Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Stand-up Comedy in Africa
African cultural productions of humour have increased even in the face of myriad economic foibles and social upheavals. For instance, from the 1990s, stand-up comedy emerged across the continent and has maintained a pervasive presence since then. Its specificities are related to contemporary economic and political contexts and are also drawn from its pre-colonial history, that of joking forms and relationships, and orality. Izuu Nwankwọ's fascinating collected volume offers a transnational appraisal of this unique art form spanning different nations of the continent and its diasporas. The book engages variously with jokesters, their materials, the mediums of dissemination, and the cultural value(s) and relevance of their stage work, encompassing the form and content of the practice. Its ruling theoretical perspective comes from theatre and performance, cultural studies, linguistics, and literary studies.
Stand-up Comedy, Theology, and Ethics
Bringing together the distinct but connected disciplines of theology and ethics, Stand-up Comedy, Theology, and Ethics adds to the growing field of humor and religion. Beginning by re-considering what we know about jokes and laughter, the authors propose that more attention needs to be paid to the quasi-sacramental, magical quality of jokes and the ways laughter can shift the affective states of an audience. They then turn their attention to key issues and debates within stand-up comedy. First, is the comical legitimacy or illegitimacy of comedians who employ humor ambiguously so that we are not sure at who or what they are “punching”. Second, is the phenomenon of canceling comedians for their behavior off stage. Third, is the sociopolitical possibilities of stand-up. Ultimately, the authors argue that there is theological, religious, and ethical significance to contemporary stand-up comedy.
Sass
Black women comedians are more visible than ever, performing around the world in physical venues like comedy clubs and festivals, along with appearing in films, streaming specials, and online videos. Across these mediums, humor—and particularly sass—functions as a tool for Black women to articulate and redress cultural, social, and political marginalization. J Finley theorizes sass as a new critical lens to better understand the power of Black women's humor and humanity and explores how sass functions as a powerful resource in Black women's expressive repertoire. Challenging mainstream assumptions about "sassiness" as an identity or personality trait to which Black women humorists may be...
Critical Perspectives on Damon Galgut
When Damon Galgut won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Promise in 2021, he was already an established writer. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010 and had been the author of eight novels and four plays, but before the success of The Promise, he remained relatively unknown to the general public outside South Africa. This volume is an attempt to engage an international set of specialists in postcolonial studies, South African literature, and, in several cases, established writers themselves, in a debate devoted entirely to Galgut’s novels. This publication demonstrates that Galgut’s work exceeds what readers tend to expect from post-apartheid white writing. Rather than offering the standard narratives of guilt, despair, and frustration, Galgut’s novels, in dialogue with each other, and in dialogue with cultural and philosophical trends, propose a more intricate fabric. The writer’s diagnosis of the human condition ultimately seems to transcend the constitutive turmoil and the crises, offering a vision of surprisingly and fascinatingly complex reality.
Politicians at Night
Politicians at Night: Interaction and Discourse on the Entertainment-Political Interview studies the exchanges between presidential candidates and talk show hosts on broadcast late-night shows in the United States. Gonen Dori-Hacohen; Eean Grimshaw and Menno H. Reijven use various language and social interaction frameworks, including membership categorization analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and semiotics. They develop a broad understanding of the Entertainment-Political Interview (EPI) and cultural role. They discuss how politicians use pronouns to achieve inclusion and exclusion. Similarly, the authors demonstrate how and why the hosts ask softball questions. Unlike the...
Humor as Social Critique
This interdisciplinary collection by Jennalee Donian and Andrea Hurst brings together insights from various humanities disciplines to examine humor's role in navigating complex political, cultural, and personal landscapes. Humor as Social Critique: Widening the African Perspective explores how humor functions as a powerful tool for social critique in the African context. Part I delves into humor's relationship with political critique, analyzing how comedians, writers, and artists use humor to resist oppressive power structures and foster dialogue. Part II examines humor's potential for socio-cultural critique, exploring how it reflects and shapes cultural norms, identities, and power dynamic...
Taking Comedy Seriously
This book explores stand-up comedy as a relevant sociological phenomenon from a contemporary perspective, as both a symptom of neoliberal capitalism and the locus specificus of socio-political critique in the era of Empire. It draws a feasible connection between the conspicuous rise in the art form’s popularity over the past number of years and the dehumanizing and fracturing processes of the current dispensation that are increasingly becoming the defining experience of life in the contemporary era, and to which, understood in terms of the traditional humor theory of relief (of which Sigmund Freud is key), comedy serves as an obvious palliative. More than this, Taking Comedy Seriously: Sta...
Understanding Laughter and Humor
This book puts forward a revolutionary and comprehensive theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humor we use to inspire it. This new perspective applies an evolutionary and biological lens through which we can fully appreciate these complex, universal human behaviors. It distinguishes itself from all classical and contemporary theories by revealing laughter’s singular message, rather than simply its causes and effects, and makes clear why perceptions of vulnerability and status are ever-present in our conscious and subconscious thoughts. The theory underscores our innate desire to cooperate, our respect for those who compete fairly, and our disdain for those who do not. And it sheds light on the social dynamics governing human interactions, both positive and negative, by recognizing laughter not as a reflexive reaction to a certain class of stimuli, but as a vital form of nonverbal communication—not only for us, but for our great ape cousins as well.
