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…

From the frequency of the racially motivated and racially justified slayings of black youth to the increased popularity of blatantly derisive racist humor, the enactment of race and racism appears to have become more defiantly overt and unapologetic. Consider the slayings of Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, and Jordan Davis, whose armed white…

The occasional role of humor as a vehicle for moral criticism is investigated. I begin by distinguishing between this particular role and the other kinds of ways in which humor and amusement might be regarded through a moral lens, consider historical approaches to humor that corroborate the kind of role for it on which my investigation focuses,…

Discusses the relationship between doublespeak and humor in the works of George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Doris Lessing, and others. Suggests that one of the most effective responses to doublespeak is humor, a response which acknowledges doublespeak's incongruities and laughs at them. (ARH)

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)