Tag Archives: Laughter

Laughter in the Presidential Campaign

Trump and Vance’s jokes are designed to beat down, not include. They elicit Hobbesian laughter, not Shaftesburian.

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Harris’s Laugh and the Wife of Bath

Kamala Harris’s big-hearted laugh puts her in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath territory. Trump is more like the Pardoner.

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Odysseus’s Authoritarian Power Play

Homer shows the dynamics of authoritarianism at work in an “Iliad” incident where Odysseus disciplines a critic of the Greek mission.

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Why Do We Laugh? Various Theories

Whether you see laughter as benign or hostile may come down to what kind of person you are.

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Lit Explains Romney’s Off-Putting Laugh

Lewis Carroll, Kundera, and Dostoevsky help us understand why Mitt Romney’s laugh makes us nervous.

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Blasphemy + Laughter, Not All Bad

Spiritual Sunday I was teaching Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale on Friday and had a sudden insight: laughter, even blasphemous laughter, is not an enemy to spirituality. In fact, it can be a means of deepening our connection with the divine. I will make my case through Chaucer. The Miller’s Tale is about as bawdy as it […]

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Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron

I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today.  I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the scandalous poetry of the licentious […]

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