Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Humor

After a multi-decade career of stimulating readers to appreciate and laugh at the glories and oddities of our English language, beloved language maven Richard Lederer has collected his very best and most popular pieces in Word Wizard. In this career-capping anthology the reader will find essays that enlighten, inspire, and tickle the funny bone.

From his hilarious bloopers to his hymns of praise to the English language, these essays are the brightest gems of a storied career. Word Wizard includes a new introduction, prefaces for each essay, sprightly verse, and material...

The Linguistics of Laughter examines what speakers try to achieve by producing 'laughter-talk' (the talk preceding and eliciting an episode of laughter) and, by using abundant examples from language corpora, what hearers are signalling when they produce laughter.

In particular, Alan Partington focuses on the tactical use of laughter-talk to achieve specific rhetorical, and strategic, ends: for example, to construct an identity, to make an argumentative point, to threaten someone else's face or save one's own. Although laughter and humour are by no means always related, the...

Drawing from literally thousands of his countless private journals and personal scribblings, author Sir Gentleman Brock LaBorde, Esquire, this century's self-proclaimed Master of Social Etiquette, painstakingly outlines his complex and erroneous guidelines for the impossible attainment of the ambiguous title of "gentleman."

Impolitely...

With these stirring words, Rover Khayyam, the barking bard of Philadelphia, commences his spellbinding masterpiece, a canine counterpart to the well-known "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." In seventy-five carefully crafted stanzas, Rover creates an indelible impression of what it means to be a dog and a mortal being. Translated from the original Dalmatian and insightfully annotated by Edward FitzHound, Rover's "Rubaiyat" is destined to be an instant classic to be cherished by anyone who is a dog or loves...

'He has no skin, only blood.He wants to bleed for everybody."

If the smell of the stable repels you;
If you don't like trouble;
If conflicted attitudes toward God and the Bible bother you;
Stay away from this book.

If you prefer writers who keep their skin on;
If you're not into vengeance, parody, or satire;
If you can't laugh uproariously at others and yourself;
You're probably not reading Richler.

But if Richler is your kind of writer and you want to know more about why and how he writes;
If you're...

The phenomenal success of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is now legendary, a story that has long beckoned a deeper exploration into the life, imagination, and demise of the writer responsible for one of American literature's most memorable characters -- Ignatius J. Reilly. In Ignatius Rising, Ren? Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy present the first biography of Toole, drawing upon scores of interviews with contemporaries of the writer and acquaintances of his influencing mother, Thelma, as well as unpublished letters, documents, and photographs. Frank...

The end of the Cold War brought new opportunities to explore the long tradition and myriad uses of humour through over two centuries of Russian literature and culture. 'Reflective Laughter' is the first book devoted to an overview of this subject. Bringing together contributions from a number of distinguished scholars from Russia, Europe and North America, this volume ranges from the classics of nineteenth-century literature through to the intellectual and popular comedic culture, both state-sponsored and official, of the twentieth-century, taking in journalism, propaganda, scholarly...

Der junge Gerichtsreferendar Carl Schmitt veroffentlichte im Jahre 1913 unter
dem Pseudonym "Johannes Negelinus" in einem Straburger Verlag die "Schattenrisse." Sie enthalten zwolf Kurzportraits, die in teilweise ironisch-polemischer Zuspitzung, meist aber in absichtsvoll banaler Wiedergabe mit Literatur, Wissenschaft und Politik der Jahrhundertwende ins Gericht gehen. Die im "Borsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels" als Reiselekture empfohlene, jedoch bis heute nahezu unbeachtet gebliebene Schrift existiert nur in wenigen Exemplaren und wird mit dem vorliegenden Band wieder zuganglich...

When humorist Sarah Schmelling transformed Hamlet into a Facebook news feed on McSweeney's, it launched the next big humor trend--Facebook lit. In this world, the king -pokes- the queen, Hamlet becomes a fan of daggers, and Ophelia renounces her interest in moody princes. Now, what began as an internet phenomenon is a book. Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook is a clever spoof of the most-trafficked social networking website and a playful game of literary who's...