Malgré l’inversion de la signification du cynisme, ses deux acceptions principalesconservent de troublantes similitudes. Tout cynisme se montre : il s’exhibe par le dénuementexemplaire des ascètes comme par les possessions des parvenus. Le cynisme est doncontologiquement théâtral. Par son association à la dérision des valeurs ou à celle de leurabsence, il se rapproche plus spécifiquement de la comédie. Cynisme et comédie ont unemême ambivalence en partage.La relation des dramaturges à l’utile dulci s’est rarement révélée aussi complexe etévolutive qu’entre 1685 et 1750. Leurs postures par rapport à la place du rire et de la moraleau théâtre influent sur leurs manières de représenter le cynisme et l’amoralité. Mais leurappréciation des arcanes des subversions morale et amorale détermine réciproquement lapoétique de leurs comédies.Dancourt, Lesage, Regnard et autres joyeux drilles couvrent de leurs sarcasmes uneamoralité collective qu’ils dédaignent de corriger. En réaction à leurs provocations, leurscenseurs ligués dénoncèrent la corruption du théâtre et entreprirent sa réforme. La comédie setransforme notamment en chaire publique, grâce à l’action de Destouches qui substitue lamoralisation au rire. C’est en moralistes que Dufresny et Marivaux envisagent, en revanche,la genèse, les causes et les implications des travers moraux. Ils découvrent que, au siècle desLumières, les ténèbres prévalent : le Mal gangrène société, individus et langage. Sublimantleur pessimisme, leur désir d’y remédier les incite alors à évaluer, avec Delisle, la possibilitéde restaurer le cynisme antique pour réenchanter leur monde / Inspite of the inversion of the meaning of cynicism, its two variants do preserve somedisquieting affinities. All cynicism must make itself visible: it exhibits itself in the ascetic’soustanding privation as much as in the parvenu’s gallery of possessions. Cynicism is thenontologically theatrical. Through its association with the mocking of values or with theirabsence, it shares closer ties with comedy. Both partake of the same ambivalence.The dramatists’ relationship to the utile dulci has rarely shown itself to be a complex andevolving as in the period between 1685 and 1750. Their stances in connection with the placeof laughter and morality in theatre bears strongly on the way cynicism and amorality arerepresented. Yet, their appreciation of the well-guarded secrets of subversions, wether moralor amoral, determines in turn their own comic poetics.Dancourt, Lesage, Regnard and other wanton libertines screen with their sarcasm acollective amorality they are loath to redress. In response to their provocations, their consorsunited to denounce the theatre’s corruption and brace up for reform. Comedy, steps then intothe pulpit owing to Destouche’s contribution substituting moralization for laughter. It is asmoralists, however, that Dufresny and Marivaux conceive the genesis, causes, andimplications of moral defects. They came to realize that in the Age of Enlightenment,darkness still prevailed: Evil corrupt society, the individual and language. The call forredemption, with the sublimation of pessimism it breeds steers them forth to evaluate, alongwith Delisle, the possibility of restoring classical cynicism in the aim of bringing enchantmentback to their worlds

The subject of this degree paper is the comedies of Angelo Beolco. The introductory part is focused mainly at the life and work of Angelo Beolco. Following this there is an introduction to the comedy genre in 16th century in Italy and the characteristics of erudite comedy, its authors and the change from the erudite comedy to the comedy dell'arte. A further part is given over to an analysis of his comedies La Pastoral (Pastoral), Il Reduce (Returnee) - Primo dialogo: Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnú de campo (First dialogue: What said Ruzante when he came back from the battlefield) and Secondo dialogo: Bilora (Second dialogue: Bilora).

This document gives an account of my artistic efforts in creating my thesis film Fathers and Sons. This document includes sections that cover the writing, casting, production design, principal photography, and editing of my film. I give special attention to the writing process in Chapter 2, because of its personal significance to my growth as a filmmaker. This chapter details the evolution of my original story concept from a drama to a comedy. The ultimate goal of my film was to create a personal work of art. This document self-reflects on how well I was able to achieve this goal, and what I learned along the way.

As well as critiquing my own abilities throughout the writing process, the essay aims to explore and examine the various models of friendship between central male protagonists and the evolution of masculinity and homosociality within the buddy movie/bromance genre which has been a staple of the American film industry since the before the 1950s. In addition, I will note if these on-screen relationships have been the product of social change and wide spread acceptance of an evolving idea of what constitutes ‘masculinity’ and if, in turn, these new boundaries of homosociality have been, in any way genre changing. Alongside this essay I intend to create a piece of creative writing within the bromance comedy genre set against the backdrop of Montclair New Jersey in present day which explores the difficulties and solidarities of friendship between five old college friends. This film intends to fit in with contemporary bromance and appeal to the market demographic of 18 – 35 males by conforming to accepted and expected aspects of the genre such as, friendship, exploration, crisis, discovery and, most importantly, comedy.

This is a semi-autobiographical script about the author, Eric Hollerbach. It analyzes how problems with his mother manifest into problems with his romantic relationships.

