That Reminds Me: Finding the Funny in a Serious World

Author: Michael Close
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1435706463
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Michael Close is an inveterate joke teller whose stories have brought gales of laughter from audiences around the world. For more than twenty years, Michael's friends and colleagues have eagerly awaited a collection of jokes from his enormous repertoire. "That Reminds Me" is that compilation - more than 250 of the best clean (and not so clean) jokes you've ever read. But this is much more than a joke book. Michael shares heartfelt reminiscences of the funny people who have enriched his life, stories of crazy personal experiences, and thoughts on the importance of "finding the funny" in your own life. This is the perfect book for anyone who needs a good laugh. Foreword by Penn Jillette [The jokes in this collection range from squeaky clean to R-rated. Words that you can't use on network television appear occasionally. If such language offends you, please don't purchase this book.]

Only Joking

Author: Jimmy Carr
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440627207
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
Britain’s hottest young comedian presents a seriously funny, up-close look at joking matters—from the social origins of laughter, to the art and craft of humor, to why we can never remember the punch line—featuring over 300 jokes. As the host of the hit game show Distraction (now in its third season on Comedy Central) and one of the premier stand-up acts working today, award-winning comedian Jimmy Carr has won over millions of fans around the world with his trademark rapier wit, laced with "exquisitely economical and perfectly timed one-liners" (The Guardian). For this book he teams up with friend and fellow comedy writer Lucy Greeves to take an in-depth look at where humor comes from and how it works, through exploring its purest form: the joke. Only Joking begins with the mechanism of laughter—how it happens and why even infants do it—then delves into the power of the punch line, exploring the basics of all jokes, from the use of shock and surprise to advanced stand-up techniques such as the "pull-back/reveal." Carr and Greeves go on to explore taboo humor, jokes that bomb, and the psychology of finding something funny. They look into the long-standing connection between politics and humor, and discuss the survival prospects for contentious jokes in the current political climate. Throughout the book they conjure up a supporting cast of colorful joke enthusiasts, from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bruce, and discuss their influence on the jokes we tell today. Surveying across national, ethnic, and gender divides, this rollicking analysis of why joking will always be close to the human heart is an irresistible exploration of humor that makes clear why we need a good laugh now more than ever.

F My Life

Author: Maxime Valette
Publisher: Villard
ISBN: 0345520114
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Today, my boss fired me via text message. I don’t have a text messaging plan. I paid 25 cents to get fired. Your girlfriend dumped you, your car broke down, your boss passed you up for the big promotion. Life’s not fair, but there is one sure-fire way to ease your pain–laughing at someone else who had an even worse day than you did. Enter the devastatingly funny world of F My Life, where calamity is comedy. Covering every disastrous pratfall in love, work, family-life, and more, F My Life proffers other people’s ruinous, real-life happenings to brighten your gloomiest day: someone getting dumped through a greeting card, ignored at their birthday party, or insulted by their own grandmother. Spanning everything from ironic twists of fate to down-right shameful moments, F My Life’s squirm-inducing stories are schadenfreude at its finest. So today, take solace in knowing that at least you’re not that guy. There now, don’t you feel better? Today, my boyfriend broke up with me. I cried and told him that I loved him. He gave me a quarter and told me to call someone who cared. I threw the quarter in his face and ran. I waited for the bus, but when I got on, I realized I was 25 cents short of the fare. I walked home in the rain. Today, my mom walked in on me looking at a 1978 Playboy. She asked if I found it in the basement. I said yes. Then I realized she was the centerfold. Today, I got in line at the grocery store. The woman in front of me looked right at me, turned to her friend, and said “That reminds me, I forgot to get acne cream.”

Shtick to Business

Author: Peter McGraw
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
ISBN: 9781544508078
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
What do comedians know about killing it in business? Just ask a behavioral economist who teaches MBAs by day and decodes comedy by night. Dr. Peter McGraw--a business school professor, professional speaker, and founder of the Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL)--translates the genius and madness of the world's funniest people into powerful prescriptions for professional success. Drawing on cutting-edge research, case studies, and his own comedy successes (and failures), Peter reveals surprising business lessons from the masters of comedy: What Bill Murray and Groucho Marx know about career management. Why Dave Chappelle and Joan Rivers are a blueprint for brand building. What Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can teach you about leadership and teamwork. How Jerry Seinfeld's daily rituals made him the wealthiest comic alive. The insights in Shtick to Business will help you improve innovation and outsmart the competition. You'll build new skills--enhanced creativity, better decision-making, and a marketing mindset--to launch a business, tackle tough management problems, and build a serious career. And you'll never have to tell a joke.

A Confederacy of Dunces

Author: John Kennedy Toole
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802197620
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Is This Anything?

Author: Jerry Seinfeld
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982112743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
The first book in twenty-five years from “one of our great comic minds” (The Washington Post) features Seinfeld’s best work across five decades in comedy. Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a twenty-one-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.” For this book, Jerry Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. In this “trove of laugh-out-loud one-liners” (Associated Press), you will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.

Poking a Dead Frog

Author: Mike Sacks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123785
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR Amy Poehler, Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, George Saunders, Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, and many more take us deep inside the mysterious world of comedy in this fascinating, laugh-out-loud-funny book. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories—from a day in the writers’ room at The Onion to why a sketch does or doesn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live to how the BBC nearly erased the entire first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—Poking a Dead Frog is a must-read for comedy buffs, writers and pop culture junkies alike.

We'll Laugh About This (Someday)

Author: Anna Lind Thomas
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1400221978
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
A hilarious argument in favor of taking life a smidge less seriously Popular humor writer Anna Lind Thomas had an epiphany after her essay about a humiliating fart went mega-viral: Everything’s funny . . .eventually. You’ll cry-laugh your way through the many grave offenses she’s endured, like not getting credit for Lady Gaga’s career, an epic financial crisis, and exercising while her children dole out biting critiques about her dimpled thighs. Anna’s wit, charm, and painful relatability will encourage you to remember that your most humiliating moment may be the best thing to ever happen to you—or at the very least, it’ll make for a really good story. “A hilarious, heartwarming trip.” —Bunmi Laditan, bestselling author of Confessions of a Domestic Failure and humorist behind The Honest Toddler “I couldn’t put this down.” —Tiffany Jenkins, bestselling author of High Achiever and humorist behind Juggling the Jenkins “Deep, bowel-loosening laughs, along with a side dish of humanity and understanding.” —Johanna Stein, author of How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane and award-winning television writer and producer “Full of humor and heart.” —Cindy Chupack, New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-winning writer/producer of Sex and the City, Modern Family, Otherhood, and more

Inside Jokes

Author: Matthew M. Hurley
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026201582X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Life Is Funny

Author: E. R. Frank
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 148143165X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
E. R. Frank’s seminal first novel weaves together the stories of eleven teenagers in one city over seven years in this groundbreaking and “impressive debut” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Why does Gingerbread always have a smile on his face? “Because life is funny,” he tells Keisha. But for her—and almost everyone else in her Brooklyn neighborhood—there doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about. China, Ebony, and Grace are best friends, but Grace’s mother isn’t crazy about her being friends with two girls who aren’t white, and each cut Ebony makes on her wrist seems to drive them even further apart. Just across the schoolyard there’s Eric who has to raise his younger brother Mickey, even though no one expects him to amount to anything. Meanwhile, Sonia’s Muslim parents expect everything of her, and it may be more than she is able to give after she suffers a shattering loss. When Drew brings his father’s Jaguar into Sam’s family’s auto body shop across town they seem to be from opposite sides of the tracks, but Drew’s the one hiding a dark family secret. And he’s not the only one.