Composing humor: Twain, Thurber, and you (Domains in language and composition)

By Jean C. Sisk

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0153123737
• ISBN13: 9780153123733
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

contents of book

The authors discuss the techniques and devices of humor, with examples from Thurber and Twain, followed by discussion questions and exercises. Topics include: comedy, wit, humor, realism, romance and tragedy; jokes, jests, and tall tales, the way-out whopper, the peripatetic prevarification, going one better and the practical joke; geniuses for minor difficulties, life's little absurdities, humor of habit, compulsive characters, human machines, humor as criticism, aiming the barbs, satire and irony, masking the tears, poetic paradies, scholarly mistreatments. Twain is timeless, if a little less fun as one grows older. Thurber's "battle of the sexes" stuff is politically incorrect (even for 1972), blatently offensive, and not funny. Still the authors are commended in trying to tackle the difficult subject of why something is funny and try to teach the writing of humor. It is the only textbook on the subject I have ever seen.