Presenting a cultural and interdisciplinary study of humor in Spain from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book examines how humour entered public life, how it attained a legitimacy to communicate ‘serious’ ideas in the Enlightenment and how this set the seed for the key position that humor occupies in society today. Through a range of case studies that run from Goya’s paintings, humor, and gender representations in radio programmes during the first Franco regime, developmentalist cinema of the sixties and seventies, to the transformation of female humor in social media, the book traces the core role that the comical has played in the public sphere. The contributors to this volume represent a wide range of disciplines including gender studies, humour studies and Hispanic studies and offer international perspectives on Spanish laughter.

Prior to the modern age laughter raised passions and activated the body to sweat and shake. Derision was not distinguished from joy. Deceiving the senses by tricks or funny stories made all people laugh loudly, regardless of class. Johan Verberckmoes describes, in this innovating book, the hotchpotch of comic images and stories in 'Flandes' during the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs, from 1500 to 1700. It challenges the Bakhtinian idea of a caesura in the history of laughter around 1600.

From U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, one of the most prominent Chicano poets writing today, here are poems like sweet music Awarded the Pura Belpré Honor for this book, Herrera writes in both Spanish and English about the joy and laughter and sometimes the confusion of growing up in an upside-down, jumbled-up world—between two cultures, two homes. With a crazy maraca beat, Herrera creates poetry as rich and vibrant as mole de olé and pineapple tamales...an aroma of papaya...a clear soup with strong garlic, so you will grow, not disappear. Herrera's words show us what it means to laugh out loud until it feels like flying. Juan Felipe Herrera's vibrant poems dance across these pages in a dazzling explosion of two languages, English and Spanish. Skillfully crafted, beautiful, joyful, fun, the poems are paired with whimsical black-and-white drawings by Karen Barbour. The resulting collage fills the soul and celebrates a life lived between two cultures. Laughing out loud, I fly, toward the good things, to catch Mamá Lucha on the sidewalk, afterschool, waiting for the green-striped bus, on the side of the neighborhood store, next to almonds, José's tiny wooden mule, the wise boy from San Diego, teeth split apart, like mine in the coppery afternoon . . .

In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s—a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature—exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games. At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.

Pictures and humor help readers build their Spanish language skills To its millions of fans, the Pattersons are just like their own families, facing universal issues among daily concerns. Containing a selection of 100 syndicated Spanish-language versions of the strip that is widely read in Latin America, Laugh 'n' Learn Spanish provides an entertaining and effective way to expand and polish conversational skills in Spanish. Readers learn by understanding and learning natural, everyday verbal interactions at home and about town, following John and Ell Patterson as they attempt to come to terms with middle age; daughter Elizabeth as she spreads her wings and goes off to college; son Michael dating and then marrying his childhood sweetheart, Deanna; daughter April as she rebels against discipline, anther grandpa who finds a second love in the autumn of his life. Each strip is graded by difficulty--Beginning, Moderate, or Challenging--and is accompanied by: Glosses that translate difficult vocabulary Usage notes to build proficiency A summarizing activity that tests comprehension Additional exercises for key idioms and word patterns appear at the end of each section