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.

How to Write Funny

Author: John Kachuba
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
A discussion of the basics and genres of the comic point of view includes essays and interviews with such authors as Dave Barry, Sherman Alexie, and Melissa Bank.

The Circle

Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385351402
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” (Vanity Fair). When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Gypsy Blood

Author: Kristy Cunning
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781097722136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
I'm not all that special, really. Or uncommon. I'm sure there are a lot of girls with old gypsy blood who see the dead, have killer cults hunting their family, and turn into something that gets scary when they panic. Yep. Completely unoriginal, if I do say so myself.Move along. Nothing to see here. Nope. I'm just an ordinary girl.I wish people would believe that.I've been labeled as one thing or another for most of my life:Death Girl.Crazy Gypsy Girl.Gothic Chick.Monster...It took my mother's death for me to finally start getting answers about what's really been going on. Unfortunately, most of the answers come from men...who aren't just men. Somehow, I've gone and landed myself in a world truly filled with monsters, and I'm starting to think this is where I should have been all along.Only...I don't understand what's going on. I'm walking into the middle of a story that's thousands of years old, and I'm the new girl on the block who doesn't have a clue how this world even works. My only guides happen to be the most lethal of the bunch.They decide who lives or dies. They decide who gets stabbed or tortured.Yeah...I've gone and drawn attention to myself, and the ones paying attention are the ones everyone else seems to fear.How do these things always happen to me?**Reverse Harem**Language warning**Sexual content**Dark Humor

Only a Joke Can Save Us

Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135825
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess. After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay. Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.

Comedy and Distinction

Author: Sam Friedman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135009015
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.

Thirty Years that Shook Physics

Author: George Gamow
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486135160
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
Lucid, accessible introduction to the influential theory of energy and matter features careful explanations of Dirac's anti-particles, Bohr's model of the atom, and much more. Numerous drawings. 1966 edition.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character

Author: Richard P. Feynman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393355683
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Book Description
One of the most famous science books of our time, the phenomenal national bestseller that "buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest). Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. In this lively work that “can shatter the stereotype of the stuffy scientist” (Detroit Free Press), Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets—and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature. In his stories, Feynman’s life shines through in all its eccentric glory—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah. Included for this edition is a new introduction by Bill Gates.

Bad Dad Jokes

Author: Willow Creek Press
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781682348338
Category : American wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The dad joke is a delicate thing. Part knowing humor, part lack of humor, it's only requirement is that it elicits not a laugh from its audience but the annoyed response: "Daaaaaaaaad." Bad Dad Jokes is the biggest, baddest collection of "so bad they're actually good" jokes that are guaranteed to deliver a daily dose of groans and giggles. Bad Dad Jokes is a one of a kind collection of extraordinary humor in one book. By giving this collection as a gift you will bring humor and lasting memories to events for years to come.

The Knot Book

Author: Colin Conrad Adams
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821836781
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Knots are familiar objects. Yet the mathematical theory of knots quickly leads to deep results in topology and geometry. This work offers an introduction to this theory, starting with our understanding of knots. It presents the applications of knot theory to modern chemistry, biology and physics.