BBC The Social - Using Comedy To Cope With Life's Dark Side. A Colombian Artist Turns Deep Truths Into Charming Comics, and We Just Can’t Get Enough. Andres Colmenares is an illustrator from Colombia who shows the world in a truly unique way.
He makes everyday objects come alive as if by magic. Three Theories of Humor: Relief, Superiority, and... Surprise! - Roxanna Elden. This lesson is part of a free, six week mini-course on humor writing.
It offers an overview of three popular theories of humor: relief theory, superiority theory, and surprise theory. These theories are useful for understanding what makes things funny. Some of them date back to early philosophers. Most people find them to be a useful starting point rather than a complete explanation. Relief Theory: Humor relieves psychological tension by allowing us to face our fears, release nervous energy, and overcome inhibitions. Friday essay: Barry Humphries' humour is now history – that's the fate of topical, satirical comedy. John Cleese's Letter to the USA. Just as most any anonymous piece of cynically humorous satire about American politics and culture ends up eventually being attributed to comedian George Carlin, so the same kind of material gets credited to English comic John Cleese when it evinces a British viewpoint on American affairs.
Unlike his fellow Monty Python trouper however, doesn’t generally pen this sort of political levity. Culture - Comedy in the age of outrage: When jokes go too far. Warning: this article may offend some readers.
To be honest, it probably won’t, but it does include several remarks made by comedians, and there is a growing feeling that comedians can no longer say anything without offending somebody. Culture - Comedy in the age of outrage: When jokes go too far. British comedy is lewd, puerile, lavatorial, lacking flair. This week, ITV’s late-night car-crash of a programme, The Nightly Show, hit a new low when its ratings slumped below a million.
Guest Post: A Quick Guide to British Humor - Understanding British Comedy - Anglotopia.net. Simon Pegg: American and British senses of humour have more in common than we think. You could spend a lot of time exploring the differences between British and American comedy only to reach the conclusion that, ironically, they're pretty much the same.
Back when director Edgar Wright and myself were writing our debut feature, Shaun Of The Dead, we were certainly banking on a comic universality in the story of a suburban waster battling the living dead. We had every confidence that the humour would translate. Indeed, we made only one subtle dialogue adjustment during the writing process, changing the word "pissed" to "drunk", so as to avoid any confusion between the conditions of being munted and mardy.
On Donald Trump, a letter from John Cleese to the United States. John Cleese, veteran English actor (Reuters Image) The US Presidential elections of 2016 have given the world a fodder for thought.
Many celebrities had earlier said that if Donald Trump won the elctions then they would leave America and settle down somewhere in Canada. The unexpected win of Donald Trump to the white house have left the political analysts and thinkers in a somewhat confused state of mind. Terry Pratchett: Turntables of the Night. Peter Baynham: Dead funny. What the hell was Julia Davis thinking when she sat down to write her BBC2 comedy series Nighty Night?
MS isn't funny. Cancer isn't funny. Has Britain lost its sense of humour? Rob Newman is on stage at London's Tricycle Theatre in the middle of a detailed analysis of the 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup.
He contends that this putsch toppled the independently minded prime minister, Muhammad Mossadeq, and restored the Shah to the throne in order to re-establish Anglo-American control over the country's oil. Laugh? I didn't, actually, but thanks for asking. Man Finds Dead Worm In His Cucumber, Tesco’s Response Is Brilliant. Customer service departments probably aren’t the funnest places to work, so when Rob from Tesco customer care received a complaint from customer Wes Metcalfe recently, he must have been pleasantly surprised by the message he found.
Because Wes’ “complaint” was actually a tongue-in-cheek anecdote about a worm he’d recently found inside the package of a Tesco cucumber, and as you can see from the below correspondence, Rob wasted no time in joining in the fun. It all started when Metcalfe did some grocery shopping at a Tesco in Dinnington, Sheffield. Realizing that there was a rather flat (and rather dead) worm inside the plastic wrapper of his cucumber, he wrote to Tesco to complain.
And things escalated pretty quickly after that… More info: Facebook. So how funny is our sense of humour? How did Mr Bean become our unofficial ambassador? Why the British Are Better at Satire. If there was ever an era ripe for political satire in America, the current one displays all the symptoms: rampant dysfunction in Congress; a paralyzed, peevish administration; dynastic ambitions in not one but two families; a surfeit of outsize and frequently cartoonish figures jockeying for space on the national stage. Given the wealth of material so near at hand, I was eagerly anticipating David Fincher’s adaptation of the brilliant 1990 BBC miniseries House of Cards when it debuted on Netflix two years ago. In Defence of English Humour. Article by Sam Nicoresti. Edited by Amy Calladine. Additional Research by Jon Park. Oxford Music Hall, 1875.