First published in 1982. The intent of this book is to build an understanding of the people who create humor and are expert at making people laugh. Who are the comedians and clowns of the world? Where do they come from? Why are they so dedicated to tickling funny bones? In what ways are they unique? It is primarily to studying comedians, clowns, and other funny people. It seeks to provide an understanding of the origins, the motivations, and personalities of those who make humor and in exploring the factors that shape actors and other public entertainers.

First published in 1982. The intent of this book is to build an understanding of the people who create humor and are expert at making people laugh. Who are the comedians and clowns of the world? Where do they come from? Why are they so dedicated to tickling funny bones? In what ways are they unique? It is primarily to studying comedians, clowns, and other funny people. It seeks to provide an understanding of the origins, the motivations, and personalities of those who make humor and in exploring the factors that shape actors and other public entertainers.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

For over twenty years, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman has examined the quirky science of everyday life. In Quirkology , he navigates the backwaters of human behavior, discovering the tell-tale signs that give away a liar, the secret science behind speed-dating and personal ads, and what a person's sense of humor reveals about the innermost workings of their mind- all along paying tribute to others who have carried out similarly weird and wonderful work. Wiseman's research has involved secretly observing people as they go about their daily business, conducting unusual experiments in art exhibitions and music concerts, and even staging fake sainces in allegedly haunted buildings. With thousands of research subjects from all over the world, including enamored couples, unwitting pedestrians, and guileless dinner guests, Wiseman presents a fun, clever, and unexpected picture of the human mind.

Critical studies attempting to define and dissect American humor have been published steadily for nearly one hundred years. However, until now, key documents from that history have never been brought together in a single volume for students and scholars. What's So Funny? Humor in American Culture, a collection of 15 essays, examines the meaning of humor and attempts to pinpoint its impact on American culture and society, while providing a historical overview of its progres-sion. Essays from Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, William Keough, Roy Blount, Jr., and others trace the development of American humor from the colonial period to the present, focusing on its relationship with ethnicity, gender, violence, and geography. An excellent reader for courses in American studies and American social and cultural history, What's So Funny? explores the traits of the American experience that have given rise to its humor.

Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the "Shepherds' Play," Thomas Dekker's pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. Farce, absurdity, excess, over-the-top characters, unremitting irony, black humor, toilet humor, and tricksters of all types - such features and more combine to satirize medical, religious, and political authority and to implement necessary social change. Written with a narrative ease, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England shows how comic interventions both describe and reconfigure prevalent authority in its own time while arguing that, through early modern comedy, one can observe the changes in social behavior and understandings characteristic of the Renaissance.