The Truth (with jokes)

Author: Al Franken
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101213337
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller by Senator Al Franken, author of Giant of the Senate Senator Al Franken’s landmark bestseller, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, was praised as a “bitterly funny assault” (The New York Times) that rang “with the moral clarity of an angel’s trumpet” (The Associated Press). Now, this master of political humor strikes again with a powerful and provocative message for all of us. In these pages, Senator Franken reveals the alarming story of how: • Bush (barely) beat Kerry with his campaign of “fear, smear, and queers,” and then claimed a nonexistent mandate. • “Casino Jack” Abramoff, the Republicans’ nearest and dearest friend, made millions of dollars off of the unspeakable misery of the poor and the powerless. And, also, Native Americans. • The administration successfully implemented its strategy to destroy America’s credibility and goodwill around the world. Complete with new material for this paperback edition, The Truth (with jokes) is more than just entertaining, intelligent, and insightful. It is at once prescient in its analysis of right-wing mendacity and incompetence, and inspiring in its vision of a better tomorrow for all Americans (except Jack Abramoff).

The Truth (with Jokes)

Author: Al Franken
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780786284535
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 584

Book Description
A work of political satire draws on a wide range of resources to expose the mendacity of the Bush administration and its conservative Republican supports.

Lies

Author: Al Franken
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101219440
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller by Senator Al Franken, author of Giant of the Senate Al Franken, one of our “savviest satirists” (People), has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of “slander,” “bias,” and even “treason.” He has examined the GOP's policies of squandering our surplus, ravaging the environment, and alienating the rest of the world. He’s even watched Fox News. A lot. And, in this fair and balanced report, Al bravely and candidly exposes them all for what they are: liars. Lying, lying liars. Al destroys the liberal media bias myth by doing what his targets seem incapable of: getting his facts straight. Using the Right’s own words against them, he takes on the pundits, the politicians, and the issues, in the most talked about book of the year. Timely, provocative, unfailingly honest, and always funny, Lies sticks it to the most right-wing administration in memory, and to the right-wing media hacks who do its bidding.

Truth in Comedy

Author: Charna Halpern
Publisher: Meriwether Publishing
ISBN: 9781566080033
Category : Improvisation (Acting)
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
The 'Harold', an innovative improvisational tool, helped many actors on the road to TV and film stardom, including George Wendt (Norm on Cheers). Now it is described fully in this new book for would-be actors and comics. The 'Harold' is a form of competitive improv involving 6 or 7 players. They take a theme suggestion from the audience and 'free associate' on the theme into a series of rapid-fire one-liners that build into totally unpredictable skits with hilarious results. The 'Harold' is a fun way to 'loosen up' and learn to think quickly, build continuity, develop characterisations and sharpen humour.

Speaking My Mind

Author: Ronald Reagan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743271114
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
The most important speeches of America's "Great Communicator": Here, in his own words, is the record of Ronald Reagan's remarkable political career and historic eight-year presidency.

Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

Author: Jim Holt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393069443
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
“Finally I understand what it is I’ve been laughing at all these years.”—Jimmy Kimmel From the best-selling author of Why Does the World Exist? comes this outrageous, uproarious compendium of absurdity, filth, racy paradox, and gratuitous offensiveness—just the kind of mature philosophical reflection readers have come to expect from the ever-entertaining Jim Holt. Indeed, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This is the first book to trace the evolution of the joke all the way from the standup comics of ancient Athens to the comedy-club Seinfelds of today. After exploring humor’s history in Part One, Holt delves into philosophy in Part Two: Wall Street jokes; jokes about rednecks and atheists, bulimics and politicians; jokes you missed if you didn’t go to a Catholic girls’ school; jokes about logic and existence itself . . . all became fodder for the grand theories of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein in this heady mix of the high and low, of the ribald and profound, from America’s most beloved philosophical pundit.

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Author: Al Franken
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455540439
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 523

Book Description
From Senator Al Franken - #1 bestselling author and beloved SNL alum -- comes the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that. "Flips the classic born-in-a-shack rise to political office tale on its head. I skipped meals to read this book - also unusual - because every page was funny. It made me deliriously happy." -- Louise Erdrich, The New York Times This is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect. It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it. It's a book about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast. In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics. Has Al Franken become a true Giant of the Senate? Franken asks readers to decide for themselves.

Based on a True Story

Author: Norm Macdonald
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812993632
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Driving, wild and hilarious” (The Washington Post), here is the incredible “memoir” of the legendary actor, gambler, raconteur, and Saturday Night Live veteran. When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre “one step below instruction manuals.” Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, “Call it anything you damn like.”

The Importance of Being Funny

Author: Al Gini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442281774
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
When E. B. White said “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; few people are interested and the frog dies,” he hadn’t seen Al Gini’s hilarious, incisive, and informative take on jokes, joke-telling, and the jokers who tell jokes. For Gini, humor is more than just foolish fun: it serves as a safety valve for dealing with reality that gives us the courage to endure that which we cannot understand or avoid. Not everyone tells jokes. Not everyone gets a joke, even a good one. But, Gini argues, joke-telling can act as both a sword and a shield to defend us from reality. As the late, great stand-up comic Joan Rivers put it: ‘If you can laugh at it, you can live with it!’ This book is for anyone who enjoys a good laugh, but also wants to know why.

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.