... readers because it sometimes seems funny-there are abrupt turn- abou ts and mundane anticlimaxes, strange incongruities, or exaggerated details (e.g., where the two warriors fight ankle-deep in their own blood). This element of absurdity can be written off as quaintly conventional medi- eval...

... of nonmasculine rhyme as rich as this one, it is difficult to go back to the second installment of The Faerie Queene and not be irritated. Many of Spenser’s feminine rhymes are just not funny. Consider, for instance, the following speech by Prince Arthur in book 4: Certes sir Knight, ye seemen...

..., Twelfth Night and The Cherry Orchard are de- lightfully funny plays. Much of their humor derives from the same familiar sources of farce: comic routines, mechanistic behavior, lack of self-knowledge, misunderstanding, knockabout. Thus we laugh at Charlotte’s tricks and Sir Toby’s “admirable...

... amended Hegel, first as tragedy, then as farce, those who endure the second time may not consider it funny at all — which, not at all incidentally, may remind those who work in the theater what the laughs disguise, what in recent theater history Samuel Beckett understood, passing it on to Harold...

... it unmistakably clear that this serious mdis antithetical to the sense of humor. The antithesis runs throughout Forster‘s fiction: Philip Herriton, we remember, had two resources-to find life “funny” and to find it “beautiful.”s They are not part of one view of life, as Thomson would contend...

..., and John are tumbled at the end of the Miller‘s Tale, and critics have seen them as getting their deserts and funny in their pain. How- ever, the “rule of justice” which makes us feel that the clerks and good Carpenter John have violated norms, which allows us to view their affliction...

... a fashion? Granted, the ending is funny, but does that really make it ironic and keep it from being erotic? Hardly! After all, fabliaux are both funny and very sexual. Humor in dealing with matters sexual does not guarantee by any means that the writer is attempting to “correct vice.” Would Au...

... the story, but others used it to train the potential adult, reducing it to moral truisms. In a very funny passage Nicholson describes Bronson Alcott, in the school he ran during the 1830s, solemnly summarizing the allegory of the poem for five-year-olds. Nicholson herself argues for a meta-allegorical...

... knows what it signifies: the sig- nified is given without being known.Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks...

... in the book) leads him into a distorting solemnity in his approach to As I Lay Dying: funny Anse Bundren suddenly becomes “unspeakable,” and our proper feeling for him should be fury (“at his cheapness and pusillanimity”) and disgust (“for his essential cal- lousness and cruelty We are, I think...

... original phase in the history of comedy has been com- pleted. In the ’sixties the comic dramatist leaves us alone and giddy in a spinning world: it is very funny and very terrifying” (p. 238). Perhaps. Yet there is ancient and medieval as well as modern experience to testify that the drama...

..., was basically a comic device; the parodies and burlesques of pretentious language, pompous characters, and idiotic plots appealed to a comedian because they were funny. Twain attacked classics frequently only to enjoy the discomfort of William Dean Howells. His “critical” position in attacking...

... Ondaatje or Leonard Cohen; the clever and funny ironies of Miriam Waddington, Leon Rooke or George Bowering; the arch tone of Robertson Davies or John Metcalf; the pointed one of Susan Swann, Libby Scheier, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip. And we must not forget...

... beauty, in her account of its history, and finally, and appropriately, in the concluding words of the play. All these are eminently funny passages. But wherein does their humor lie? In the case of her quibble with Veit this is not difficult to see. Clearly, it revolves on her play...

... Gallant, Michael Ondaatje or Leonard Cohen; the clever and funny ironies of Miriam Waddington, Leon Rooke or George Bowering; the arch tone of Robertson Davies or John Metcalf; the pointed one of Susan Swann, Libby Scheier, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip...

... to the category of what a college administrator once referred to in my presence as “funny languages” now produce a small but growing number of young scholars trained in the methods of modern criticism but also capable of reading Yiddish literature sympathetically (and unashamedly). These few will provide...

... Dryden for the wisdom of his comedy, but McFadden rarely quotes a funny line and never quotes Dryden when rude or coarse, which he often is. McFadden’s Dryden “disliked puns” (p. 242); his propensity for “all-too-concrete comparisons between the physi- cal and the psychic” is simply his...

... take a pride to gird at me.” When he mentions his “dagger of lath,” he seems to compare himself to the Vice, or Fool, of early comedy; and, like the Vice, he is a much more moving force in the plot than most of the stupidly funny clowns and country jakes of Elizabethan drama ;12...

... consideration that supersedes it: history, culture, philosophy, form. The life story of the individual author is often viewed as relatively insignificant: though of undeniable lowbrow interest, it does not lead anywhere, change anything, or install some new cognitive system. Pollak’s brave, funny...

...-Freudian sense of what the poet and his work were actually like. There are exceptions, of course: Onorato is unintentionally very funny about the “displaced breast symbol” (a pitcher), which-in common with many of her sex and class and time-the woman of Book 11 carried on her head (p. 214...