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A philosopher’s take on what makes jokes funny.
BBC
Humour doesn’t often age well. But some comedy can adapt to changing social mores.
While improv comedy in the classroom might nurture your child’s stage talent, it’s also a highly effective way of teaching literacy. Pictured here, La Ligue d'Improvisation Montréalaise.
(Wikipedia Commons)
In the elementary classroom, improv can nurture a collaborative and creative climate in which even reticent kids want to participate.
Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp.
PA/PA Archive/PA Images
Charlie Chaplin changed the worlds of film and comedy forever. He deserves a lasting tribute and London’s Cinema Museum – the UK’s only Chaplin museum – must be rescued.
Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.
Amazon
It can be a tough gig as a female comedian.
When does parody spill into insensitive cultural appropriation? While Chris LIlley is probably OK to appropriate the upper North Shore culture of Ja’mie (pictured), he’s on dodgier ground with Jonah from Tonga.
Princess Pictures, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Home Box Office (HBO)
In our pursuit of a world that is safely and entirely OK, must humour be cleansed of its original sin of cultural appropriation and insensitivity? It depends whether we are ‘laughing up’ or ‘laughing down’.
Courtesy of HBO
American comedian Larry David has drawn fire for his jokes about the Holocaust. But he draws on a long tradition of Jewish humour.
Shutterstock/Azovtsev Maksym
There’s a reason why horror films are becoming more and more absurd.
Emma Cooper created the show “Rape is Real and Everywhere” with fellow comedian Heather Jordan Ross.
Scot McLean
Rape jokes are among the most controversial that comedians can tell, but a Concordia professor says laughing at the absurdity of a world that silences survivors is also an act of support and solidarity.
Laurel and Hardy.
Publicity photo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy from the 1930s
Charlie Chaplin was a comedy great but it’s Stan Laurel who still gets ‘em rolling in the aisles.
Funny serious.
via shutterstock.com
From Obama to street protests, humour is being used to make some very serious points.
George Vasey, The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (1875).
Have you heard the one about the Victorian sense of humour?
Sparks fly as families come together for the Christmas dinner in Nakkiah Lui’s Black is the New White.
Prudence Upton
Nakkiah Lui’s Black is the New White takes 17th-century comedy of manners and uses it to probe race and class to great effect.
John (Peter Kay) and Kayleigh (Sian Gibson) in BBC One’s Car Share.
BBC/Goodnight Vienna Productions
As series two comes to a close, here are the ingredients behind a piece of 24-carat comedy gold.
Shiralee Hood performing in 2016: being a left-handed, Indigenous woman, she describes herself as a ‘triple threat’.
Supplied
Aboriginal stand-up comedy is thriving and no topic, it seems, is off limits. As the Melbourne International Comedy Festival opens, here’s the lowdown on Indigenous humour.
A local shop, for local people.
BBC
British comedy has always revelled in self-reflexive parody. Now, following Brexit, perhaps the re-nationalisation of British comedy is nigh.
Daniela Parra/Flickr
Enough with the charming, naughty funny-guy rants. There are too many in a new anthology of Australian comedy writing – and women display a superior comic imagination.
Why does that one video crack you up?
Laughing image via www.shutterstock.com.
One viral video might leave you in stitches; another leaves you cold. Psychology researchers have worked out several theories of humor to explain why.
Taking physick – or – the news of shooting the King of Sweden!, by James Gillray (died 1815), published 1792.
Wikimedia Commons
British society takes monarchy far more seriously than they did two centuries ago. Far too seriously.
Paramount Pictures
His extraordinary talent was most evident as his ‘straight guys’ became increasingly deranged.