Humor

In stark contrast to Blood of a Poet, Horse Feathers is a simple and direct comedy that uses a great combination of both visual and verbal gags to entertain the audience. This film is a great example of how both sight gags and verbal jokes can capitalize off one another. In every scene of the film, there are visual gags, such as when Pinky (Harpo Marx) cuts the cards, when Professor Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) is visiting Connie (Thelma Todd) and keeps leaving the room and returning, and when…

The Effectiveness of “Winter Stars” By Larry Levis The poem “Winter Stars” by Larry Levis starts out depicting a story that a boy is remembering from his child hood. Levis vividly depicts the boy’s father “breaking a man’s hand” (Levis) on a piece of farming equipment because the man named “Rubén Vásquez” (Levis) attempted to kill him with a well described knife. His father then proceeds, with no empathy, to grab some lunch and listen to some music. The boy then contemplated the meaning of life…

Comedic Philosophy: That’s Deep Bro In the podcast, That’s Deep Bro, philosophical questions are explored by the host, Christina Pazsitzky, in her comedic style. She employs personal anecdotes, colloquialisms, and satire to adequately drive her arguments and create an entertaining podcast. At the start of each podcast, Pazsitzky tells a story from her personal life. She uses personal anecdotes to connect her life to the philosophical question she intends to unpack and answer. In “Self Hatred…

I come from a family that has little to nothing. We live by what people would say “paycheck to paycheck.” So we’ve done things that may seem silly or weird to others, but for me, I like to think that it’s something funny to tell in the future. Which is true because now I can make jokes and use some of my mistakes or things like that to make people laugh or to grow from it. My family can be considered somewhat heavy on education; even if we didn’t have much, my parents still told us education is…

Laughter is the best medicine. Making someone laugh is one of the greatest feelings in the world, whenever I make someone laugh it brightens up my day. Brian Regan understands this. Brian Regan is one of the most creative, and confident people I know, and is a huge influence on who I am as a person. Brian Regan has a very unique act. He makes jokes about normally mundane things and makes them seem surreal. You would think that to make a joke about eating Fig Newtons funny, you would have to be…

Nestruck effectively employs humour in his essay “The importance of email punctuation”. His essay shows how each type of punctuation can carry a connotation of either seriousness or cordiality. Unfortunately for Nestruck, it is the former that has caught his attention while reading an email sent to him from a coworker whom he has feelings for. Using hyperbole and metaphors such as “And as she recedes into the distance, I will be left standing there like an ellipsis. Two little bulletholes…

Slapstick comedy in films started around 1915 when the famous Keystone Cops silent movies were made. The silent era saw the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton who starred in some of the more memorable films such as “The Tramp” and “The General”. Slapstick comedy is an extreme form of comedy normally involving forms of physical acts by the actors, such as being poked in the eyes or pulling one around by his ears. In the 1930s slapstick was dominated by “The Three Stooges” and Laurel and…

Living ironically is as problematic as Wampole says. One of Wampole's objections to ironic living is how with this new technological age we create a distance between ourselves and those around us. Wampole has us to question whether we are sincere about our actions or words when we interact with people. "Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use?"(Wampole) I believe most of the…

In Alain de Button’s Status Anxiety, he argues that humorists say things that others refuse to say. Therefore, he ranks humorists as a vital function in society. He could not be more accurate. Humorists make topics enjoyable and easily comprehensible and pave the way for future discussions on sensitive topics. Humorists make controversial topics entertaining. An example of this would be Saturday Night Live’s Cold Opens on the recent Presidential debates. These parodic shorts make bland,…

Someone with a good sense of humour often makes jokes in every occasion. However, some people might find the jokes offensive. Looking at the day two events, the joke “I am stuck with her” was not necessarily intimidating. The preceptor might have wanted to be friendly with the student by making some jokes. According to Brooks and Bitterly (2017), jokes in the workplace can help the worker to be more productive. In another hand, the preceptor should have been more careful when making a joke with…