The authors embark on a lively and funny journey through the more bizarre activities of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, ranging everywhere from moochers to quacks to shrews to willing suckers.

The U.S. State Departments prestigious Fulbright Scholar Program places American professors in other countries for an extended period to teach and experience other cultures. Never has anyone enjoyed it more or provided such an entertaining insight into the program. Paul Dishman provides a revealing view into Montenegro, the tiny former Communist country struggling to join the world stage. The experience turns into a personal journey as he travels to the land of his grandfather and discovers his own surprising heritage. It is part travelogue, part history, part heartwarming personal journey, and all delightfully droll.

Flying to Heaven to demand an end to war, building Cloudcuckooland in the sky, descending to Hades to retrieve a dead tragedian - such were the cosmic missions on which Aristophanes, the father of comedy, sent his heroes of the classical Athenian stage. The wit, intellectual bravura, political clout and sheer imaginative power of Aristophanes' quest dramas have profoundly influenced humorous literature and satire, but this volume, which originated at an international conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University in 2004, is the first interdisciplinary study of their seminal contribution to the evolution of comic performance. Interdisciplinary essays by specialists in Classics, Theatre, and Modern Literatures trace the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The story encompasses Jonson's satire, Cromwell's Ireland, German classicism, British Imperial India, censorship scandals in France, Greece and South Africa, Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.

An anthology of the first three Diablo novels includes Legacy of Blood, The Black Road, and The Kingdom of Shadow, and is complemented by the original eBook title, Demonsbane, in which a warrior, the sole survivor of a massacre, is driven to avenge his fallen comrades. Original. 35,000 first printing.

Accessible and amusing in style, Humour, Work and Organization explores the critical, subversive and ambivalent character of humour, work and comedy as it relates to organizations and organized work. It examines the various individual, organizational, social and cultural means through which humour is represented, deployed, developed, used and understood. Considering the relationship between humour and organization in a nuanced and radical way and this book takes the view that humour and comedy are pervasive and highly meaningful aspects of human experience. The richness and complexity of this relationship is examined across three related domains. They are: how humour is constructed, enacted and responded to in organizational settings how organizations and work are represented comedically in various types of popular culture media how humour is used in organizations where there is a more explicit relationship between the comedic and work. An exciting and controversial text, Humour, Work and Organization will appeal to students of all levels as well as anyone interested the full complexities of human interactions in the workplace.

Explores comedy's voracious and multifarious dialogue with a large spectrum of literary, sub-literary and paraliterary traditions surrounding and shaping it.

This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.