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Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]
Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]

Author: 
Matthew Bevis
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  • Explores many different forms of comedy from the Greeks to the present
  • Takes examples from both high and low culture, and from several different literatures and languages
  • Develops a comparitive approach which allows comic theory and practice to shed new light upon one another
  • Offers both close readings and broad overviews of comic styles, tropes and impulses
  • Written in a witty and engaging style

  
To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? 

This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic drama, prose fiction and poetry, alongside forms of pantomime, comic opera, silent cinema, popular music, Broadway shows, music-hall, stand-up and circus acts, rom-coms, sketch shows, sit-coms, caricatures, and cartoons. 

Taking in scenes from Aristophanes to The Office, from the Roman Saturnalia to Groundhog Day, Bevis also considers comic theory from Aristotle to Freud and beyond, tracing how comic achievements have resisted as well as confirmed theory across the ages.

This book takes comedy seriously without taking it solemnly, and offers an engaging study of the comic spirit which lies at the heart of our shared social and cultural life. 

Index: 

Introduction
1: In the beginning...
2: In and out of character
3: Plotting mischief
4: Underdogs
5: Getting physical
6: Taking liberties
7: Beyond a joke
8: Endgames
Conclusion

About the author: 

Matthew Bevis is a Fellow in English at Keble College, University of Oxford. His publications include Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Some Versions of Empson, ed. (OUP, 2007), and The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his research in 2007.

"Insightful, witty and impressively wide-ranging throughout" - Times Literary Supplement

"Bevis shows there's no iron rule that a book on comedy can't be entertaining" - Independent

Product details

ISBN : 9780199601714

Author: 
Matthew Bevis
Pages
168 Pages
Format
Paperback
Size
111 x 174 mm
Pub date
Dec 2012
Series
Very Short Introductions
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Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction [#341]