Discourse pervades all areas of human activity. Beyond the use of verbal communication, discourse also extends to non-verbal elements such as body language, facial expressions, intonation and laughter. Despite the wide range of studies that examine the structures and nature of political discourse, very few have looked at the ways in which politicians use non-verbal elements and, in particular, laughter as part of their discourse strategies. This study looks at the use of laughter in the German Bundestag by analysing 16,000 observations of laughter taken from the transcripts of 847 plenary sessions spanning four electoral terms. The study finds that laughter can be used by politicians as a non-verbal means of expressing opinion and making a statement without breaking the stringent rules of conduct. The use of laughter in parliament can provide information on party alliances, both current and traditional, as well as the general ‘mood’ of the electoral period. Due to the changing nature of political debates and the increasing rejection of ‘traditional’ means of doing politics, fascinating changes are taking place in the political landscape.:1 Introduction 2 Discourse analysis 2.1 Political discourse analysis 2.2 Parliamentary debates 2.2.1 According to Klein 2.2.2 Parliamentary discourse as monologue, dialogue or trialogue? 2.2.3 Interjections as parliamentary discourse 2.3 Non-verbal communication 3 Humour 3.1 Humour in politics 3.2 The study of humour in politics 4 Background 4.1 The German Bundestag 4.2 Stenographic reports 4.2.1 Written or spoken language? 4.2.2 The difference between Lachen and Heiterkeit 4.3 Electoral term specifics 5 Data 5.1 Hypotheses 5.2 Description of the analysis 6 Results 7 Discussion 7.1 Reflections 7.2 Outlook 8 Conclusion References

This project is researching how a comedy show on insanity could be created and aims to research the subject of madness and the performance of insanity. What is the creative idiot? How can play be an option for understanding the Other? The research is the phenomenology of crazy as the unknown, the stranger and the other.  This research questions the ethics of the performance as well as its aesthetics. How can crazy perform itself in an international performative arts context? The focus is to understand the Other as the unknown as unavailable to reason and therefore impossible to perform as understandable. The object of research is the conflict between reason and its negation as the unknown stranger.  The result of this project is an idea on how to create this performance, as a way of practicing madness in a safe space and enjoy insanity as a way of producing the not yet known, as a way of playing life. / Det här examensarbetet önskar resultera i en idé till en humorföreställning. Det undersöker tematiken kring galenskap och på vilket sätt det går att gestalta den. Undersökningens fokus är vansinnets fenomenologi och möjligheten till dess gestaltning inom internationell scenkonst.  Detta examensarbete undersöker föreställningens förutsättningar både etiskt och estetiskt via teori och praktik. Hur kan galenskapen gestaltas oavsett tid, plats och form? Fokus kommer först och främst att ligga på själva researchfasen i projektet men delar av materialet kan komma att användas i den framtida föreställningen. Resultatet är en idé till en humorföreställning som gestaltar galenskap och dess bakomliggande teorier om humor som en konflikt mellan förnuft och oförnuft.

With podcasts being a fast growing audio-only form of media, an effective way of promoting different podcast shows becomes more and more vital to all the stakeholders concerned, including the podcast creators, the podcast streaming platforms, and the podcast listeners. This thesis investigates the relatively little studied topic of automatic podcast trailer generation, with the purpose of en- hancing the overall visibility and publicity of different podcast contents and gen- erating more user engagement in podcast listening. This thesis takes a hotspot- based approach, by specifically defining the vague concept of “hotspot” and designing different appropriate methods for hotspot detection. Different meth- ods are analyzed and compared, and the best methods are selected. The selected methods are then used to construct an automatic podcast trailer generation sys- tem, which consists of four major components and one schema to coordinate the components. The system can take a random podcast episode audio as input and generate an around 1 minute long trailer for it. This thesis also proposes two human-based podcast trailer evaluation approaches, and the evaluation results show that the proposed system outperforms the baseline with a large margin and achieves promising results in terms of both aesthetics and functionality.

