Comic Practice/comic ResponseThis study focuses on response to comedy. The author maintains we respond rather mindlessly to comic effect. Comedy itself, in the philosophical sense, is seen as play. The play impulse is manifest in numerous forms from theater to painting, the novel to sculpting, poetry to cartooning; and each medium has its own semiotic language. |
Contents
| 11 | |
Operations of the Art of Comedy | 35 |
The Meanings of Comedy | 55 |
Modes of Comedy Meaning | 73 |
Modes of Comedy Perceptual Play | 94 |
ComicSerious SeriousComic | 114 |
HumorComedy Television | 135 |
Contexts Extensions | 153 |
Notes | 169 |
Bibliography | 186 |
Index | 197 |
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Common terms and phrases
action aesthetic audience response awareness Beckett Blazing Saddles Bloom County Boar's Head California Press characters cognitive comic artist comic effect comic response comic values concept conventions creative critical dance deep Drama Elder Olson element embodied emotional dialectic ending episode experience exploration expression Falstaff farce farceur feel fictional film genre happy Henry Henry IV Hotspur humor instance irony joke juxtaposition language laughter lead-in literary London loony Lucrezia Margaret Houlihan meaning medium Menandrine mind mode Monty Python narrative Neil Simon novel Odd Couple Olivia operations Oscar overall parody Pegeen perceptual play Phebe phenomenological play's playful Psychology punch line reader ridicule Robbins satire scene semiotic serious Shakespeare signification sitcom situation comedy slapstick social sponse stage structure subcomedy surface effect symbolic Synge television theater theatrical thematic things tion variety show visual Waiting for Godot Wolfgang Iser women York
Popular passages
Page 126 - Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules, but beware instinct. The lion will 245 not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct.
Page 127 - Harry , I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time , but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on , the faster it grows , so youth , the more it is wasted , the sooner it wears.
Page 117 - It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's or an earl's itself when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips till I'd feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.
Page 30 - The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Page 19 - Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.
Page 30 - And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are Known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar...