Environmentalists are accustomed to using the rhetorical appeals of guilt and sacrifice to advocate their agendas. I argue that the motivations of guilt and sacrifice do not mirror the goals of sustainability, and are easy for anthropocentric-resourcist ideology (ARI) agendas to counter. When it comes to actual environmental policy change, however, the rhetorical means in which guilt and sacrifice appeals arise are valid and sustainable: the melodramatic frame and dialogic engagement. I use these rhetorical tools to inform my readings of two eco-comedic artifacts: Earth to America! and my own performance work with "The Composters." Through these analyses, I argue that comedy is a viable method that matches the message of environmentalism. Comedy becomes a kind of discursive biomimicry that mirrors, as a predator does a prey, the language of ARI. Since comedy is dependent on contradiction and juxtaposition, it becomes an adequate tool for calling the bluff on ARI agendas that are based on illogical claims that sound ecologically savvy (e.g., "clean coal"). In this dissertation I undertake an examination of these informative overlaps. I place eco-comedy on the line in order to map a more sustainable environmental rhetoric between the intersections of melodrama, dialogic engagement, environmentalism, comedy, and advocacy.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Boston University. / In attempting to discover the significance of laughter in interpreting Shakespeare's plays, one must realize that laughter is not always certain in any given instance, that no single, simple explanation of laughter either of the past or of the present will cover all kinds of laughter, and that people in different countries and periods laugh at different things differently. It is possible, nevertheless, to discover with considerable certainty what people laughed at in Elizabethan times. Although the small amount of sixteenth century theory about laughter probably had little direct influence upon the Elizabethan dramatists, a study of contemporary comments on the theater, of some plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, of Elizabethan jigs, and of the jest-books of successful Elizabethan comedians indicates that certain actions, speeches, topics, and types of characters and situations were likely to evoke laughter. I drew up a list of these topics and devices for securing laughter and selected those often repeated in the various sources. The similarity of topics and devices appearing in both dramatic and non-dramatic sources makes it reasonable to believe that certain things had become established as evocative of laughter in Elizabethan times. A study of selected early religious plays, of moralities, and of school, court, and professional plays shows that certain topics on the already developed lists keep reappearing and become traditional sources of laughter and that laughter varies with the kind of audience for which a play was designed. It also shows that the repetition of certain topics for securing laughter in the same play and the constant direction of the laughter of the audience at a certain person and with others emphasized the theme of the play as, for example, in Wyt and Science with its praise of the academic virtues and the condemnation of idleness and ignorance [TRUNCATED]

Spike Milligan has had an undisputable influence on English-language comedy in the past half-century. Monty Python’s Terry Jones cites the “free-wheeling fantasy world” Milligan created for the surreal radio series The Goon Show as the chief inspiration for his own group’s more internationally-famous work. However, Milligan’s writing for The Goon Show, which first aired between 1951 and 1960 displays a depth beyond “the confidence to be silly” noted by Python’s Michael Palin. Milligan’s scripts reveal a deliberate, if not wholly conscious, rejection of the laws of causality and probability, through frequent and systematic distortions of time and space. The fictional world revealed in The Goon Show’s corpus of half-hour stories is one in which concepts relating to time and space lack the fixed meanings that we attach to them in everyday life. Temporal and spatial relationships are fluid and indeterminate: boundaries between different times and different spaces can dissolve, allowing mutually inconsistent chronologies and scales of size and distance to coexist. The world-view underlying this is governed by an inversion of the generally-agreed-upon relationship between observable phenomena and individual perception. Rather than using the outside world as a source of data from which to construct models of ‘objective’ reality, Milligan allows his characters’ own words to modify the given conditions of any situation. This quasi-magical principle of storytelling mirrors cognitive strategies used by children in their primary-school years to grasp and describe the complexities of time and space. Childlike and lighthearted as it often is, The Goon Show’s twisting of time and space has a parallel to some highly complex ‘grown-up’ thinking. Its implicit rejection of the self-evidence of the fundamental laws of Newtonian physics recalls more than just the challenge to these laws provided by relativity and quantum mechanics. It also anticipates, by a full generation, the skeptical stance towards the self-evidence of immutable laws which forms the cornerstone of postmodern critiques of all fields of endeavour. The Goon Show reveals Spike Milligan to be an unsung visionary: always striding into unknown conceptual territory, he let his scripts, rather than a body of theoretical work, articulate his vision. Milligan’s comedic touch and his inimitable strangeness have led him to be appreciated, rather than studied. The ways in which The Goon Show turns time and space inward on themselves demonstrate, however, that the First Mover Unmoved in the mad universe of Goonery was an artistic and intellectual force to be reckoned with. Further study of Spike Milligan can only to lead to a greater appreciation of how far ahead of his time he truly was.

