This paper explores comedy as a "queer pedagogical form" that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating 'form' less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of "formation" that positions these in dynamic…

This article explores the affective dimensions of comedy education and performance through workshops with undergraduate acting students in Manchester, UK. Drawing on Suzanne Langer's process philosophy and recent research in affect studies, the authors compose complex mappings of affective intensity as it circulates through stand-up comedic…

This article begins by examining the bad reputation humor traditionally had in philosophy and education. Two of the main charges against humor--that it is hostile and irresponsible--are linked to the Superiority Theory. That theory is critiqued and two other theories of laughter are presented--the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. In the…

While humor has long been documented as a useful teaching tool, it is almost entirely untheorized in terms of its potential for multicultural education. Specifically, the learning opportunities that racial comedic media offer in multicultural and anti-racist coursework is a particularly under-studied area, while research in this vein has great…

We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos. In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that…

This essay examines the deliberately humorous approaches undertaken in two recent higher education marketing endeavors: The American Council on Education's "Solutions for Our Future" campaign and Stanford's "Hail, Stanford, Hail" initiative. Three television commercials from each project are described and discussed in light of a view of comedy…

Shows how the rhetoric of selected woman humorists from 1820 to 1880 exemplifies the operation of various comic literary reference frames. Asserts that their comic frame disintegrated because these writers were unable to foster identification between females and males and failed to provide a world view that could accommodate social change. (MM)