In “Mysterious Stranger,” Twain calls upon us to laugh at autocrats—even when it gets us in trouble, as it did Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.
Tag Archives: Laughter
Twain: Autocrats Fear Being Laughed At
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged CBS, Donald Trump, Late Show, Mark Twain, Mysterious Stranger, Stephen Colbert Comments closed
Laughter in the Presidential Campaign
Trump and Vance’s jokes are designed to beat down, not include. They elicit Hobbesian laughter, not Shaftesburian.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged blood libel, Caite Upton, Comedy, Donald Trump, Henry Fielding, Kamala Harris, Leviathan, Mel Brooks, mysogeny, Tom Jones Comments closed
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.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Donald Trump, Geoffrey Chaucer, Kamala Harris, Pardoner, Wife of Bath Comments closed
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.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged authoritarianism, Fascism, Homer, Iliad, John Stoehr, police violence, Thomas Hobbes, white supremacy Comments closed
Why Do We Laugh? Various Theories
Whether you see laughter as benign or hostile may come down to what kind of person you are.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Anthony Ashley Cooper, Comedy, Leviathan, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes Comments closed
Lit Explains Romney’s Off-Putting Laugh
Lewis Carroll, Kundera, and Dostoevsky help us understand why Mitt Romney’s laugh makes us nervous.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alice in Wonderland, Encounter, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Idiot, Lewis Carroll, Milan Kundera, Mitt Romney, politics Comments closed
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 […]
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 18th Century Novel, Jane Austen, Restoration comedy, Romantic Comedy, Sense and Sensibility, teaching Comments closed
