Daniel Tosh

Daniel Tosh
Author: Belmont and Belcourt Biographies
Publisher: Price World Publishing
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2012-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1619840669

As the host of Comedy Central's "Tosh.0," Daniel Tosh is known for his biting wit and his ability to make just about everyone laugh their head off. Daniel himself describes his wit as "insanely condescending and sarcastic," which just so happens to go directly against the way he was raised. Although as the son of a preacher his beginnings may be as far from the comedic world as possible, he has made a very lucrative career out of making people laugh. In this biography you will learn how Daniel turned his religious upbringing into a life of jokes and sarcasm. In addition, you will learn what keeps him excited about life and what he is planning for the future. From racism to sexism to politics, all you need to know about Daniel Tosh is right here, right now, in the most up to date coverage of his life.

Tea Cakes for Tosh

Tea Cakes for Tosh
Author: Kelly Starling Lyons
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2012
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0399252134

Tosh has spent many days in the kitchen with his grandmother, Honey, watching her bake cookies and listening to tales of their slave ancestors, so when Honey's memory starts to fail, Tosh is able to help with the cookies and more. Includes a recipe for tea cakes. Full color.

The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island

The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island
Author: John Osborne Austin
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
Total Pages: 508
Release: 1969
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN: 080630006X

This legendary work consists of alphabetically arranged genealogical tables of approximately 500 Rhode Island families, representing thousands of descendants of pre--1690 settlers, all carried to the third generation, and some--about 100 families-- carried to the fourth.

The Todd Glass Situation

The Todd Glass Situation
Author: Todd Glass
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 147671441X

A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man—and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman. Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convince him that it was finally time to come out to the world. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone—young and old, gay and straight—breathe a little more freely. Peppered with anecdotes from his life among comedy’s greatest headliners and tales of the occasionally insane lengths Todd went through to keep a secret that—let’s face it—he probably didn’t have to keep for as long as he did, The Todd Glass Situation is a front-row seat to the last thirty plus years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance.

Reading the Comments

Reading the Comments
Author: Joseph M. Reagle, Jr.
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262328887

What we can learn about human nature from the informative, manipulative, confusing, and amusing messages at the bottom of the web. Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In this book, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations “on the bottom half of the Internet,” he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison), and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism, and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying, and misogyny. He considers the way comment—a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking—affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling—short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, “WTF?!?”

Extreme Mean

Extreme Mean
Author: Paula Todd
Publisher: Signal
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2014-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0771084048

From one of Canada's foremost investigative writers, a groundbreaking exposé on the motives and machinations behind cyberabuse - tormenting, trolling, harassment, cyberbullying, stalking, and sexual extortion - and the toll it is taking on children, youth, and adults around the world. It seems as if each week our news broadcasts, newspaper headlines, Twitter feeds, and Facebook timelines are dominated by stories of cyberbullying and other digital abuse. This isn't the playground teasing and name-calling of generations before the Internet. This new abuse's unique characteristics - anonymity, permanence, and viral audience - can relentlessly exacerbate the humiliation, pain, and danger of its victims. Ugly rumours that once snaked through school hallways and around the office water cooler are now delivered at lightning speed to the world, while sexual extortion and revenge-porn sites target those who've shared intimate images or had them stolen by hackers. Cyberstalkers who target adults destroy reputations and careers. And the splendid connectivity of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, also makes us vulnerable to "interpersonal terrorism," while apps that promise privacy and rapid deletion are ridden with loopholes. With vivid reportage, Paula Todd goes deep into the world of "extreme mean," uncovering the people who use the Internet to undermine lives rather than improve them. Through exclusive personal stories of online abuse from around the world, including the suicide of Amanda Todd and the untold costs of Rebecca Black's experience as "the most hated girl on the Internet," as well as interviews with troll-tormentors, accidental abusers, victimized kids, and adults, Extreme Mean explores the often surprising roots of online abuse, challenges current academic thinking, and offers new ways of understanding the nasty and the nefarious who erode humanity and threaten Internet freedom. Provocative, astute and compelling, Extreme Mean is a shocking yet inspiring illustration of behaviour that affects all of us. It's a call-to-arms for change, and a search for ways to turn a moral panic into a moral possibility.

Theology, Comedy, Politics

Theology, Comedy, Politics
Author: Marcus Pound
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506458351

What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war, a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and, more recently, Rowan Williams, in their accommodation to literature, choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast, this book develops recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine, but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.

This Is Not Fame

This Is Not Fame
Author: Doug Stanhope
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0306825759

An unfiltered, unapologetic, hilarious, and sometimes obscene assemblage of tales from the down-and-dirty traveling comedy circuit Doug Stanhope has been drunkenly stumbling down the back roads and dark alleys of stand-up comedy for over a quarter of a century, roads laden with dank bars, prostitutes, cheap drugs, farm animals, evil dwarfs, public nudity, menacing third-world police, psychotic breaks, sex offenders, and some understandable suicides. You know, just for levity. While other comedians were seeking fame, Stanhope was seeking immediate gratification, dark spectacle, or sometimes just his pants. Not to say he hasn't rubbed elbows with fame. He's crashed its party, snorted its coke, and jumped into its pool naked, literally and often repeatedly -- all while artfully dodging fame himself. Doug spares no legally permissible detail, and his stories couldn't be told any other way. They're weird, uncomfortable, gross, disturbing, and fucking funny. This Is Not Fame is by no means a story of overcoming a life of excess, immorality, and reckless buffoonery. It's an outright celebration of it. For Stanhope, the party goes on.

Taboo Comedy

Taboo Comedy
Author: Chiara Bucaria
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2016-11-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137593385

The essays in this collection explore taboo and controversial humour in traditional scripted (sitcoms and other comedy series, animated series) and non-scripted forms (stand-up comedy, factual and reality shows, and advertising) both on cable and network television. Whilst the focus is predominantly on the US and UK, the contributors also address more general and global issues and different contexts of reception, in an attempt to look at this kind of comedy from different perspectives. Over the last few decades, taboo comedy has become a staple of television programming, thus raising issues concerning its functions and appropriateness, and making it an extremely relevant subject for those interested in how both humour and television work.

The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose - Third Canadian Edition

The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose - Third Canadian Edition
Author: Laura Buzzard
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 1122
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1554813468

The third Canadian edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. There is also a focus on issues of great importance in twenty-first-century Canada, such as climate change, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Jian Ghomeshi trial, Facebook, police discrimination, trans rights, and postsecondary education in the humanities. Works of different lengths and levels of difficulty are represented, as are narrative, descriptive and persuasive essays—and, new to this edition, lyric essays. For the new edition there are also considerably more short pieces than ever before; a number of op-ed pieces are included, as are pieces from blogs and from online news sources. The representation of academic writing from several disciplines has been increased—and in some cases the anthology also includes news reports presenting the results of academic research to a general audience. Also new to this edition are essays from a wide range of the most celebrated prose writers of the modern era—from Susan Sontag, Eula Biss, and Michel Foucault to Anne Carson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The anthology also offers increased diversity of representation—including, for example, a larger proportion of First Nations writers and women writers than previous Canadian editions. Unobtrusive explanatory notes appear at the bottom of the page, and each selection is preceded by a headnote that provides students with information regarding the context in which the piece was written. Each reading is also followed by questions for discussion. A unique feature is the inclusion of a set of additional notes on the anthology’s companion website—notes designed to be of particular help to EAL students and/or students who have little familiarity with Canadian culture. The anthology is accompanied by two companion websites. The student website features additional readings and interactive writing exercises (as well as the additional notes). The instructor website provides additional discussion questions and, for a number of the anthology selections, background information that may be of interest.