To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony?
Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and repro…
An extravagant but cleverly planned burlesque that works as a condemnation of Chivalry, one of Twain's chief aversions.
Based on a holiday boat trip made by the author and his two real-life friends George and Harris. This humorous travelogue includes local history of towns along the Thames, as well as a few serious and sentimental passages, but remains at its core a comic novel.