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From Stephen Elliott
Plenty of people, from Christopher Hitchens to Adam Carolla, have made the assertion that women aren’t funny.
You can probably guess that we at the Rumpus disagree, since we have a whole feature devoted to Funny Women (plus we live in the real world, rather than Misogynist Fantasyland, where women have never, ever rejected Christopher Hitchens or Adam Carolla, and always laugh at their jokes).
...moreIs Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
A Bad Idea I’m About to Do.
I Feel Bad About My Neck.
The titles of comedy books almost make a good blog post just by themselves. But if you want to learn more about books to laugh to, check out this Splitsider list, “The Ultimate Comedy Library.” It includes fiction, nonfiction, memoir, oral history, and an afterword by God.
...moreGIF connoisseurs and fanfic devotees, all that effort you’ve put into polishing your blog to a perfect gleam might finally pay off.
Chronicle Books is looking for the next great humor book, and they want you to pitch them via Tumblr.
...more“I feel that for writers, an obsession with what is elegant or what is a cliché or not a cliché can become very inhibiting.” Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro stands up for cliches. (via Bookninja)
“Laughs were out, torture porn was in.” Colin Bateman wonders what happened to humor in crime fiction.
...more“But there is another issue, too: one for which you can’t blame publishers or booksellers. The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard.
“It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime.”
Another strong argument to be made for the importance of comic literature at The Times.
...more“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).”
At 3 a.m.
...more“I’d been thinking about writing a book on genocide for some time, but the project really kicked off about a year-and-a-half ago, around the time my wife told me she was pregnant with our second child.
Naturally, I thought about the Holocaust.
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Incapable of making a good cup of tea, Barbara Gupta asks her colleague Meena Patel to teach her how to make Chai, not the pre-sweetened Starbucks kind that she loves so much, but the real thing, like the Chai that was served to her when buying overpriced textiles while vacationing in Coldcutta, I mean Calcutta, I mean Kolkata.
A new and heralded collection of short stories digs to the heart of obsession, isolation, and strangeness.
Classicist Mary Beard has discovered a joke book from the 4th century AD, filled with rib-ticklers from the late Roman Empire. Just like today, the old egghead is a source of tremendous humor, along with other frequently targeted figures of fun, such as eunuchs (of course), and people with hernias.
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