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Humor, like ritual, may sometimes license otherwise offensive insults. When and why? The special genre of insult humor, including roasts, is considered along with Freud's account of the role of collusion in tendentious humor broadly conceived. When is it wrong to laugh? Satire, teasing, and bullying sometimes take the ridicule in insult humor to the extremes of aggression.

This chapter begins with a discussion of why happiness has held such an ambiguous place in French life. In the eighteenth century, the French were as keen on happiness as the Americans. On the theoretical and literary levels, indeed, they could probably claim to have been the world's experts on it, for they then, suddenly, published about two hundred treatises on the subject. In the process, however, they discovered, or rediscovered, many of the complications that happiness involves; and their longing for it was therefore balanced by vigorous arguments about its nature and much uncertainty about how it could be achieved. The chapter considers the history of friendship to provide an idea of the way changing social conditions bore upon the problem of being happy, for the ordinary man. It looks at the manifestations of happiness, particularly dancing, and works from them to the social relationships with which they were linked. The discussion then turns to the different kinds of humour seen in the history of laughing, of eating, and of drinking.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Legman completed and published two volumes of his studies of sexual humor, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke and No Laughing Matter. In these books he presented thousands of jokes on sexual and bodily topics, framed by his own version of a Freudian approach to humor. This chapter lays out Legman’s organization of the materials dredged up in his decades of joke collecting, outlines his theories of humor, and places his books in the expansion of scholarly interest in humor in the 1960s and 1970s. Legman was almost alone in emphasizing aggression as a largely unconscious motive in joke telling and in emphasizing that jokes expressed unresolved psychic conflicts. The Rationale of the Dirty Joke was more warmly received than Legman’s second volume of jokes, in large part because No Laughing Matter dealt with the nastiest jokes in Legman’s collection. The chapter also examines the academic and popular reactions to both books and details Legman’s difficulties with publishers, especially around the issue of royalties for his work.

This chapter examines Robert Saxton’s The Beach in Winter: Scratby (for Tess) (2007). This piece, originally commissioned for the NMC Songbook, is now to be found as the last song of a major seven-movement baritone cycle Time and the Seasons. Its idiom is a far cry from Saxton’s earlier modernist works. The music is mellifluous, basically tonal, and beautifully turned, with voluptuously expressive vocal phrases that cover a wide range. The composer gives the baritone plenty of scope to span spacious phrases and articulate contrasting emotions, amid continual changes of key signature. Lines dart around the registers a good deal and the singer will need to control dynamics and vary timbre throughout his range. The pianist propels the music along with a continuous, ever-shifting texture of wave patterns—first rippling, then surging and pounding, or quite suddenly scattering in spray. Rhythms are pliable and there are many instances of irregular divisions, pitting fours against threes in the piano part.

This chapter argues the sitcom is an especially important genre for thinking about television audiences because comedy is a form of communication that relies on audience response for its effect. The chapter examines sitcom tropes such as the laugh track, to examine how the audience is signalled within the genre. It also explores audience reactions via complaints, and examines what such complaints tell us about audience expectations for the genre. This is also linked to issues of broadcasting regulations. The chapter draws on primary research with comedy audiences carried out for this book.

This chapter introduces an extended scena by Earl Kim—Letters Found Near a Suicide. Kim sets three poems in a continuous span, so the work can be counted as a song cycle. The chapter reveals Kim's intimate understanding and love of the human voice, which is amply demonstrated by the comfortable lie of vocal lines which cover an extremely wide range of dramatic colours. Words are always audible, and emotions conveyed with concise poignancy. Key moments in the text are often set in a fairly low tessitura so that the singer is able to vary the vocal palette and enunciate the texts without strain. The piano part is full of fine detail, and there are plenty of pitch cues to help the singer. The textures are expertly balanced and well integrated in style.

