Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Comedy

The Importance of Being Earnest is both Oscar Wilde's most important and funniest play. As the subtitle suggests there is more to this play than it's farcical nature suggests. Wilde calls into question the nature of identity while poking fun at proper British manners and the aristocracy. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

Bestselling author Roy Blount Jr. tells the story of theclassic Marx Brothers wartime satire Duck Soup. As always, Blount isinformed yet informal, tongue-in-cheek yet tempered, providing the perfectvoice to recount the irreverent antics of Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. Readers of HarpoSpeaks, The Essential Groucho, and Monkey Business and fans of Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera and the Marx Brothers' other timelesscomedies--as well as all fans of Blount's witty and insightful books like Alphabet Juice and Feet on the...

The Importance of Being Earnest is both Oscar Wilde's most important and funniest play. As the subtitle suggests there is more to this play than its farcical nature suggests. Wilde calls into question the nature of identity while poking fun at proper British manners and the aristocracy. Even after one hundred years, The Importance of Being Earnest continues to be the standard by which all other farces are judged. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have attracted much interest in recent years from popular audiences as well as scholars in various disciplines. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been named on Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the issues engendered by the popularity of entertainment news, including the role of satire in politics, the declining level of trust in traditional sources of media, the shows' cathartic or informational function, and the ways in which these shows...

Comedy

Characters: 3 or 6 males, 2 females

Scenery: Various simple settings

Kate and Dave meet at their mutual friend's Tupperware party. There follows a disastrous first date, a mini-break in the Lake District, a drunken misunderstanding and Dave finds himself somehow engaged to Kate. A funny and insightful play.

Fate? Or "a series of accidents"? In love? Or "in synch"? This funny, insightful play explores the opposing reactions of men and women when romance comes their way. Never mind its course running smooth, how do they know if it's true love in the first place?

Comedy with music

Alan Ayckbourn, Music by John Pattison

Characters: 5 males, 3 females

Scenery: Exterior

The reigning king of English comedy strikes off in a new direction with this gleeful fantasy. A couple is preparing for an al fresco party while their hapless ex son in law is holed up in their summer house, drinking off his divorce while he completes illustrations for a new edition of Beauty and the Beast. When he conjures Belle to life and she appears in the garden unable to understand English unless it is sung, her fantastical presence wreaks havoc with the all too real...

Genre: Short comedies

Characters: Various males and females, extras

Includes: Trapped, Oedocles, King of Thebes, Pride at Southhanger Park by Rupert Bean, and Cinderella.

While assimilating theoretical insights from Aristotle to the present day, the wholly original approach to the study of comedy contests the theory of comedy s ritual origin; challenges the age-old and continuing attempts to determine the structure of action that characterizes comedy; and suggests instead that structures of action are shared by all genres, and that it is the specific mood that accounts for their differences. Author Eli Rozik questions the traditional semiotic view that all meaning is in the text, and suggests that, in generating comedic meaning, the spectator s contribution...

Genre: Farce

Characters: 4 males and 3 females or 3 males and 4 females

Scenery: Interior

Jeremy and Celia return a week early from their unsuccessful honeymoon to find that both Jeremy's partners have accepted his offer to stay in his house while he is away. The only problem is that they have each brought the other's wife with them. Jeremy discovers one illicit couple, Celia the other. Both issue invitations to them for dinner. Complications pile up thick and fast as, realizing their dilemma and desperate to make a good impression on Jeremy's colleagues, the couple stages two...

Classic comedy routines and individual gags have been around for literally hundreds of years; the best of these ribticklers making their merry way through theater, circus, film and television. The challenge to comedians has always been to adapt familiar material in a way that emphasizes their personal perspective, style and approach. The many routines and gags cited in this illustrated history are lovingly deconstructed to demonstrate the manner in which they have been modified to suit different eras and different performers.

The first study of pioneering TV comedian Ernie Kovacs and his influence on later shows, ranging from Laugh-In to Letterman.

Genre: Farce

Characters: 2 males, 4 females plus 1 optional male

Scenery: 1 set

This fast paced, fun filled farce by two masters of the genre enjoyed a successful run at London's Strand Theatre, starring David Jason as the hapless Fisher. Peter Fisher is the manager of the West Berlin office of a British car company, where selling British cars is like selling pork chops at a bar mitzvah He is also an undercover agent for British Security of Industry, a role for which he is singularly ill-equipped. With his wife Monica due to fly home to England for a short break, Fisher is...

Genre: Comedy

Characters: 2 males, 4 females

Scenery: Interior

Following his wife's recent death Gerald hopes to spend the rest of his days alone with his memories. But he reckons without his late wife's "forward planning," which results in a series of unexpected events occurring that Gerald had not anticipated. With the help of his daughter and son-in-law, Gerald strives to maintain his independence and keep unexpected visitors at bay. But the recalling of memories revives events from the past that are both funny and sad. From the author of Bedside Manners.

Genre: Comic Drama

Characters: 4 male, 6 females

Scenery: Interior

Unmarried sisters in their fifties share a London flat. Nina is brisk, dynamic and gainfully employed. Nancy is plump, self-conscious and suddenly redundant. Urged to find a hobby, she unwittingly stumbles into a job modeling for eccentric drawing students and their philandering teacher. Initially horrified to discover that life models pose naked, Nancy is unexpectedly liberated by the experience. Though she keeps this activity a secret, her newfound confidence unsettles Nina. The sisters move toward an inevitable...

Genre: Comedy

Characters: 4 males, 4 females

Scenery: Combined interior and exterior

Jane and Andrew's pleasant country house is accident prone. Six people have already died there in unfortunate and embarrassing accidents. When daughter Sally's young man Geoff arrives for the weekend unaware of the house's reputation, he mistakenly deduces from conversational confusion that the deaths were due to sinister circumstances. A body is discovered in the cupboard and a visiting vicar passes peacefully away in the garden just as Geoff's parents call unexpectedly. Jane and her...

How does comedy in film attempt cultural criticism? How does cinema use its own visual technology to reflect on and critique its power within both politics and visual culture?
Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film addresses these questions in detail as it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means of staging cultural criticism. Focusing on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture that cinema helped to generate, foster and question in the twentieth century, it examines the issues of technology that allow film comedies to engage in self-reflexive cultural...

Well, it took along time to write, I hope you think it's worth it. What's it about? A good question, I wish I knew. You could read it to find out. Basically it's about my career in show business as a thespian. Well, they can't touch you for it. I come from a working class family who had no roots in show business. My interest began at an early age. My father often took me to our local theatre where we would sit in the Gallery to see the shows. I just loved it and wanted to be part of it. But how to do it, that was the question. When at first you don't succeed, pack it in. Not me, I ignored...

A collection of comics from the first year of the comic strip "Whomp ." Ranging from inconveniences to pure survival, the lives of the various characters are now splayed in book form for your amusement.

500 a line is a poetry book. The title of the book is a tongue-in-cheek response to the pressure of wining a 5000 writing commission from Shape (disability arts) as part of the Cultural Olympiad. The original ten-line poem 'Comfortably' was the starting point of the work. Liz performed the final piece at the Southbank in July 2009 as part of the London Literature Festival. The poems are about her experiences from winning the commission to its performance one year later. Themes of the work include her job as a therapist, being in therapy, relationships, separation, bereavement and having...