Comedy Can Be Deadly

Comedy Can Be Deadly
Author: Ryan Rivers
Publisher: Partners in Crime Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2024-10-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1956244050
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When the curtain falls, the body count rises Murder takes center stage in this witty and whimsical cozy mystery set in the heart of small-town Texas. When former nurse Sho Tanaka reluctantly takes on the role of Lysander in a community theater production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, he expects his biggest challenge to be remembering his lines. But when an actor takes a deadly tumble from the rafters, Sho finds himself tangled in a web of secrets, lies, and murder most foul. With his best friend and the town mayor, Levi Blue, at his side, Sho must navigate a cast of quirky suspects, each with motives murkier than the Guadalupe River. From the high-strung director with a flair for drama to the method actor who takes his roles a little too seriously, everyone's got something to hide. With the killer still on the loose and the show's opening night fast approaching, Sho and Levi find he finds themselves tangled in a web of secrets, lies, and murder most foul. With its clever Shakespearean touches, charming setting, and endearing amateur sleuths, Comedy Can Be Deadly offers a fresh and entertaining twist on the cozy mystery genre. Ryan Rivers artfully blends humor, heart, and homicide in this delightful page-turner that will keep you guessing until the final act. Perfect for fans of Shakespeare, small-town mysteries, and quirky characters, this novel proves that even in the quaintest of communities, comedy can quickly turn to tragedy. Will Sho and Levi unmask the killer before the curtain falls, or will they find themselves upstaged in a deadly denouement? Places, please! Grab your copy of Comedy Can Be Deadly and get ready for a mystery that's sure to bring down the house!

The Art of Monster, Inc.

The Art of Monster, Inc.
Author:
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2015-11-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1452147515
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The Art of Monsters, Inc. opens the door into Pixar's colorful archives of concept art and to the endearing story of Monsters, Inc. Since the very first bedtime, children around the world have known that once their parents tuck them into bed and shut off the light, monsters lie waiting behind closet doors, ready to emerge. But what they don't realize is that these monsters scare children because they have to. It's their job. This superb film from Pixar Studios, the people who brought you Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Toy Story 2, reveals the truth about monsters with the brilliant techniques that have earned them their reputation as a ground-breaking animation studio. This incredible body of artwork was commissioned from the top artists, illustrators, and animators in the industry and from it the ultimate visual approach of the film was defined. From sketches scribbled on napkins and quickly inked marker drawings, to finished oil paintings and fabulous pastel color scripts, this behind-the-scenes artwork reveals the elaborate creative process behind a blockbuster film.

Seriously Funny

Seriously Funny
Author: Barbara Hamby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2010
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0820330876
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Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Tour said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.

Humor, Seriously

Humor, Seriously
Author: Jennifer Aaker
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0593135296
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WALL STREET JOURNAL, LOS ANGELES TIMES, AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER • Anyone—even you!—can learn how to harness the power of humor in business (and life), based on the popular class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Don’t miss the authors’ TED Talk, “Why great leaders take humor seriously,” online now. “The ultimate guide to using the magical power of funny as a tool for leadership and a force for good.”—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When and Drive We are living through a period of unprecedented uncertainty and upheaval in both our personal and professional lives. So it should come as a surprise to exactly no one that trust, human connection, and mental well-being are all on the decline. This may seem like no laughing matter. Yet, the research shows that humor and laughter are among the most valuable tools we have at our disposal for strengthening bonds and relationships, diffusing stress and tension, boosting resilience, and performing when the stakes are high. That’s why Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas teach the popular course Humor: Serious Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where they help some of the world’s most hard-driving, blazer-wearing business minds infuse more humor and levity into their work and lives. In Humor, Seriously, they draw on findings by behavioral scientists, world-class comedians, and inspiring business leaders to reveal how humor works and—more important—how you can use more of it, better. Aaker and Bagdonas unpack the theory and application of humor: what makes something funny, how to mine your life for material, and simple ways to identify and leverage your unique humor style. They show how to use humor to rebuild vital connections; appear more confident, competent, and authentic at work; and foster cultures where levity and creativity can thrive. President Dwight David Eisenhower once said, “A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.” If Dwight David Eisenhower, the second least naturally funny president (after Franklin Pierce), thought humor was necessary to win wars, build highways, and warn against the military-industrial complex, then you might consider learning it too.

Reader in Comedy

Reader in Comedy
Author: Magda Romanska
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474247903
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This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.

The Transnationalism of American Culture

The Transnationalism of American Culture
Author: Rocío G. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0415641926
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This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.

Just as Deadly

Just as Deadly
Author: Marissa A. Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-02-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1009158201
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A riveting scientific account of why and how female serial killers commit murder-and often get away with it.

The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy

The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy
Author: Patrice A. Oppliger
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-04-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030372146
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This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.

The Comedy of Survival

The Comedy of Survival
Author: Joseph W. Meeker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:
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With imagination and flair, the author also introduces the idea of a play ethic, as opposed to a work ethic, and demonstrates the importance of play as a necessary and desirable component of the comic spirit. The Comedy of Survival is a book for literary critics, environmentalists, human ecologists, philosophers, and anthropologists. General readers, too, will find much to ponder in the author's clear explication of how all of us might become better stewards of this, our home planet Earth.

Paracomedy

Paracomedy
Author: Craig Jendza
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0190090944
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Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Drama is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. Jendza presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of light-heartedness or humor. While this work traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. Jendza argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides' most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to re-appropriate Aristophanes' mockery of his theatrical techniques. Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy theorizes a new, ground-breaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.