What is humour? Why do we laugh? And why is the root of a good joke almost always error? Good jokes, bad jokes, clever jokes, dad jokes — the desire to laugh is universal. But why do we find some gags hilarious, whilst others fall flat? Why does explaining a joke make it less amusing rather than more so? Why is laughter contagious, and why did it evolve in the first place? Using the oldest jokes and the latest science, in The Comedy of Error, Professor Jonathan Silvertown investigates why we laugh: from laughter's evolutionary origins, to similarities and differences in humour across cultures, and even why being funny makes us sexier. As this unique book demonstrates, understanding how humour really works can provide endless entertainment.

When E. B. White said “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; few people are interested and the frog dies,” he hadn't seen Al Gini's hilarious, incisive, and informative take on jokes, joke-telling, and the jokers who tell jokes. For Gini, humor is more than just foolish fun: it serves as a safety valve for dealing with reality that gives us the courage to endure that which we cannot understand or avoid. Not everyone tells jokes. Not everyone gets a joke, even a good one. But, Gini argues, joke-telling can act as both a sword and a shield to defend us from reality. As the late, great stand-up comic Joan Rivers put it: ‘If you can laugh at it, you can live with it!'This book is for anyone who enjoys a good laugh, but also wants to know why.

Diese phänomenologische Studie bietet im historisch orientierten ersten Teil eine umfassende mentalitätsgeschichtliche Analyse der Deutung und Bewertung des Lachens von der europäischen Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Kritisch analysiert werden die wichtigsten und folgenreichsten Argumentationsmodelle. Der zweite, systematische Teil führt die anthropologisch orientierte Argumentationstradition auf der Grundlage der Neuen Phänomenologie von Hermann Schmitz fort und beschreibt das Lachen in seinen drei Grundtypen als Bekundungs-, Interaktions- und Resonanz-Lachen auf den verschiedenen ontogenetischen Stufen von Lachmündigkeit als Spiel von personaler Emanzipation und personaler Regression wie auch als synergetisch-synästhetisches Gesamtverhalten bei verschiedenen Einstellungen und in verschiedenen Situationen. Ausführlich stellt Lenz Prütting dar, dass die Fähigkeit zum Lachen in seinen verschiedensten Formen dem Menschen eigen ist, ihn erst zum Menschen macht. Er lädt ein, das Lachen und den Humor als wichtige Lebensfunktionen anzusehen.'Es gilt ein Werk anzuzeigen, wie es wohl nur alle hundert Jahre einmal zustande kommt, speziell über diesen Gegenstand, aber so noch nie geschrieben worden ist, und das, obwohl sich über einen Zeitraum von zweieinhalb Jahrtausenden ausnahmslos alle westlichen Denker damit befasst haben'. Burkhard Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Laughter is often no laughing matter, and, as such, it deserves continued scholarly attention as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon. This collection of essays is a meeting ground for scholars from several disciplines, including historians, philologists, and scholars of social sciences, to discuss places and roles of laughter in history, in historical narratives, and in cultural anthropology from prehistory to the present. The common foci of the papers gathered in this volume are to examine laughter and its meanings, to reflect on the place of laughter in Western history and literature, to disclose laughter's manipulative potential in historical and literary narratives, to see it in the light of the concepts of carnivalesque and playfulness, to see it as a reflection of hysterical historicizing, to see its place in comedy, farce, grotesque and irony, and to see it against its broadly understood theoretical, philosophical and psychological aspects. The book will appeal chiefly to an academic readership, including students, historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages'and a ‘gloomy early modern age,'many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.