Ce mémoire considère l'évolution des stéréotypes racistes et sexistes qui sont contestés dans trois œuvres littéraires afro-américaines, soit Not Without Laughter de Langston Hughes, The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison et Citizen : An American Lyric de Claudia Rankine. L'analyse de ces livres vise à déterminer comment la double contrainte des femmes noires sous-tend les stéréotypes et préjugés qui sont apparus pendant l'esclavage et qui persistent dans la culture du vingt-et-unième siècle. Ces stéréotypes, tels que la Mammy, la Jezebel ou la femme en colère, ont été créés et maintenus afin de fournir une justification idéologique à la marginalisation et à l'exploitation des femmes noires. De plus, ils ont servi à soutenir les intérêts et objectifs de la société blanche patriarcale telle que manifestée aux États-Unis à travers le temps. Encore aujourd'hui, ces images discriminatoires et non représentatives contribuent à la perpétuation du racisme et du sexisme, et continuent de contrôler le corps, l'esprit, et la sexualité des femmes noires aux États-Unis. À travers une analyse chronologique des œuvres, publiées respectivement en 1930, 1970, et 2014, mon argumentaire postule que les performances de féminité noire étudiées dans chaque roman révèlent un désir de contester et réfuter ces stéréotypes, s'avérant ainsi des actes de résistance et d'autodétermination. Mon approche, éclairée par les théories de l'intersectionnalité et du féminisme noir, étudie la manière dont Hughes, Morrison, et Rankine revisitent, remettent en question, et déconstruisent les stéréotypes raciaux afin de mettre en évidence la multiplicité des identités féminines Afro-Américaines et ainsi, rejeter la fausse perception monolithique des femmes noires. / This thesis investigates the evolution of racist and sexist stereotypes forced onto black women in three African American works: Langston Hughes's Morrison's The Bluest Eye , and Claudia Rankine's Not Without Laughter Citizen: An American Lyric , Toni . The thesis aims to show the pervasiveness of the double bind of African American women that emerged during slavery and that persists in the culture of the twenty-first century as the Mammy, the Jezebel, or the angry black woman, among . Stereotypes, such others, were created and maintained to provide an ideological justification for the marginalization and exploitation of black women, which, in turn, were used to support the interests of the white mainstream and patriarchal society. To this day, these cont rolling images black female body, mind, and sexuality perpetuate racism and regulate the in the United States. Through a chronological analysis of the works, respectively published in 1930, 1970, and 2014, my argumentation posits that the chosen iterations of black womanhood talk back to their racial heritage, a vexed history of misrepresentation and misconception, thereby allowing for new performances and scripts of the black female self to be inscribed in culture. My approach to this thesis, grounded in theorizations related to intersectionality and black feminism, demonstrates that Hughes, Morrison, and Rankine revisit, challenge, and deconstruct racial stereotypes to highlight the multiplicity of African American female identities and, ultimately, reject the monolithic perception of black women.

The intention of this thesis is to identify and analyze the cat woman archetype as a contemporary extension of the transgressive witch archetype, which rampantly appears over the course of cinema history, working as a signifier of a patriarchal society's fear of autonomous and subversive women. The character of Catwoman is the ultimate representation for this archetype on grounds of her visibility, longevity, and ability to return again and again. More importantly, Catwoman and her sisterhood of cat women work against male creators as a means of female empowerment through trickery. Within this thesis, key films of varying genres are drawn from throughout cinema history and analyzed in order to demonstrate the intertextual network of characters that make up the cat woman archetype, and the importance of the Catwoman character in her many forms.

anglicky : Title of the thesis : Humour during the French classes Keywords : Comic, irony, humour, laughter, Henri Bergson, Louis Cazamian, gelotology, gélothérapie, sense of humour, French as a foreign language, school class, word play, joke, riddle, tongue twister, didactical sheet. Abstract : The thesis aims to provide a comprehensive description of possible use of humour in teaching the French language. In the theoretical section, it defines humour as a form of comic, deals with the influence of humour and laughter on health and describes the advantages and difficulties of integrating humour into school teaching. In the practical part, it analyses the humour in French textbooks, proposes a typology of humour in teaching materials and presents finally didactical sheets to teach French at all language levels. These exercises and activities are dedicated to all speech and language skills. They are focused on different themes to captivate the target age category and meet the requirements to be fun for students. The thesis should become aid and inspiration for those teachers, who decide to incorporate humour and laughter in the teaching of French.

