Sitting in the Earth and Laughing: A Handbook of HumourTransaction Publishers - 222 pages This book is at once a serious guide to that form of human incognuity we call humor and an entertaining embodiment of humor itself. Designed to cross disciplinary boundaries, this "handbook of humor" alternates chapters of serious study with chapters composed of illustrative humorous material. "Serious" chapters include distinctive efforts to understand the reality of comic laughter; the laughter of children, the clown, and the fool; the quality of secular humor within the Jewish tradition; and the vexing question of whether there is such a discrete phenomenon as Christian or theological laughter. |
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Common terms and phrases
adult aggression asked Auschwitz Berger chap chapter child Christian clown Cohen collarbone comedian comedy comic laughter Comic Vision Conrad Hyers contrast Dear death divine doo-doo Earth and Laughing Edward Lear Elie Wiesel Enjoy faith fate feel final fool Freud funny goyish Gurewitch hasid Holocaust human humor and laughter ibid incongruity irony Isaac Bashevis Singer Israel James Thurber Jewish humor Jewish Wry Jews John Morreall joke Judaism Laughter and Humor Lenny Bruce Leo Rosten live look ludicrous meaning moral Moshe Waldoks never Niebuhr nonhumorous nonsense once person play Precarious Vision Press Proto-Jokes question Rabbi religion religious Rewot Rosten S. J. Perelman Sarah Blacher satire sense Shechner Shel Silverstein Shoah Sholom Aleichem suffering Swabey Taking Laughter Seriously tears tell theology theory things tion tragedy trans truth ultimate University Wet Queen Wet-X-Queen woman Woody Allen word write Yiddish York
Popular passages
Page 118 - The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — Of cabbages — and kings — And why the sea is boiling hot — And whether pigs have wings.
Page 99 - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Page 141 - It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless, eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a bleak absurd cosmos. Allen: What're you doing Saturday night?
Page 118 - Now", he said, "go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in." After some perplexed contemplation, I said, "The left hand." "Exactly," he said, "and how do you explain that ?" I couldn't explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand ?
Page 118 - When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.
Page 181 - There is joy as well as fury in the hasid's dancing. It's his way of proclaiming. "You don't want me to dance; too bad, I'll dance anyhow. You've taken away every reason for singing, but I shall sing. I shall sing of the deceit that walks by day and the truth that walks by night, yes, and of the silence of dusk as well. You didn't expect my joy, but here it is; yes, my joy will rise up; it will submerge you.
Page 21 - Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
Page 177 - ... man as a unity of body and spirit can neither by taking thought reduce the dimension of his life to the limit of nature, nor yet raise it to the dimension of pure spirit. Either his incomplete and frustrated life is completed by a power greater than his own, or it is not completed. Faith is therefore the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence. There is no other triumph and will be none, no matter how much human knowledge is enlarged. Faith is the...
Page 108 - I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly.
Page 118 - Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real." "I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry. "You wo'n't make yourself a bit realler by crying," Tweedledee remarked: "there's nothing to cry about." "If I wasn't real," Alice said — half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — "I shouldn't be able to cry.