Funny Peculiar : Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor

ISBN-13: 9780881634044 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 174 str.

Mikita Brottman

Opis

Why are jokes funny? Why do we laugh? In Funny Peculiar, Mikita Brottman demurs from recent scholarship that takes laughter - and the broader domain of humor and the comical - as a liberating social force and an endearing aspect of self-expression. For Brottman, there is nothing funny about laughter, which is less connected to mirth and feelings of good will than to a nexus of darker emotions: fear, aggression, shame, anxiety. Brottman rethinks not only the mechanisms of humor but the relation of humor to the body and the senses. To this end, she provides an engrossing account of the life and work of Gershon Legman, exiled author, publisher, and sexologist, Alfred Kinsey's first bibliographer, and legendary compiler of the dirty joke. Like Freud, Legman was convinced of the impossibility of understanding humor apart from sex, and Brottman shows how his two massive works on the subject, Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter, provide a framework for understanding the ambivalent and often hostile impulses that underlie the comic impulse in its various guises. In lively and enlivening chapters, she traverses dirty jokes, the figure of the evil clown in popular culture, t

Spis treści

Introduction. Legitimizing Legman. Against Jokes. Against Laughter. Against Clowns. Against Stand-Up. Against Humor Therapy. Afterword: Risus Sardonicus.

O autorze

Mikita Brottman, Ph.D., who earned her doctorate at Oxford University, is Professor of Language and Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a candidate at the Washington Square Institute for Psychotherapy and Mental Health (NYC).  She writes regularly for mainstream and alernative publications and is the author of three books on the horror film.