Slapstick and Comic Performance

Slapstick and Comic Performance PDF

Author: L. Peacock

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-07-03

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1137438975

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Slapstick comedy has a long and lively history from Greek Theatre to the present day. This book explores the ways in which comic pain and comic violence are performed within slapstick to make the audience laugh. It draws examples from theatre, television and film on both sides of the Atlantic.

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion PDF

Author: Ervin Malakaj

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 3110571986

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Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

The Languages of Humor

The Languages of Humor PDF

Author: Arie Sover

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-09-20

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1350062316

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Why are things funny? How has humor changed over the centuries? How can humor be a political force? Featuring expert authors from across the globe, The Languages of Humor discusses three main types of humour: verbal, visual, and physical. Despite the differences between them, all have a common purpose, showing us in different ways the reality that we live in, and how we can reflect on that reality. To this end, the book shows how humor has been used to address such topics as the Holocaust and the Soviet Union, and why it has been controversial in cases including Charlie Hebdo. The Languages of Humor explores a subject that is of interest in a wide range of intellectual disciplines including sociology, psychology, communication, philosophy, history, social sciences, linguistics, computer science, literature, theatre, education, and cultural studies. This volume features contributions from world-leading academics, some of who have professional backgrounds in this field. This unique research-led book, which includes over 20 illustrations, offers a top-down analysis of humor studies.

Funny Dostoevsky

Funny Dostoevsky PDF

Author: Lynn Ellen Patyk

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-05-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13:

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Tapping into the emergence of scholarly comedy studies since the 2000s, this collection brings new perspectives to bear on the Dostoevskian light side. Funny Dostoevksy demonstrates how and why Dostoevsky is one of the most humorous 19th-century authors, even as he plumbs the depths of the human psyche and the darkest facets of European modernity. The authors go beyond the more traditional categories of humor, such as satire, parody, and the carnivalesque, to apply unique lenses to their readings of Dostoevsky. These include cinematic slapstick and the body in Crime and Punishment, the affective turn and hilarious (and deadly) impatience in Demons, and ontological jokes in Notes from Underground and The Idiot. The authors – (coincidentally?) all women, including some of the most established scholars in the field alongside up-and-comers – address gender and the marginalization of comedy, culminating in a chapter on Dostoevsky's "funny and furious" women, and explore the intersections of gender and humor in literary and culture studies. Funny Dostoevksy applies some of the latest findings on humor and laughter to his writing, while comparative chapters bring Dostoevsky's humor into conjunction with other popular works, such as Chaplin's Modern Times and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. Written with a verve and wit that Dostoevsky would appreciate, this boldly original volume illuminates how humor and comedy in his works operate as vehicles of deconstruction, pleasure, play, and transcendence.

Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure

Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure PDF

Author: Sara Jane Bailes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1136932437

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What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail? In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk. Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.

Performance in Popular Culture

Performance in Popular Culture PDF

Author: Sharon Mazer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 100093442X

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Performance in Popular Culture reveals the intricate relationship between performance and popular culture by exploring how theatrical conventions and dramaturgical tropes have informed the way the social is constructed for popular consumption. Staged as a series of case studies, this book considers the diverse ways the social is imagined and produced in live and mediated performances, in images and texts, in interactive experiences and in cultural institutions. By looking at performance in popular culture, the world we live in becomes more visible, open to investigation and (perhaps) to change. Performance in Popular Culture engages a wide range of disciplines and theoretical frameworks: performance, theatre and cultural studies; comparative literature and media studies; gender and sexuality, critical race and post-colonial theories. Designed for accessibility at an undergraduate level, the case studies make use of visual materials, moving images and texts that are readily available to lecturers and students, to scholars and to the general public.

Toward Cinema and Its Double

Toward Cinema and Its Double PDF

Author: Laleen Jayamanne

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780253339829

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Jayamanne brings together her discussions of Australian films, Sri Lankan films, European art films, silent film comedy, contemporary American films and her own films.

Slapstick Comedy

Slapstick Comedy PDF

Author: Tom Paulus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-09

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1135966230

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From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture.

Bas Jan Ader

Bas Jan Ader PDF

Author: Jan Verwoert

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006-05-26

Total Pages: 69

ISBN-13: 1846381282

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An illustrated investigation into the critical motives behind the last, unfinished work that has defined the romantic legacy of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. Ader's considerable influence on later conceptual artists stems from the way in which he used the cool analytic and antisubjective aesthetics of conceptual art to explore experiences that would seem definitively subjective—the emotional intensity of tragedy and the romantic quest for the sublime. In Search of the Miraculous was conceived as a three-part project: a lonely nighttime walk from the hills of Los Angeles down to the sea, documented in photographs; the Atlantic crossing; a night walk through Amsterdam, mirroring the LA photographs.The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader (as a person) with the role of the tragic romantic hero. The cult status of the artist as a hero whose work is authenticated through his death, however, has obscured the fact that Ader's art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be identified with. This book unpicks these ties in Ader's work in order to highlight the specific and unique way in which Ader explores the existential and emotional with an artistic approach that is as conceptual and analytic as it is poetic and personal. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.

La India María

La India María PDF

Author: Seraina Rohrer

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-12-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1477313451

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La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked. Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco's life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films' financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as "la crisis," this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.