The biggest and best collection of Kerryman jokes ever published!

Contains hundreds of jokes, stories, and other tomfoolery from the Cavan Man.

What is it about a sign or a notice that often provokes hilarity? The message is condensed, space is at a premium, and the sign or notice often loses its meaning, or indeed acquires a whole new meaning, sometimes unintended, and in many delicious cases, quite rude. To put this book together Des MacHale has scoured public toilets (not literally!) hotels, churches, shops and supermarkets, garage forecourts, car stickers, undertakers (surprisingly funny), pubs and bars, buses, trains, factories, schools and colleges, farms, newspapers, sports clubs, and indeed just about anywhere sigs and notices are displayed in Ireland. The results are hilarious and add yet another dimension to Irish humour, already known to be among the best in the world.

Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"?that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all?applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears.Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In The Game of Humor, he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score?winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature.The Game of Humor makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life.

Why is it so cold at Christmas? Because it’s Decembrrrrr! What do elves use to make Christmas cakes? Elf-raising flour! What’s miserable and covered in custard? Apple grumble! Packed full of seasonal silliness and funny festive jokes that will keep you laughing for days – and that's sno joke! From Christmas jokes to food jokes, dinosaur jokes to pirate jokes, these laugh-out-loud one-liners are just the sort that you'd find in Christmas crackers. The perfect stocking filler, A Bumper Book of Christmas Jokes is decorated with humourous black and white line drawings and packed with hundreds of hilarious jokes about all sort of topics.

Now in its third edition, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language provides the most comprehensive coverage of the history, structure and worldwide use of English. Fully updated and expanded, with a fresh redesigned layout, and over sixty audio resources to bring language extracts to life, it covers all aspects of the English language including the history of English, with new pages on Shakespeare's vocabulary and pronunciation, updated statistics on global English use that now cover all countries and the future of English in a post-Brexit Europe, regional and social variations, with fresh insights into the growing cultural identities of 'new Englishes', English in everyday use with new sections on gender identities, forensic studies, and 'big data' in corpus linguistics, and digital developments, including the emergence of new online varieties in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Packed with brand new colour illustrations, photographs, maps, tables and graphs, this new edition is an essential tool for a new generation of twenty-first-century English language enthusiasts.