Humour is pervasive in contemporary culture, and is generally celebrated as a public good. Yet there are times when it is felt to produce intolerance, misunderstanding or even hatred. This book brings together, for the first time, contributions that consider the ethics as well as the aesthetics of humour. The book focuses on the abuses and limits of humour, some of which excite considerable social tension and controversy. Beyond a Joke is an exciting intervention, full of challenging questions and issues.

At the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, a global audience of nearly one billion viewers were treated to the unprecedented sight of James Bond meeting Queen Elizabeth II. Shortly after, the 'Queen' hurled herself out of a helicopter, her Union Jack parachute guiding her down to the Olympic Stadium. What it is about moments such as these that define both a particular idea of Britishness and a particular type of British film comedy? How has British cinema exploited parody as a means of negotiating its sense of identity? How does this function within a globalized marketplace and in the face of dominant Hollywood cinema? Beyond a Joke explores the myriad ways British film culture has used forms of parody, from the 1960s to the present day. It provides a contextual and textual analysis of a range of works that, while popular, have only rarely been the subject of serious academic attention – from Morecambe and Wise to Shaun of the Dead to the London 2012 Olympics' opening ceremony. Combining the methodologies both of film history and film theory, Beyond a Joke locates parody within specific industrial and cultural moments, while also looking in detail at the aesthetics of parody as a mode. Ultimately, such works are shown to be a form of culturally specific film or televisual product for exporting to the global market, in which 'Britishness', shaped in self-mocking and ironic terms, becomes the selling point. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout with a diverse range of examples, Beyond a Joke is the first book to explore parody within a specifically British context and makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on both British and global film culture.

Beyond a Joke is a celebration of comedy - one of the modern world's most dominant and compelling art forms - but it is also the story of comedy's dark side, homing in on the scandals that have surrounded some of light entertainment's biggest stars, and telling it as it is, featuring insight from one who was there at the time. While Beyond a Joke explores the extremes of this world it also addresses another question. Are comedians naturally dysfunctional, or does the stress and pressure of the job make them dysfunctional? Ruby Wax once told the author that she had builders in her house who were just as emotionally unstable as most stand-up comedians she had worked with. But they don't want to go on stage and plead with an audience to love them. Bruce Dessau is the only person who could write this book. From Russell Brand slashing his chest onstage to Jo Brand trashing a friend's car on the motorway, he has heard it all. Bruce Dessau knows where the bodies are buried.

This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Allais' story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.

This book argues that when visual jokes are harmful, they harm in a specific way: a subject’s personhood is revoked in a way that differs both in kind and degree depending on whether that person is depicted or described. Such revocation can occur in every role and any stage within the joke’s context, from character to audience member, from moment of depiction to uncritical exposure. Unlike a mere unhumorous insult, which doesn’t require the sympathy of its audience but can operate solely between the target and the bully, a joke requires a particular kind of response from its audience to complete itself—to “deliver”, which requires not only some degree of complicity from audience members, but a complicity earned at the expense of the joke’s referent. This book shows how we need not prevent the occurrence of these things in order to undermine their oppressive power—we only need the right kind of recontextualization: turning those utterances into jokes or turning those jokes against themselves. Unlike other forms of visual oppression, the harms contained within visual jokes can be reconfigured to affirm those they were created to harm, changing their function from jokes which attack others to jokes which attack themselves, empowering those they were created to target by calling into question the problematic conceptions of audiences who are sympathetic to the harmful joke’s initial formulation.

Despite the fact that they are often crucial to our understanding, the vague, ineffable elements of language use and communication have received much less attention from linguists than the more concrete, effable ones. This has left a range of important questions unanswered. How might we account for the communication of non-propositional phenomena such as moods, emotions and impressions? What type of cognitive response do these phenomena trigger, if not conceptual or propositional? Do creative metaphors and unknown words in second languages and other ‘pointers’ to ‘conceptual regions’ communicate concepts learned from language alone? How might the descriptive ineffability of interjections, free indirect speech etc. be accommodated within a theory of communication? What of those working on the aesthetics of artworks, music and literature? What can evolution tell us about ineffability? The papers in this volume address these fascinating questions head-on. They represent a range of different attempts to answer them and, in so doing, allow us to pose exciting new questions. The aim, to bring the ineffable firmly within the grasp of theoretical pragmatics.

Are you ready to step over the edge? This grand horror collection contains the greatest supernatural mysteries, gothic novels, dark romances & macabre tales: Bram Stoker: Dracula The Squaw... John William Polidori: The Vampyre James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Rip Van Winkle Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado The Masque of the Red Death The Premature Burial Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental... H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House... Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Haunted House... Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel The Woman in White Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla... Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan... William Hope Hodgson: The Ghost Pirates The Night Land E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night... Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables... Thomas Hardy: What the Shepherd Saw The Grave by the Handpost Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho The Italian Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Rudyard Kipling: My Own True Ghost Story The City of Dreadful Night The Mark of the Beast... Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Dark Other Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian: The Man-Wolf... Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach... Pedro De Alarçon: The Nail Walter Hubbell: The Great Amherst Mystery Some Real American Ghosts Some Chinese Ghosts...

Having been mentored by Viktor E. Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, Emeritus Professor David Guttmann authored this book so general readers may understand this approach to finding meaning in life at the point when most of us begin deeply wondering over that question, at midlife and beyond. Especially in this day and age of multiple demands on our time and seemingly non-stop obligations, we too often find that it is only when the dust settles, after a work day or work week, or even after retirement, when we begin to wonder: What is the meaning of life? The purpose? This book is a new millennium venture into those questions and their answers using logotherapy, written by a sage understudy who recalls Frankl, with his logotherapy, as the epitome of his theory even at 80 years old, wise and witty, exuding an energy, enthusiasm and youthful spirit that belied his years by decades. Aging does not diminish our power, our energy, and our quest for life, but reshapes it with new understandings, goals, and needs. But, says Guttmann, we live in a technical and machine-based world now, in which there is a danger of losing our souls. Here, readers find a new, creative perspective on aging and a fresh spiritual outlook. This book will be of interest not only to general readers, especially those at midlife and beyond, but also to their families, friends, and students or professionals in the helping professions. This unique work provides knowledge to find meaning in life derived from the fields of philosophy, psychology, religion and gerontology, with case illustrations and vignettes to give readers both intellectual pleasure and practical guidance.