Laughing at Yourself

Laughing at Yourself
Author: Frank E. Burdett
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2014-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1493134620

Frank E. Burdett is a survivor from seriousness. This is no laughing matter and only needs a simple explanation. Frank decided to divorce himself from all seriousness in an effort to gain control of his sense of humour. Once he attained his sense of humour he realised that the amount of absurdity and nonsense that abounds in society can only be diagnosed, in the gentlest of terms, as over-seriousness of epidemic proportions. Frank has researched and evaluated the importance of nurturing your sense of humour in order to balance the well-being of people everywhere, especially against the high degrees of stress, both emotional and work-associated challenges that attack everyone today. He came to the conclusion that people of all persuasions have completely lost the knack of being able to step aside and have a good and free laugh at themselves. Therefore, the time has come for you to learn to laugh at yourself and live longer! Frank knows the effects of harrowing trauma, being attacked, mauled and carried away by a man-eating tiger and, curing himself of spreading melanoma cancer of the neck/shoulder, both lungs, liver and bowel cancer. He had been diagnosed by orthodox medicine as stage IV and given six months to live. He tuned to find an alternative cure. He has now been four years free of cancer. Frank devised a technique whereby, even you, can benefit and learn to laugh at yourself. You have nothing to lose, except your overpowering seriousness. Frank spent three years delving into the properties of laughing at yourself and he soon realised that there is more to laughing than showing a set of teeth. Laughing at yourself allows you the complete freedom to see stress and serious-ness in their proper light, as a threat to your long-lasting happiness. This is your opportunity to take a real look at yourself by using Franks technique to step on the path towards learning the Art of Happiness. You either want to be free from the pangs of stress and seriousness, or you do not! Your choice!

The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh

The Boy Who Made Everyone Laugh
Author: Helen Rutter
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1338652281

When life is funny, make some jokes about it. Billy Plimpton has a big dream: to become a famous comedian when he grows up. He already knows a lot of jokes, but thinks he has one big problem standing in his way: his stutter. At first, Billy thinks the best way to deal with this is to . . . never say a word. That way, the kids in his new school won’t hear him stammer. But soon he finds out this is NOT the best way to deal with things. (For one thing, it’s very hard to tell a joke without getting a word out.) As Billy makes his way toward the spotlight, a lot of funny things (and some less funny things) happen to him. In the end, the whole school will know -- If you think you can hold Billy Plimpton back, be warned: The joke will soon be on you!

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2008
Genre: Cancer
ISBN: 9780340977002

A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasnt about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

Reader's Digest Laughter is the Best Medicine: All Time Favorites

Reader's Digest Laughter is the Best Medicine: All Time Favorites
Author: Reader's Digest
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1621455971

A hilarious collection of the funniest family-friendly jokes, quotes, stories, cartoons, and anecdotes from the past 100 years of Reader’s Digest magazine. A little chuckle every day will keep the doctor away. Editors have mined the Reader’s Digest archives to bring you Laughter Is the Best Medicine, All-Time Favorites, a collection of the most hilarious jokes and anecdotes we’ve come across over the years. As you turn the pages of our newest collection, you’ll realize once again that laughter is always the best medicine. If evolution really works, how come mothers have only two hands? –Milton Berle The game card said: “Name three wars.” My teenage daughter’s response: “Civil War, Revolutionary War, and Star Wars.” Keep your temper. Nobody wants it. –Dearborn Independent Check out this billion-dollar idea. A smoke detector that shuts off when you yell, “I’m just cooking!” Anthropologists have discovered a 50-million-year-old human skull with three perfectly preserved teeth intact. They're not sure, but they think it may be the remains of the very first hockey player. –Jay Leno This collection of laugh-out-loud, clean jokes, one-liners, and other lighthearted glimpses of life—drawn from Reader’s Digest magazine’s most popular humor columns—is sure to tickle the funny bone. Packed with cartoons, quotes, quips, and stories contributed by professional comedians, joke writers, and readers of the magazine, this side-splitting compilation pokes fun at the facts and foibles of daily routines, illustrating that life is often funnier than fiction.

How to Tell a Joke

How to Tell a Joke
Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691211078

Timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audience Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome’s greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity’s funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him “the stand-up Consul.” How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero’s essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian. The result is a timeless practical guide to how a well-timed joke can win over any audience. As powerful as jokes can be, they are also hugely risky. The line between a witty joke and an offensive one isn’t always clear. Cross it and you’ll look like a clown, or worse. Here, Cicero and Quintilian explore every aspect of telling jokes—while avoiding costly mistakes. Presenting the sections on humor in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Quintilian’s The Education of the Orator, complete with an enlightening introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Tell a Joke examines the risks and rewards of humor and analyzes basic types that readers can use to write their own jokes. Filled with insight, wit, and examples, including more than a few lawyer jokes, How to Tell a Joke will appeal to anyone interested in humor or the art of public speaking.

Inside Jokes

Inside Jokes
Author: Matthew M. Hurley
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 026201582X

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Why Is My Child in Charge?

Why Is My Child in Charge?
Author: Claire Lerner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-09-02
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 153814901X

Solve toddler challenges with eight key mindshifts that will help you parent with clarity, calmness, and self-control. In Why is My Child in Charge?, Claire Lerner shows how making critical mindshifts—seeing children’s behaviors through a new lens —empowers parents to solve their most vexing childrearing challenges. Using real life stories, Lerner unpacks the individualized process she guides parents through to settle common challenges, such as throwing tantrums in public, delaying bedtime for hours, refusing to participate in family mealtimes, and resisting potty training. Lerner then provides readers with a roadmap for how to recognize the root cause of their child’s behavior and how to create and implement an action plan tailored to the unique needs of each child and family. Why is My Child in Charge? is like having a child development specialist in your home. It shows how parents can develop proven, practical strategies that translate into adaptable, happy kids and calm, connected, in-control parents.

Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half
Author: Allie Brosh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1451666187

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Funny and smart as hell” (Bill Gates), Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations. FROM THE PUBLISHER: Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written. Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to. FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book: Pictures Words Stories about things that happened to me Stories about things that happened to other people because of me Eight billion dollars* Stories about dogs The secret to eternal happiness* *These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

Great Political Wit

Great Political Wit
Author:
Publisher: Doubleday
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1998
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 9780385493475

Presents a collection of the funniest remarks and observations made by and about twentieth century politicians