Ce travail de recherche vise à présenter une collection de récits traditionnels persans, soit tirés et traduits des ressources indiennes, soit écrits et composés directement en persan dans le sous-continent. Notre attention s'est portée sur les récits en prose qui détiennent plusieurs emprunts de la tradition et la culture indienne, et ceux qui sont enrichis par des éléments narratifs et imaginaires fabuleux. Ces spécificités apparaissent dans de divers aspects : la structure du récit-cadre, les thèmes principaux et les personnages des contes. Les récits indo-persans sélectionnés sont présentés en détail par des informations sur leurs auteurs / traducteurs, la date et le lieu de composition, leurs thématiques, leurs sources originales, les manuscrits disponibles et d'autres références. La recherche actuelle est également un effort pour la pratique et le développement de la perception symbolique dans les récits classiques. Touti-Nâme, choisi comme le corpus de notre étude, nous fournit des scènes sur la vie sociale, les relations intimes et conjugales dans les contextes individuels et sociaux. J’ai examiné les thèmes dominants de la ruse des femmes, du conflit entre le désir et la loi, du rêve et du rire à travers des approches mythiques et symboliques. Le rôle prépondérant des personnages féminins et des perroquets sont étudiés profondément dans les contes. J'ai aussi essayé d'analyser les aspects psychiques des personnages par le biais de l'approche psychanalytique jungienne. Des exemples concrets de l'autorité et des jeux de pouvoir entre les sexes sont donnés dans Touti-Nâme comme spécificité des sociétés traditionnelles patriarcales. / The present research aims to introduce a collection of Persian traditional narratives, either translated from Indian sources, or written and composed directly into Persian language in the sub-continent. Our focus has been on prose narratives which hold multiple specificities borrowed from Indian tradition and culture, and are enriched by fabulous and imaginary narrative elements. Such specificities appear in diverse aspects : the frame structure of the stories, the leading themes and the typical Indian characters. These stories are presented in detail by providing information about their authors / translators, date and place of composition, themes, original sources, available manuscripts and other references.The current research is also an endeavor to practice and develop symbolic perception in classical stories. Touti-Nâme, chosen as our target text, demonstrates social life, conjugal relationships and power-struggle in both individual and social contexts. The dominant themes of women’s guiles and tricks, love and law conflict, dream and laughter have been examined through mythical and symbolic approaches. Women characters and birds such as parrots have gone through profound studies due to their predominant roles within the tales. I have also tried to study psychological aspects of story characters and their role in the events by means of the Jungian psychoanalytical approach. Concrete examples of gender authority and power-games in traditional patriarchal societies have been given in Touti-Nâme.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:34:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Elias Nascimento.pdf: 94720526 bytes, checksum: 5d9e140975a2ba8884c72826cf3db0cb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-04-23 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The objective of this dissertation is the study of the linguistic-discursive strategies of the laughable in Porque Lulu Bergatim não atravessou o Rubicon of José Cândido de Carvalho. The author s work presents dozens of curious stories on the interior of the country. Written in a very characteristic way, the narratives introduce funny personages involved in unusual situations. The author's style is marked, mainly, by the use of the comic exaggeration employed in ironies and metaphors. The present study included the analysis of stories, their connection with the laughter and the brevity inherent to both. In the present work the manifestation of the laughter was analyzed considering the concepts discussed by the philosophers and theoretical from the Antiquity to the current days. In the study it was verified that in the last centuries the comedian was own of the inferior classes, lowered, with addictions and faults. Starting from the century XX the laughter began to have value in the social relationships. In the contemporary theories, the laughter exists to correct habits, to punish behaviors and to punish distracted, and it can be expressed in four ways: in the forms and movements, in the situations, in the words and in the character. The corpus was divided considering these four categories. The analysis of the linguistic-discursive strategies of the laughter detached the polissemic exploration happened in the stories not only by the use of the metaphors and of the ironies, but also by the use of slangs, of alliterations, of hyperboles, of puns, of strange names and of neologisms / O objetivo desta dissertação é estudar as estratégias lingüístico-discursivas do risível em Porque Lulu Bergatim não atravessou o Rubicon de José Cândido de Carvalho. A obra reúne dezenas de contos curiosos sobre o interior do país. Escritas de forma bastante característica, as narrativas apresentam personagens divertidos envolvidos em situações insólitas. O estilo do autor é marcado, principalmente, pelo uso do exagero cômico empregado às ironias e às metáforas. O estudo abrangeu o gênero conto, sua ligação com o riso e o laconismo inerente a ambos. Compreendeu a manifestação do riso a partir de um levantamento histórico que considerou os conceitos discutidos pelos filósofos e teóricos desde a Antiguidade até os dias atuais. Nesse estudo verificou-se que nos séculos passados o cômico era próprio das classes inferiores, rebaixadas, com vícios e falhas. A partir do século XX o riso passou a ter valor nas relações sociais. Nas teorias contemporâneas, o riso existe para corrigir costumes, castigar comportamentos e punir distraídos, e pode se manifestar de quatro maneiras: nas formas e movimentos, nas situações, nas palavras e no caráter. O corpus foi dividido segundo estas quatro categorias. A análise das estratégias lingüístico-discursivas do riso destacou a exploração polissêmica ocorrida nos contos não só pela utilização das metáforas e das ironias, mas também pelo uso de gírias, de aliterações, de hipérboles, de trocadilhos, de nomes estranhos e de neologismos

