Funny: The Book

Author: David Misch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1557839662
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Funny: The Book is an entertaining look at the art of comedy, from its historical roots to the latest scientific findings, with diversions into the worlds of movies (Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers), television (The Office), prose (Woody Allen, Robert Benchley), theater (The Front Page), jokes and stand-up comedy (Richard Pryor, Steve Martin), as well as personal reminiscences from the author's experiences on such TV programs as Mork and Mindy. With allusions to the not-always-funny Carl Jung, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler, Funny: The Book explores the evolution, theories, principles, and practice of comedy, as well as the psychological, philosophical, and even theological underpinnings of humor, coming to the conclusion that (Spoiler Alert!) Comedy is God.

Finding the Funny Fast: How to Create Quick Humor to Connect with Clients, Coworkers and Crowds

Author: Jan McInnis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984099900
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
If you've ever thought about using humor in a speech, sales letter or even casual conversation but stopped because you had no idea where to start looking for the funny or were overwhelmed by the thought of spending hours crafting a joke, then this book is for you! Jan steps you through the ways she writes humor fast for herself and her clients. Humor is the best way to make your communications memorable, connect with employees and coworkers immediately, keep people interested in what you have to say, sell a product or service and diffuse tense situations. Become more effective with everyone you're communicating with by using humor now!

Finding Your Funny

Author: Jr. Don Barnhart
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781518819452
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Finding Your Funny is the new book by award-winning comedian, comedy coach and filmmaker Don Barnhart that explores the Art, Science and Business of Stand Up Comedy. With a humorous and heartfelt forward by Comedy Legend George Wallace, Finding Your Funny goes beyond Barnhart's own journey and shares the brutal, often overlooked experience and advice of other comedians, entertainers, managers, agents and bookers. The book includes a no holds barred assessment about what clubs, venues and agents are really looking for as well as many of the things you need to do and avoid if you're looking into making comedy a career. With over 25 yeas of road experience as a comedian, comedy coach and booker, Don Barnhart's book offers great for the open mic comic, professional comedian and comedy fan. It includes personal tragedies, anecdotes and stories one can only get from living a life on the road. Barnhart, who founded The Las Vegas Comedy Institute where he teaches stand up, improv and comedy writing was inspired to write the book after the success of the documentary on his stand up comedy class, Finding The Funny directed by John Bizarre. "The book, Finding Your Funny began as an outline for my comedy class," said Barnhart in a recent phone interview where was performing overseas for the troops with his Battle Comics World Tour. Some of the topics covered in Finding Your Funny are: Can You Teach Funny?, The 'High' Cost of Fame, Getting Booked, Hurdles and Pitfalls, The Truth About Managers, Agents and Other Oddities, The Joke Police and When To Throw In The Towel. Barnhart added, "I tried to answer all the questions I wish I had when I was first starting out. I wanted to give a variety of opinions as there is no one, hard set rule but there are some guidelines to success."

Fast Funny Women

Author: Gina Barrraca
Publisher: Woodhall Press
ISBN: 9781949116205
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
FAST FUNNY WOMEN is a broad collection: 75 women writers, ages 20 to 89, were invited by editor Gina Barreca to make a party out of their life's most unnerving, challenging, illuminating, desperate, and hilarious moments. Political campaigners, devoted teachers, lousy daughters, good mothers, would-be nuns, admired sportswriters, grad-school-wanna-bes, revenge-driven sisters, frustrated roommates, body-fluid-sorting professionals, lace-loving fashion mavens, intrepid daters, hungry lovers, justice-seeking nasty-women, ACE wedding celebrants, trapped wives, and women with all kinds of ammunition tell their stories-- and their stories are all under 750 words. You know many of these brilliant women, but you've never heard them like this: with new works commissioned for the book from NYT Bestseller and member of the American Academy of Poets, Marge Piercy, Pulitzer-Prize winner Jane Smiley, NYT bestseller graphic artist Mimi Pond, New Yorker staff cartoonist Liza Donnelly, Commander of the British Empire Fay Weldon, bestselling author of "Love, Loss, and What I Wore" Ilene Beckerman, "Sylvia" creator Nicole Hollander, stand-up comics Lisa Landry and Leighann Lord, filmmakers Ferne Pear

