What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: David Sipress
  • Publisher: HarperCollins
  • ISBN: 0358658667
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 298

From a longtime New Yorker staff cartoonist, an evocative family memoir, a love letter to New York City, and a delightful exploration of the origins of creativity—richly interleaved with the author’s witty, beloved cartoons A wry and brilliantly observed portrait of the budding young cartoonist and his Upper West Side Jewish family in the age of JFK and Sputnik. Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his father, the meticulous, upwardly mobile proprietor of Revere Jewelers, and in the face of the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother. With self-deprecation, wit, and artistry, Sipress paints his hapless place in his indelibly dysfunctional family, from the time he was tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window, to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his journey as a professional cartoonist. In What’s So Funny?—reminiscent of the masterly, humane recall of Roger Angell and the brainy humor of Roz Chast—Sipress's cartoons appear with spot-on precision, inducing delightful Aha moments in answer to the perennial question aimed at cartoonists: Where do you get your ideas?


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Tim Conway
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 1476726515
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 272

Six-time Emmy Award-winning funny man Tim Conway, best known for his roles on The Carol Burnett Show, offers a straight-shooting and hilarious memoir about his life on stage and off as an actor and comedian. In the annals of TV history, few entertainers have captured as many hearts, tickled as many funny bones, and brought as many families together in living rooms across America as Tim Conway. In What’s So Funny? he brings his hilarious hijinks from the screen to the page. Conway’s often-improvised humor, razor-sharp timing, and hilarious characters have made him one of the funniest and most authentic performers to grace the stage and studio. As Carol Burnett has said, “there’s no one funnier” than Tim Conway. Now, Conway takes us on a seventy-year, rags-to-riches journey that is touchingly comical and ultimately inspiring, from his pranks in small Ohio classrooms during the Great Depression to his pitch-perfect performances on national TV and in major motion pictures. Along the way, Conway shares hilarious and often moving accounts of the glory days of The Carol Burnett Show; his famous partnerships with entertainment greats like Harvey Korman, Don Knotts, and Dick Van Dyke; and his friendships with stars like Betty White, Bob Newhart, and, of course, Carol Burnett, who also provides an intimate foreword to the book. As Conway continues to tour the country giving live comedy performances that enchant his always eager audiences, What’s So Funny? brings his warmth, humor, and heart to delight and inspire fans everywhere.


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Murray S. Davis
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780226138107
  • Category : Wit and humor
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 408

Jokes, puns, stories, tales, sketches, and shticks saturate our culture. And today the stuff of comedy is almost inescapable, with all-comedy cable channels and stand-up comics acting as a kind of electronic oracle. We're laughing more often, but "what" are we laughing at? Murray Davis knows. In this inventive book, he uses jokes (good, bad, offensive, and classic) to reveal the truths that comedians deliver. "What's So Funny?" is not about the psychology of humor but about the objects of our laughter the world that comics turn upside down and inside out. It also explores the logic of comedy as a serious, critical assault on just about everything we take for granted. Drawing on a vast array of jokes and the work of dozens of comedians from Jay Leno and Lenny Bruce to Steve Allen and Billy Crystal, Davis reminds us of the extraordinarily subversive power of comedy. When we laugh, we accept the truth of the comic moment: that this is the way life "really" is. The book is in two parts. In the first, Davis explores the cultural conventions that even simple jokes take apart the rules of logic, language, rationality, and meaning. In the second, he looks at the social systems that have been at the root of jokes for centuries: authority figures, power relations, and institutions. Whatever their style, comedians use the tools of the trade ambiguous meanings, missed signals, incongruous characters, unlikely events to violate our expectations about the world. Setting comedy within a rich intellectual tradition from Plato to Freud, Hobbes to Kant, in philosophy as well as sociology Davis makes a convincing case for comedy as a subtle, complex, and articulated theory of culture and society. He reveals the unsuspected ways in which comedy, with its spotlight on the gap between appearance and reality, the ideal and the actual, can be a powerful mode for understanding the world we have made."


