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.]

It's Kind of a Funny Story

Author: Ned Vizzini
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
ISBN: 1423141083
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.