My Planet

Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1621450724
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
From acclaimed, New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach comes the complete collection of her “My Planet” articles published in Reader’s Digest. She was a hit columnist in the magazine, and this book features the articles she wrote in that time. Insightful and hilarious, Mary explores the ins and outs of the modern world: marriage, friends, family, food, technology, customer service, dental floss, and ants—she leaves no element of the American experience unchecked for its inherent paradoxes, pleasures, and foibles. On Cleanliness: Ed has crud vision, and I don’t. I don’t notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually see bacteria. . . . He confessed he didn’t like me using his bathrobe because I’d wear it while sitting on the toilet. “It’s not like it goes in the water,” I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn’t strictly true. On the Internet: The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation. While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’” “Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.” On Fashion: My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I’m exhibiting continental drift in reverse. On Eating Healthy: So Ed and I were eating a lot of vegetables. Vegetables on pasta, vegetables on rice. This was extremely healthy, until you got to the part where Ed and I are found in the kitchen at 10 p.m., feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough.

The Accidental Diary of B.U.G.

Author: Jen Carney
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241455456
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Meet Billie Upton Green and her VERY accidental diary - and don't you DARE call her B.U.G! Billie has taken the new girl at school under her wing. She'll teach her the important stuff - Biscuit Laws, Mrs Patterson and of course where to sneakily eat a Jaffa Cake. She might even get invited to the EVENT OF THE YEAR (Billie's mums' are getting married). But then suspicion sets in. The new girl seems VERY close to Billie's best friend Layla. And she knows a LOT about the big school heist - the theft of Mrs Robinson's purse. But, Billie is on to her. Well, as long as Patrick doesn't catch her eating biscuits first. Join Billie in this laugh-out-loud adventure! A sparky, funny new series perfect for fans of Diary of A Wimpy Kid - Daily Mail Jen Carney knows how to make kids laugh . . . and I mean totally unreserved roll-on-the-floor belly laugh. Billie Upton Green is a firm favourite in our house - Emma Mylrea, author of Curse of the Dearmad

Build to Laugh

Author: Cherie Kerr
Publisher: ExecuProv Press
ISBN: 9780964888227
Category : Comedy
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description

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.”

Planet Funny

Author: Ken Jennings
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501100602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes. Where once society’s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness. Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials—those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day—and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV. In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

Do You Talk Funny?

Author: David Nihill
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1942952287
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Public speaking can be terrifying. For David Nihill, the idea of standing in front of an audience was scarier than cliff jumping into a thorny pit of spiders and mothers-in-law. Without a parachute or advanced weaponry. Something had to change. In what doesn't sound like the best plan ever, David decided to overcome his fears by pretending to be an accomplished comedian called "Irish Dave" for one full year, crashing as many comedy clubs, festivals, and shows as possible. One part of the plan was at least logical: he was already Irish and already called Dave. In one year, David went from being deathly afraid of public speaking to hosting a business conference, regularly performing stand-up comedy and winning storytelling competitions in front of packed houses. And he did it by learning from some of the best public speakers in the world: stand-up comedians. Do You Talk Funny?: 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker shows how the key principles of stand-up comedy can be applied to your speaking engagements and presentations to make you funnier, more interesting, and better looking. (Or at least two of the three.) Whether you are preparing for a business presentation, giving a wedding toast, defending your thesis, raising money from investors, or simply want to take on something you're afraid of, this book will take you from sweaty to stage-ready. You'll learn how to: - Craft a story and content that your audience will want to listen to - Find the funniest parts of your material and how to get to them faster - Deal with stage fright - Master the two most important parts of your performance: timing and delivery Ten percent of the author's proceeds from this book will go to Arash Bayatmakou via Help Hope Live until he is fully back on his feet and thereafter to one of the many facing the same challenges after suffering a severe spinal cord injury.