The doctoral thesis The World of Italian Comic-Realistic Poetry maps in a mostly chronological order the type of Italian poetry that is often referred to as 'giocosa' or 'comico- realistica' - in Czech translation, this best corresponds to 'poezie komicko-realistická'. The principal themes and individual topoi within the genre are analysed one by one, and examples are introduced to demonstrate the propositions related to the existence, characteristics and quality of the genre and the comic contained therein. The introduction is followed by an analysis of comic-realistic poetry of the first period which saw its heyday, namely, the first half of the 14th century, roughly comprising the years 1280- 1340. Following an analysis of sonnets by Rustico di Filippi, who is considered the emblematic founder of the genre in Italy, various topics are gradually analysed such as Bakhtinian reversal in values and seeming protest against the world, poverty and money, woman and anti-stilnovismo in sonnets of a great number of poets of the time, the most typical of them being Cecco Angiolieri. Topics with a more realistic background are also included, religious and political sonnets in particular. The issue of autobiography or pseudo- autobiography in comic-realistic texts is also covered in detail. Based on the...

This dissertation argues that Nella Larsen, Tess Slesinger, and Jane Bowles, in a set of novels published between 1928 and 1943, all deployed laughter—not humor or comedy, but laughter itself—to express a critique of the rigid prescription of female subjectivity. In a historical window of epistemic instability, between the earlier dominance of humanist individualism and the subsequent dominance of humanist universalism, these authors reacted against nominally liberatory political movements, such as first-wave feminism and Black “uplift,” that had not in fact challenged an ideal of the sovereign subject still modeled on the white male Euro-American individual. Their objections anticipated, by several decades, later critiques of the subject that emerged in second-wave feminism and post-structuralist theory. Laughter, as Larsen, Slesinger, and Bowles understood, reckons with difference, and not only identitarian difference: when we laugh, we recognize someone or something as different, other, and differently different, otherly other—not a defined other, but a fresh challenge to discursive taxonomy. Moreover, when we laugh, experiencing a material overthrow of subjective control, we encounter the otherness, the multiplicity, of the self ever different from itself. Laughter thus opens the self to difference, inside and out. But the “subversive” force of the laughter of the oppressed can also be coopted and reabsorbed by a dominant social order. This project takes up Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as a case study in the limits of the “subversive,” before turning to Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943) as exemplars of a more radical laughing objection to the prescription of subjectivity, and to the dualisms that undergird the subject’s construction: self and other, oppression and resistance, mind and body, thought and feeling, depth and surface. The latter novels laugh a “laughter of the middle”: a materially situated, present laughter, living in the in-between spaces of dialectical discourse; a laughter of the here and now, the ever-shifting ground of a self in pieces.