In "Engaging Humor", Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful - even significant - form of expression. Oring scrutinizes classic Jewish jokes, frontier humor, racist cartoons, and contemporary joke cycles. He provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts-not just their contents. Arguing that incongruity and absurdity are key elements of humor, Oring also asserts that humor is a form of play and that playing with ideas does not require us to endorse them. Analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as forms of human communication whose implications are startling, engaging, and profound. "Engaging Humor" explores Freud's theory that every thought contains a joke. Oring suggests that racist humor is not rooted in repression and offers a new perspective on other forms of humor seemingly based on hatred, including the recent blonde joke cycle. Oring also addresses the use of jokes as commentaries on the conversations in which they are embedded and considers the similarities in the humorous traditions of the United States, Australia, and Israel - each formed through colonization in modern times.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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ADVANCE PRAISE "I have read well over a hundred books on humor. None is superior to this one in clarity of expression or liveliness of ideas." -- John Morreall, author of Taking Laughter Seriously and Humor Works and review editor of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research from 1988 to 1999
Book Description
Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression. Oring provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.
--This text refers to the
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
HUMOR, I HAVE ARGUED, depends upon the perception of an appropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appropriate relationship between categories that would ordinarily be regarded as incongruous. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
appropriate incongruity, joke gloss, schadchen jokes, appropriate incongruities, blond jokes, dyadic traditions, incongruous categories, incongruity resolution, joke text, joke cycle, nonsense humor, oral literary criticism, joke site, following joke, joke thoughts, elephant jokes, absurd humor, tall talk, corrupt language, humor appreciation, secondary pattern, humorous expression, dumb blond, indirect representation Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Their Relation, Bill Clinton, White Aryan Resistance, Garden of Eden, Sigmund Freud, Galician Jew, Essex Man, Appropriate Incongruity Redux, Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, White House, Abu Layish, President Clinton, Tom Metzger, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, World War, World Wide Web, Colonizing Humor, Hillary Clinton, Sister Mary Elephant, Thomas Hobbes, While Freud New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
HUMOR, I HAVE ARGUED, depends upon the perception of an appropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appropriate relationship between categories that would ordinarily be regarded as incongruous. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
appropriate incongruity, joke gloss, schadchen jokes, appropriate incongruities, blond jokes, dyadic traditions, incongruous categories, incongruity resolution, joke text, joke cycle, nonsense humor, oral literary criticism, joke site, following joke, joke thoughts, elephant jokes, absurd humor, tall talk, corrupt language, humor appreciation, secondary pattern, humorous expression, dumb blond, indirect representation Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Their Relation, Bill Clinton, White Aryan Resistance, Garden of Eden, Sigmund Freud, Galician Jew, Essex Man, Appropriate Incongruity Redux, Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, White House, Abu Layish, President Clinton, Tom Metzger, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, World War, World Wide Web, Colonizing Humor, Hillary Clinton, Sister Mary Elephant, Thomas Hobbes, While Freud New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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1
book
cites this book:
- Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud on 12 pages
- Jokes And Their Relations by Elliot Oring on 5 pages
- Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy) by V. Raskin on 5 pages
- The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (The Standard Edition) (Vol. 1-24 Volume Set) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) by Sigmund Freud on 4 pages
- A Treasury of Western Folklore by Benjamin Albert Botkin on 4 pages
See all 100 books this book cites
- Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (Humor Research 7) by Giselinde Kuipers in Back Matter
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