In 1792, Thomas Beddoes, Sr. was nominated by the Oxford University chancellor to become the first holder of its Regius chair in Chemistry. But political blacklisting by anonymous detractors responding to the King’s proclamation against seditious writings doomed his chances. He moved to Bristol, where he set up an independent Pneumatic Institute for study of therapeutic uses of nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) and other elemental gases, assisted by Humphry Davy. He joined the brilliant circle of intellectuals gathered around the philanthropic Wedgwood family at Cote House, working with Coleridge and others to support the cause of parliamentary reform. He wrote five pamphlets on reform issues between 1795 and 1797, including an Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt. His scientific work was increasingly associated with his political liberalism by his opponents, leading to losses in private funding. His own health suffered from the strain, leading to an early death.

With an annual incidence of more than 600,000 cases, thromboembolic stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer (Kochanek et al., 2004). The number of stroke survivors has increased to 4.5 million adults nationally as the management of acute stroke continues to improve (AHA, 2002). Psychiatric syndromes are common complications of stroke and are associated with psychologic distress, increased impairment, poor rehabilitation outcomes, and excess morbidity. The purpose of this chapter is to describe clinically important poststroke psychiatric disorders and suggest appropriate treatment. Cognitive deficits are the most common psychiatric complication of stroke and affect nearly all stroke survivors. The type of cognitive disturbance depends on the location of the brain injury. Left hemisphere strokes frequently cause aphasia. Right hemisphere strokes cause substantial (but often underrecognized) cognitive impairments such as diminished insight, decreased attention, impaired spatial reasoning, and neglect syndromes. Furthermore, depending on the location of a stroke, other functions such as motivation, memory, judgment, and impulse control may also be affected. A large stroke or a series of small strokes affecting both hemispheres may lead to the global cognitive impairment of dementia. When a series of strokes is involved, the cognitive decline develops in a stepwise manner. This vascular dementia or multi-infarct dementia may be difficult to distinguish from Alzheimer’s disease. Autopsy studies of patients diagnosed with vascular dementia have often demonstrated the presence of Alzheimer’s disease pathology. As many as 25% of all dementia cases are attributable to a combined neuropathology of Alzheimer’s disease and multiple infarcts (Massoud et al., 1999). In addition to strategies such as speech and language therapy, physical and occupational therapy, and cognitive rehabilitation, pharmacologic treatment may improve cognitive deficits in some stroke patients. The parallels between vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the evidence that reduced cholinergic function may play a role in both (Gottfries et al., 1994) have encouraged the use of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (eg, donepezil) in vascular dementia. These drugs have shown modest benefits in such patients (Roman et al., 2005), and their use is described in Chapter 20.

This chapter examines Gertrude Stein's authorial attention to individual moments, which may be influenced by her narrative desire to laugh. It studies her first work, Q.E.D.; observes that her explorations move from self to other through a series of philosophically informed narratives set primarily in the private sphere; and determines that this shift in Steinian narrative laughter coexists with the modernist theory on risibility.

This chapter focuses primarily on Wyler's first prestige project, Counselor-at-Law, starring John Barrymore. It recounts the director's behind-the-scenes problems with the star actor, but also analyzes Wyler's successful transformation of a hit play by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Elmer Rice for the screen. In what was the first of a dozen Broadway hits that Wyler brought to the screen, he displays early-on his gifts for making a play look and feel cinematic. The chapter also touches on his attempts (with John Huston) to bring Laughing Boy to the screen, as well as briefly discussing his film Tom Brown of Culver, which was made in part on location.

This chapter analyses more of Arthur Szyk's artworks during his time in Paris. It reveals the particularities of Szyk's artistry which would remain with him for the rest of his career, such as his tendency to produce in miniatures. His art also demonstrates a wide variety of formats and subject-matter, ranging from stories drawn from Jewish history to a formal portrait of M. de Monzie. The chapter focuses in particular on his pieces for Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St Anthony). It also looks into the publication of Le Juif qui rit (The Jew Who Laughs), which were small, paperbound volumes containing pen and ink drawings to illustrate brief jokes. Finally, the chapter studies Szyk's illumination of the Statue of Kalisz, which can be considered an indication of his re-entry into the political life of his homeland.

