The Laughing Stalk

With contributions by leading scholars, writers and comedians in the USA, the UK and Canada, The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences focuses on the dynamics of audience behavior. Performers, writers, historians, producers, and theorists explore the practice and reception of live comedy performance, including cultural and historical variations in comedy audience conduct, the reception of “low” versus “high” comedy, and the differences between televised and live jokes. Contributors reflect on the subjectivity of audience members and the spread of affect, as well as the two-way relationship between joker and listener. They investigate race, sexuality and gender in humor, and contemplate the comedy club as a distinct spatial and emotional environment. The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences includes excerpts and scripts from Michael Frayne’s Audience and Andrea Fraser’s Inaugural Speech. Judy Batalion interviews noted comic writers, performers, and theater designers, including Iain Mackintosh, Shazia Mirza, Julia Chamberlain, Scott Jacobson, and Andrea Fraser. Sarah Boyes contributes a short photographic essay on comedy clubbers. Essay contributors include Alice Rayner, Matthew Daube, Lesley Harbidge, Gavin Butt, Diana Solomon, Rebecca Krefting, Kevin McCarron, Nile Seguin, Elizabeth Klaver, Frances Gray, AL Kennedy, Kélina Gotman, and Samuel Godin. The comedy duo of Sable & Batalion share their conclusions about audience responses to hip-hop theater.

“Book-o-laughter, adventures, excitement and ridiculousness.” Unknown Observer Lafabo (laughable), a multi-talented and multi-professional, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Lafuta (laughter). He lived in Kunkhaniland, a land where Chi-chenglish, a mixture of Chichewa and English, is mostly spoken. Memories of each year are worth to remember. Lafabo Adventures is a book based on the life and inspiration of the author (Biography) and friends. It goes back to the early seventies through the eighties, nineties and then the new millennium. A lot of different activities happened in this democratic land. Lafabo as a boy, passed through many troubles. He grew up as any other boy. As an adult he had a wide experience in life. Worries and problems were part of life. The way he found the solutions were the adventures worth reading. Have fun all fun seekers and wishing you all the best.

Imagine a book that has you sitting at the edge of your seat, turning each page, from cover to cover with breathless anticipation. Your heart pounds, your hands sweat, your mind wanting to know what happens next. Have you ever read a book that has you mused one moment to the next, and then breaks your heart and leaves you with tears streaming down your cheeks. Are you ready for a read so thought provoking that after reading it you are left changed forever. This is that book. Izz of Zia is the first novel of a three part trilogy that can be interpreted on two separate horizontal stratums: as an exciting, fantasy, action, adventure, or as a deeply spiritual saga. Izz of Zia is set in the First Age of the Noble Kings, in the Middle Era of the First Millennia, in the year one hundred and eleven, in the days of King Ozzdon, in the Empire of Xylenia, on the planet Zia. Betrayal from within threatens to tear a world that has lived in peace for thousands of years apart forever. This work is a multi-faceted writing that intertwines heartbreak with adoration, deceit with truth, betrayal with loyalty, creating a web in which two young heartthrobs that are as different as the east is far from the west learn the fathomless meaning of passion, devotion and true love. This is a book about a faith filled heart that wills to keep going no matter how many time it breaks, no matter how low life beats it down, no matter how close death comes to sweeping it under, hope rises from within. Prepare to be inspired by a love whose story begs to be told, and refuses to be denied no matter how painful, tragic, or tear-jerking.

A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.

Research Methods in Performance Studies offers a unique approach for readers to engage with performance research and methods in practice. It examines ways of making performance, researching performance cultures, researching performers who themselves are engaged in research, and conducting research in the context of enduring and emergent themes of performance studies inquiry. This book features the work of eighteen scholar-artists currently working in performance studies who demonstrate—through applied projects—various methods for conducting performance research. The result is a wide array of novel scholarship including activist performance, slam poetry, video performance, stand-up comedy, adaptation for the Broadway stage, naturecultural performance, intersectional performance, performances of cultural and material preservation, and many others. Faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and performance practitioners alike will benefit from the approaches to performance studies research methods articulated by the scholar-artists featured in this collection.

The Uralic Languages, second edition, is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Uralic family. The Uralic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from Dalarna County in Sweden to Dudinka, Taimyr, Russia. There are currently approximately 50 languages in the group, the largest one among them being the state languages Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian; other Uralic languages covered in the book are South Saami, Skolt Saami, Võro, Moksha Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Zyrian Komi, Mansi, Khanty, Nganasan, Forest and Tundra Enets, Nenets, and Selkup. The book also contains a chapter on Finnic languages, the reconstruction of Uralic, the history of Uralic studies, connections of Uralic to other language families, and language names, demographics, and degrees of endangerment. This second and thoroughly revised edition updates and augments the authoritative accounts of the first edition and reflects recent and ongoing developments in linguistics and the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis and documentary linguistics; a relatively uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, The Uralic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, folklore, and Siberian studies.

Dakota is back again with her story continuing on with her returning to her life as a vampire after spending the summer in Ireland adjusting. The Rowens are there for her when her own family has shunned her. Koda settles in for her senior year of high school as she is faced with challenges and hardships that no teenage girl should ever have to face. But, her biggest challenge is looming in the near future as Brice warns her about a vision that could ruin her. What will Koda do when she comes face to face with the one thing that Brice can't save her from'...