In her paper, "Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and the Tradition of Screwball Comedy," Mei Zhu argues that Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is controversial owing to the subtlety and complexity of the text as well as its subject matter. Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film version seems to follow the narrative structure of the original play closely while its effect is different. Through a detailed ...

We present a complete system that generates Japanese stand-up comedy. Different modules generating different types of jokes are tied together into a performance where all jokes are connected in some way to the other jokes. The script is converted to speech and two robots perform the comedy routine. Evaluations show that the performances are perceived as funny by many, almost half the evaluation...

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the first edition of Francis Cornford's The Origin of Attic Comedy, a book that sought the origins and essence of Old Comedy in "primitive" ritual, cult, and myth. The sub-title of Bowie's book on Aristophanes might lead one to expect that he is continuing the project begun by Cornford, and the fact that Cambridge has published both books, even if a ...

Using Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, this study examines stand-up comedy in the U.S. and Japan and demonstrates pervasive patterns of communication in comedy performance. In the U.S., stand-up acts are comprised of solo comedian’s narrative performance, while stand-up comic narrative in Japan is performed in the form of dialogue between...

<193>Aristotle, in his Poetics, claimed that tragedy, “through pity and fear, accomplishes the catharsis of such emotions (di j ejlevou kai; fovbou peraivnousa th;n tw'n toiouvtwn paqhmavtwn kavqarsin) (Poet. 1449b27f.) .” It has been argued that the medical purgation theory of the musical catharsis in Politics is the key phrase for the interpretation of tragic catharsis, where he says, those w...

In his article "'Mad Laughter' in Federman's The Twofold Vibration" Menachem Feuer discusses one of the central questions in the debate over post-Holocaust representation with regard to comedy and laughter. Several authors and filmmakers including Mel Brooks, Lina Wertmüller, Roberto Benigni, Michael Chabon, or Jonathan Safran Foer employ comedy in work. Although the books and films of these au...

Sense of humor is potentially relevant to social functioning in dementias, but has been little studied in these diseases. We designed a semi-structured informant questionnaire to assess humor behavior and preferences in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 15), semantic dementia (SD; n = 7), progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n = 10), and Alzheimer's disease (A...

We focus on interactive comedy, a relatively new genre in interactive drama, in this study. To be able to maintain the story, we adopt hierarchical task network planning (HTN) for planning of a character agent. We then extend HTN such that the extended HTN allows for the direct use of character failures, higher interactions with the viewer, and more story variations. Our extensions lead to effe...

This research conducted on flouting quality maxim uttered by the actors and actress in Lapor Pak Comedy. The problems of are: (1) What floutings forms are gone through Comedy? (2) reasons actors/actress flouted maxims quality? purposes this To identify sustained Comedy describe contextual meanings which used who quality. Descriptive qualitative method had been research. theory Grice (1975). res...