In today's multicultural and multireligious societies, humour and comedy often become the focus of controversy over alleged racist or offensive content, as shown, for instance, by the intense debate of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Ali G and Borat, and the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite these intense debates, commentary on humour in the academy lacks a clear way of connecting the serious and the humorous, and a clear way of accounting for the serious impact of comic language. The absence of a developed 'serious' vocabulary with which to judge the humorous tends to encourage polarized debates, which fail to account for the paradoxes of humour. This book draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, as a form of language similar to metaphor, it is both unstable and unpredictable, and structurally prone to act rhetorically; that is, to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and that aimed at Asians in the UK, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour shows how racist humour expresses and supports racial stereotypes in the US and UK, while also exploring the forms of resistance presented by the humour of Black and Asian comedians to such stereotypes. An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern forms of humour, this book will be of interest to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies, as well as those working in the fields of race and ethnicity, humour and cultural theory.

An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern humour, Weaver draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, being similar to metaphor, it is prone to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and Asians in the UK, this book shows how it expresses and supports racial stereotypes, while exploring the forms of resistance presented by Black and Asian comedians.

An investigation of the origins of comedy and the meaning of laughter, drawing on biology, anthropology, classical studies, behavioural science, philosophy and psychology - with a few authorial jokes along the way.

France presents a comprehensive critique of composition theory and pedagogy from a leftist perspective. He contests the notion that composition courses have no content and are only skills courses, devoid of intellectual suppositions and cultural premises. Writing instructors should therefore focus on teaching students how to retextualize contemporary cultural practices and become proficient in dissenting from as well as affirming the status quo. Each chapter extends the argument for a critical composition practice from theory into explicit, detailed narratives of composition techniques and analysis. Issues covered are the implicit ideology and curricular function of composition, the definition of a materialist rhetoric, the place of feminism in the writing classroom, the interrogation of dominant ideology in business and professional writing courses, the critique of knowledge making in the context of social-epistemic pedagogy, and the historical and rhetorical relations of religion to persuasion.

Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some "traditions" dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter. Uniquely, however, the essays here peruse a remarkable paradox---the convergence of death and humor.

Eskridge and Hunter's Sexuality, Gender and the Law provides detailed information on the sexuality, gender, and the law. It covers the rapidly developing field of transgender law as well as federal court developments in the areas of same-sex sexual harassment, discrimination against transgendered persons as gender discrimination, and pregnancy discrimination and legally defining gender. Specific court decisions on custody, sexual orientation discrimination in jury selection, and gender identity are included and there is an appendix with an annotated list of the best web sites for research on issues of sexuality and gender law.