This thesis attempts to redress the drought of work on Dickens on comedy, which is surprising considering how often Dickens is thought of as a comic writer. The thesis uses Dickens to demonstrate problems with and resistance to existing theorizations of laughter, and attempts to develop a new way of thinking about laughter through Dickens. The thesis begins with a theoretical section, which is a discussion of existing discussions of laughter followed by an attempt to develop a new way of thinking about laughter by making use Alain Badiou’s concept of the ‘event.’ The thesis then moves to Section Two, in which these ideas are discussed alongside Dickens’s novels. Chapter Four attempts to show in a general way how Dickens and these discussions of laughter belong together, and how a certain moment in the nineteenth century that Dickens was a unique part of shows that new ways of discussing laughter are needed. Chapter Five argues that laughter in Dickens is not natural or spontaneous but part of constructing an idea of natural spontaneity. Pickwick Papers, it is argued, is the novel of retroactive causes, showing how laughter can create ideas of ‘nature’ which then appear to explain social behaviour such as laughter itself. Chapter Six tackles the relationship between laughter and anxiety. It argues that laughter creates order by ‘dealing’ with anxiety, but that this order it produces is profoundly unstable and has new anxieties. Barnaby Rudge is the novel which shows this in its particular historical context. The final chapter argues that Dickens’s writing can be called ‘comic’ in the terms that have been established throughout the thesis. Discussing Great Expectations, it argues that laughter is a plotting force that creates narratives and structures. Finally, the conclusion discusses changes that may have happened to laughter in the nineteenth century and what it means to find ourselves laughing at Dickens’s texts today.

The writing and producing of this musical comedy was a creative production thesis. The playwright also served as director and designer. The organization of the thesis is basically the organization of the project.

No description available.

Female stand-up comics occupy a permanently liminal space which can be broken down into three small areas, characterized thusly: the interpersonal, the sexual and the professional spheres. Issues of power, footing and the carnivalesque are threaded throughout these three spaces, and I use the work of Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin and Erving Goffman to examine the ways in which the female comics I talked, lived and performed with over a two-year period negotiate this permanent liminality to both their advantage and their detriment. The three liminal spaces overlap and intersect, with female comics occupying at times two, and sometimes all three, at any given moment, in a constantly forming and re-forming state of “otherness” that separates them from the default male comic body. In locating female comedians in a permanent liminality, I illustrate the structures at play that are demonstrative not only of the comic experience, but of larger issues surrounding gender in contemporary society. / text

Piñata: A Dark Comedy is a dark comedy written to explore what an audience is willing to laugh at and what remains when the laughter has finished. Set in a tavern, Piñata showcases the comedic on goings of a few young adults. Stephen enacts an extensive scheme to show Marcy that her boyfriend is no good for her. Stephen’s friend Wick attempts to cope with haunting trauma as his sister, Lily, does what she can to get Stephen’s attention. The characters navigate each others desires and needs through witty banter and outrageous stories. These comedic antics build in intensity until the play reaches a shocking climax. This moment thrusts the audience into a state of discomfort. The play is prefaced with a critical chapter that explores the way in which the play deals with its audience and how the play utilizes audience laughter. / February 2016

An analysis of American independent cinema from 1990 until 2007, with an emphasis on these films? relationship to the Remarriage Comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. There is a uniquely American tendency to use cinema to reevaluate marriage that was most clearly evident in the Remarriage Comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, this thesis contends that this tendency has emphatically reemerged in American independent cinema since 1990. Using detailed analyses of films that most clearly evidence the persistence of this theme, this thesis explores, in-depth, four films: Hal Hartley?s Trust (1990), Richard Linklater?s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), and Aaron Katz?s Quiet City (2007). These four films combine to form a coherent vision of a new perspective on romantic coupling, uniting to together show what they are rebelling against, what their new relationships should be built upon, and, finally, what the new kind of relationship that they present can look like. The definitively American theme that is delineated in these four films not only forms a clear connection to the history of American cinema, but also shows how new generations approach the essential questions implicit in coupling and marriage.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 9-25.