World of Comedy & Humor

Community College of Vermont - Middlebury, VT

Currently accepting resumes from applicants interested in teaching:  Fall 2016

HUM-1240   World of Comedy & Humor   3 Credits
What makes us laugh? This interdisciplinary course explores the nature and role of humor across cultures and many of the forms it has taken throughout history. Examples of comic styles and devices will be critically analyzed in a range of social and performative contexts. Theories of humor will be examined to illuminate how, through generating laughter and expressing emotions and ideas that are often socially suppressed, humor can be effective in entertaining, persuading, communicating social commentary, and even in healing.

    1. Discuss how humor developed as a mode of communication in antiquity, who has been allowed to use humor and in what settings, and how historic characters like jesters, wits and bards combined humor with critical commentary to persuade, instruct, and address social and political issues.
    2. Analyze examples of how and what humor and comedy communicate in a range of social and performative settings, such as comics, cartoons, art, literature, film, theatre, radio, television, and a range of everyday events and conversations.
    3. Discuss how the principles of effective and appropriate humor vary between cultural groups, and identify common roles for humorists and the types of comic messages that appear to be universally funny.
    4. Identify cross-cultural examples of comic styles and devices, such as satire, irony, sarcasm, parody, slapstick, black humor, caricature, puns, jokes, and comedic timing, and demonstrate how these can be manipulated to construct effective humorous messages for particular audiences.
    5. Examine major theories of humor and hilarity, why we need this, and why individuals react to it differently, as developed by philosophers, artists, psychologists, anthropologists and biologists.
    6. Explore the creative foundations of humor and how it can be both spontaneous and deliberately used to communicate and mediate social tensions around gender, religion, social status, politics, and insecurity.
    7. Discuss the status of comedy among the modes of communication, the exploitation of language in joke telling, and the risks, constraints and ethical dimensions involved with humor.
    8. Consider how laughter, the development of a humorous worldview, and a greater appreciation for the comic aspects of our human condition has developed as a movement designed to help individuals with physical and psychological healing and alleviate some of the current problems that confront humanity.

Master's degree required.

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