What's So Funny About Getting Old

What's So Funny About Getting Old

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  • Author: Ed Fischer
  • Publisher: Running Press Adult
  • ISBN: 147674291X
  • Category : Humor
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 128

One bonus of getting older is that it gives us a great perspective on life ...and that includes plenty of humor! This collection of cartoons, quips, quotes, and insights introduces a new comedy genre: elderhumor. It captures the wry hilarity of our real-life sitcoms. Generational vocabulary gaps, miscommunications, preoccupation with health and comforts, foibles, disguises (for aging), even physical limitations -- all can have their funny sides when we're laughing at ourselves. One bonus of getting older is that it gives us a great perspective on life ...and that includes plenty of humor! This collection of cartoons, quips, quotes, and insights introduces a new comedy genre: elderhumor. It captures the wry hilarity of our real-life sitcoms. Generational vocabulary gaps, miscommunications, preoccupation with health and comforts, foibles, disguises (for aging), even physical limitations -- all can have their funny sides when we're laughing at ourselves. This book, a light-hearted gift for anyone who's 50-plus, is a memoryjogger too. Remember the Katzenjammer Kids? Jack Armstrong? Apple Mary? Check out your friends' ages by their responses to a "Vanishing Words" test (examples: "spider," "broomstick skirt," "running board," "the shag"). If you're still calling the refrigerator an "icebox," it's a giveaway -- you're probably over 60. What's So Funny about Getting Old? is brought to you by a comedy team of two. Ed Fischer is an award-winning cartoonist. Jane Thomas Noland, author of Laugh It Off (what's so funny about trying to lose weight?) is a books editor and a former Minneapolis Star Tribune feature writer. Both have delicious ways of looking at life. Both, like all the rest of us, are getting older. Laughter heals. Laughter helps. Laughter keeps us in shape emotionally and physically. Read this book and try it. You'll be convinced, as these authors are, that there's only one way to grow older -- with a healthy sense of humor!


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Nancy A. Walker
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
  • ISBN: 9780842026888
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 302

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.


Only Joking

Only Joking

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  • Author: Jimmy Carr
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 1440627207
  • Category : Humor
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

Britain’s hottest young comedian presents a seriously funny, up-close look at joking matters—from the social origins of laughter, to the art and craft of humor, to why we can never remember the punch line—featuring over 300 jokes. As the host of the hit game show Distraction (now in its third season on Comedy Central) and one of the premier stand-up acts working today, award-winning comedian Jimmy Carr has won over millions of fans around the world with his trademark rapier wit, laced with "exquisitely economical and perfectly timed one-liners" (The Guardian). For this book he teams up with friend and fellow comedy writer Lucy Greeves to take an in-depth look at where humor comes from and how it works, through exploring its purest form: the joke. Only Joking begins with the mechanism of laughter—how it happens and why even infants do it—then delves into the power of the punch line, exploring the basics of all jokes, from the use of shock and surprise to advanced stand-up techniques such as the "pull-back/reveal." Carr and Greeves go on to explore taboo humor, jokes that bomb, and the psychology of finding something funny. They look into the long-standing connection between politics and humor, and discuss the survival prospects for contentious jokes in the current political climate. Throughout the book they conjure up a supporting cast of colorful joke enthusiasts, from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bruce, and discuss their influence on the jokes we tell today. Surveying across national, ethnic, and gender divides, this rollicking analysis of why joking will always be close to the human heart is an irresistible exploration of humor that makes clear why we need a good laugh now more than ever.


What's So Funny? How to Sharpen Your Sense of Humor

What's So Funny? How to Sharpen Your Sense of Humor

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  • Author: Paul Moran
  • Publisher: Lulu.com
  • ISBN: 1430301147
  • Category : Humor
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 106

The author's goal is to help you learn to think funny every day.


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Lotte Goslar
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 9789057021770
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 198

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Donald E. Westlake
  • Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
  • ISBN: 0446511781
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 301

In what may be the "best Dortmunder yarn yet," Westlake's seasoned but often scoreless crook must take on an impossible crime, one he doesn't want and doesn't believe in -- but a little blackmail goes a long way (Associated Press). All it takes is a few underhanded moves by a tough ex-cop named Eppick to pull Dortmunder into a game he never wanted to play. With no choice, he musters his always-game gang and they set out on a perilous treasure hunt for a long-lost gold and jewel-studded chess set once intended as a birthday gift for the last Romanov czar, which unfortunately reached Russia after that party was over. From the moment Dortmunder reaches for his first pawn, he faces insurmountable odds. The purloined past of this precious set is destined to confound any strategy he finds on the board. Success is not inevitable with John Dortmunder leading the attack, but he's nothing if not persistent, and some gambit or other might just stumble into a winning move.


What's So Funny?

What's So Funny?

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  • Author: Stephen Hoover
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780989746588
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 144

Why do we laugh? How does comedy work? This book examines the theories from philosophers to scientists on why we need to laugh and how we laugh. For the comedy fan or comedy writer, this enjoyable and fast read will fill you in on all of the theories of humor.