Eugene O'Neill's encounter with religion was as much personal as philosophical, and it is understandable that he would be attracted to Friedrich Nietzsche and think that he could regard the once-shocking saying “God is dead” as a celebration. O'Neill felt deeply the dualisms of philosophy, particularly between matter and spirit, experience and meaning, and the individual and society. The conflict between science and religion divides two families in O'Neill's Dynamo. During the years immediately preceding Lazarus Laughed and The Great God Brown, O'Neill was confronted by sickness and death. Death is a meditative dread to O'Neill during the writing of Lazarus Laughed, and a possible answer to facing death becomes the central theme. He made his last effort at treating religion on the stage in Days Without End. It can be stated that O'Neill may have used the theater to deal with religious questions.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of Garbo's laughter and why it was touted as so remarkable an event in the annals of film. Its praise as a historic occasion was a savvy promotional gimmick that predated the making of Ninotchka, the 1939 film that it was publicizing. It explores the historic significance of Garbo's face, as director Ernst Lubitsch contemplates with great delicacy in Ninotchka. The chapter also studies and analyzes her unique relation to language, her unsteady command of the idioms of everyday life, that betray her anti-modernity. Furthermore, it looks at the manners through which Garbo was hailed as the spiritual vessel in which Hollywood of the 1930s decanted its highest ideals of womanhood. Her incarnation as Ninotchka, for example, represents an instructive example of how America implicated the sexual fate of women in its own historical triumphalism. Thus, the chapter explores the character and roles that Garbo would take and how they influenced America.

This chapter indirectly connects with the question for which Cixous remains best known today, the notion of écriture feminine developed in her short text ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, through consideration of the fiction she wrote at the same time, Souffles. It focusses on the figure of the mother, investigating especially how the mother is a metaphor. Souffles is a hymn of praise to two writers who can only metaphorically be considered mothers, the homosexual male writer, Jean Genet, and the celibate nun, St. Theresa of Avila. The position of mother is available to anyone able and willing to invent it, notably ‘poets’ who are not threatened by a porous border between self and other. The generosity that Cixous had considered a ‘feminine’ property in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is here a characteristic of the ‘mother’ but also of the ‘nègre’. Already in 1974, Souffles proposed a visionary harnessing of sexual and postcolonial politics.

As Cobb’s career hit rock bottom, his health declined, as did daughter Buff’s second marriage. However, he started to write his life story in the late 1930s, titled Exit Laughing. Cobb’s opposition to the New Deal and a third term for Roosevelt led him to campaign for Willkie in 1940. These exertions exacerbated Cobb’s diabetes and intestinal problems, and his health was severely affected. Cobb managed to finish his autobiography, but his condition deteriorated and he died in March 1944. Ellis concludes by remarking on Cobb’s career and legacy.

The Melungeons are a group of miscegenated people shrouded in mystery and mythology. Represented by Mike Mignola in his 2008 comic book mini-series Hellboy: The Crooked Man, they have been described by Wayne Winkler as a group comprised of a complicated and contested constellation of races and ethnicities, including whites, African Americans, and local indigenous tribes. This chapter examines how Mignola demystifies Appalachian witchcraft lore in Hellboy through the subversions of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of a “laughing truth” that leads to generic parody laughter with respect to visual narratives or graphic novels. It looks at claims that Mignola was guilty of racial stereotyping or egregious misrepresentation of a historical Melungeon people, and argues that Hellboy actually undermines and refutes these stereotypes by situating them in a complex narrative of history, myth, and memory as well as giving a voice to a people who have long been neglected in official histories.

The darkly humorous mode of antiwar critique in Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and the satirical newspaper The Onion: America’s Finest News Source has been a prevalent trope of oppositional politics in America over the past decade. However, this practice dates back 200 years ago, when The Cynick and The Tickler employed satire to express their dissatisfaction with the War of 1812. This chapter examines the crucial role played in both eras by American antiwar satirists, dubbed “laughing doves” in reference to the hawk/dove terminology first coined in 1812. It provides a valuable historical frame for political discourse in the public sphere by focusing on three wars: the War of 1812 (–1815), the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), and the U.S.-Philippine War (1899–1913). It looks at a number of forgotten American antiwar satirists, as well as several Americans who are remembered for everything but their antiwar satire, from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Finally, it argues that antiwar satirists navigate between the “twin accusations of triviality and treason”.