This thesis offers a critical examination of what I call the “Apatow aesthetic” in order to analyze the social processes of growing up in contemporary neoliberal network society. While doctors, psychologists and social scientists still proffer a model of mid- 20th century human development centered around a chronologically-determined life cycle, the Apatow aesthetic imagines a non-linear reality where traditional life events and social practices don’t always correspond to specific age groups. Specifically, I argue, the Apatow aesthetic subjects the spectator to the pleasures and pains of these life-cycle disruptions, and reveals the unfolding of a new cultural shift which challenges the legitimacy of mid-century heteronormative, adulthood.

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The late Middles Ages saw the development in Europe of increasingly complex, ambitious, and self-conscious forms of creative literature. In the works of poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer new models of authorship and poetic identity were being explored, new kinds of philosophical and aesthetic value attributed to literary discourse. But these creative developments also brought with them new dangers and tensions, a sense of guilt and uncertainty about the value of creative literature, especially in relation to the dominant religious values of late medieval culture. In this thesis I explore how these doubts and tensions find expression in Chaucer’s poetry, not only as a negative, constraining influence, but also as something which contributes to the shape and meaning of poetry itself. I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith. This struggle, which emerges most strongly and polemically in the final fragments, I argue, runs in subtle and creative forms throughout the whole of Chaucer’s work. By seeing Chaucer in this light as a poet not of fixed, but of conflicted and vacillating intentions – a poet productively caught drawn between ‘game’ and ‘earnest’, radical ironies and Boethian truths – I attempt to account, in a holistic manner, for the major dichotomies that characterise both his work and its critical reception.

This dissertation addresses the possibilities for humor to serve as political action. While humor has been studied since Aristotle, and many theories about its efficacy as a rhetorical form abound, most claim at best that humor produces a lesser effect than other, more serious forms of discourse. When audiences, institutions, contemporary scholars and even the comics themselves address humor, they tend to reify the theories of foundational scholars - theories that serve to circumscribe the place of humor as necessarily non-political and non-efficacious. Such modalities of humor span many theories, including intentional forms such as irony, parody and satire, spatializations such as the carnivalesque, effects based criteria such as pleasure and/or laughter (as opposed to pain and/or outrage). When taken up at an institutional level (whether by legal or economic institutions, or even by scholarly institutions), these pre-set modalities comprise sets of rules, or litige, that preempt the possibility for some of humor's most progressive functions. To reexamine humor, this project begins with the most marginalized of humorous forms, stand-up comedy. Beginning from a standpoint of critical rhetoric, routines by comics such as Lewis Black, Lenny Bruce, Dave Chappelle, Margaret Cho, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Michael Richards and Sarah Silverman are used to display the limitations of contemporary theories, as well as to point out the possibility for stand-up comedy to enact critique. The primary finding is that humorous techniques create a separation between the stated and the inferred, which provides possibilities for audience judgment that is prudential in the sense of operating without pre-set models. The possibility of prudential judgment enables humor to enact détournement, the detour, diversion, hijacking, corruption or misappropriation of the spectacle.

Latin American film comedies, from the early sound period until the beginnings of the aesthetic and political New Cinemas (1930-1960), mediated modernity in diverse national contexts through affective and aesthetic tactics that shifted the spectator position in the narrative. These film comedies functioned in a mode of "critical realism" that produced historical self-awareness and foregrounded the geopolitical extension and uneven development of modernity. The comedian comedies of Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno (Mexico), Niní Marshall and Luis Sandrini (Argentina), and Oscarito and Grande Otelo (Brazil) demonstrate not only what kind of "peripheral humor" operated within - and traveled beyond - the national context, but also what this kind of humorous social critique reveals about the capacity of film to move viewers, by means of affect, into positions of critical opposition in the public sphere. By examining the linguistic play of these comedians, this study demonstrates four aspects of Latin American comedy that operate via embodiment and spatio-temporal location. First, Cantinflismo had as its basis not merely word play and non-sense, but misdirection, an evasive spatial practice which positioned the viewer to resist social hierarchies within and beyond the nation. Second, Marshall's multiple radio and film characters and her vocal stardom constituted an auditory map of Buenos Aires that created a different spatial intelligibility for her auditors. Third, Sandrini's stutter produced multiple temporalities that, in turn, positioned the audience itself to do a double take regarding its relation to the film text and its location within the standardized time of modernity. Fourth, the palimpsestic parody of the Brazilian chanchanda by Oscarito and Grande Otelo produced an awareness of historicity in a critically realist vein. Taken together, these four parallel examples of comedic practice demonstrate how Latin American film comedies produced a critically proximate spectator capable of perceiving and organizing space and time differently. Affirming that the study of popular film genres should be seen neither as derivate of foreign models nor as defensive authentic cultural expression, the thesis argues that articulating Miriam Hansen's concept of vernacular modernism to Angel Rama's concept of transculturation yields an understanding of popular cinema as a cultural practice of embodiment that foregrounds the differentiated responses to modernization. Furthermore, by re-reading the theories of realism of Gyorgy Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer and the theories of mimesis and innervation of Walter Benjamin through the critical lenses of Henri Bergson and debates about realism in the Latin American literary boom, this study demonstrates how the humor is contingent on thinking within a particular historical context and becoming part of a located collective body. These film comedies produce a critically proximate humorous spectator moved in laughter to examine his/her relation to the film text and his/her historical and geopolitical location within a cultural landscape marked by economic dependency.