A tragicomic story of bad dates, bad news, bad performances, and one girl's determination to find the funny in high school from the author of Denton Little's Deathdate. Winnie Friedman has been waiting for the world to catch on to what she already knows: she's hilarious. It might be a long wait, though. After bombing a stand-up set at her own bat mitzvah, Winnie has kept her jokes to herself. Well, to herself and her dad, a former comedian and her inspiration. Then, on the second day of tenth grade, the funniest guy in school actually laughs at a comment she makes in the lunch line and asks her to join the improv troupe. Maybe he's even . . . flirting? Just when Winnie's ready to say yes to comedy again, her father reveals that he's been diagnosed with ALS. That is . . . not funny. Her dad's still making jokes, though, which feels like a good thing. And Winnie's prepared to be his straight man if that's what he wants. But is it what he needs? Caught up in a spiral of epically bad dates, bad news, and bad performances, Winnie's struggling to see the humor in it all. But finding a way to laugh is exactly what will see her through. **A Junior Library Guild Selection**

Recall old memories from your life as you read the author’s moving story. Be a part of an inspiring journey as you laugh, cry and think. Laugh with the author on this roller-coaster ride. Shed a few tears if you have to, but move on. Understand the value of what you have. Are you happy with who you are? Do you have superstitious beliefs and habits that annoy others? Think! Do not lead a life in self-denial. Remove the tinted glasses that block your vision and see the real dimensions of life and its challenges. This book will help you assess yourself and start afresh, if required, on a journey in which caste, creed and other artificial barriers do not matter. Make the transformation now before it is too late. Choose any chapter to read as the episodes are not interrelated. Though this book is for everyone, teenagers and young adults will especially benefit from it.

This book is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about humour in all kinds of tourism settings. It discusses the many ways in which humour can occur during tourism exchanges including guided tours, tourism marketing and promotion and travel narratives. Other themes include the role of humour in enhancing the tourist experience, the benefits of tourism humour, considerations of when humour may appear inappropriate in tourism settings and the development of tourism humour theory. The work includes much original material collected by the authors. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers of tourism as well as humour scholars from other disciplines.

The Number One international bestseller, Eat, Pray Love is a journey around the world, a quest for spiritual enlightenment and a story for anyone who has battled with divorce, depression and heartbreak.

We are not such as dreams are made of. But sometimes our dreams can lead us home.

Do you believe that joy is a choice? Dawn Barton does. She's an upbeat Southerner with good hair and a successful business background, but she's had more heartache than most of us can imagine. Laughing Through the Ugly Cry is a collection of honest and sometimes raw stories. Dawn throws an arm around readers as she brings them along on her journey through the loss of a child, divorce, cancer, rape, the death of her only sibling, her husband's substance abuse, and finding her way back to Jesus in the middle of it all. Dawn shares her personal story to show readers how to find happiness and purpose even in the darkest of days. By laughing through the ugly cry, you will discover how to: Shut down negative feelings causing you to feel inadequate Identify the pros despite how challenging the cons may seem Embrace joy wherever you can find it Learn how to be honest with yourself and process grief in a healthy way Dawn writes, "If more women were open about just how difficult our lives feel and how hard we are on ourselves, I think we'd learn to relax a little and give ourselves the grace God gives us every day." Laughing Through the Ugly Cry is great for: Women of any age seeking comfort, encouragement, and inspiration Book clubs and girls' nights--Dawn poses thoughtful group questions to support meaningful conversations about growth and joy

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.