Sherlock meets Veronica Mars meets Ferris Bueller's Day Off in this story of a wisecracking girl who meets a weird but brilliant boy and their roller-coaster of a semester that's one part awkward, three parts thrilling, and five parts awesome.When Philip Digby first shows up on her doorstep, Zoe Webster is not impressed. He's rude and he treats her like a book he's already read and knows the ending to. But before she knows it, Digby—annoying, brilliant and somehow...attractive? Digby—has dragged her into a series of hilarious and dangerous situations all related to an investigation into the kidnapping of a local teenage girl. A kidnapping that may be connected to the tragic disappearance of his own sister eight years ago.When it comes to Digby, Zoe just can't say no. Digby gets her, even though she barely gets herself. But is Digby a hero, or is his manic quest an indication of a desperate attempt to repair his broken family and exercise his own obsessive compulsive tendencies?A romance where the leading man is decidedly unromantic, a crime novel where catching the crook isn't the only hook, a friendship story where they aren't even sure they like each other—this is a contemporary debut with razor-sharp dialogue, ridiculously funny action, and the most charismatic dynamic duo you've ever met.

Product Description: This volume brings together the current approaches to the definition and measurement of the sense of humor and its components. It provides both an overview of historic approaches and a compendium of current humor inventories and humor traits that have been studied...read more

Retells some of the jokes Freud used to make points about human psychology, and examines what these jokes suggest about Freud's own personality

A serious study of dirty jokes and sexual humor presents more than two thousand jokes, folktales, and lore, examining each entry in terms of its historical and socio-analytic significance, as well its meaning. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Product Description: Through his own and other people's stories, Steve Rizzo reveals how humor can affect our perceptions of challenging circumstances and life's tragedies. He shows how humor can short circuit negative thoughts and emotions-before emotional and physical havoc can set in.

A leading researcher presents the latest findings on a scientific examination of laughter, exploring this nearly involuntary reflex in terms of its social, psychological, and biological significance in humans and even some animals. 15,000 first printing.

Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"—that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all—applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears. Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In The Game of Humor, he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score—winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature. The Game of Humor makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Rhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such "postphilosophers" as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous, and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: BOOKS IN SPANISH

Product Description: This manual identifies the range of emotions health care workers feel while working with patients and provides guidelines on how to manage the stress more effectively. Health care workers, and thus patients, will learn the effects of stress and how humor can assist in reducing stress and enhancing profession-patient interaction...read more

Product Description: William Fry and Melanie Allen began writing this book with the objective of obtaining information from comedy writers that would reveal their experiences in creating humor. Over a period of two years, they conducted interviews and obtained a wealth of information about many different areas of humor and comedy, which caused them to expand on their original aim...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This treatise presents and defends a new theory of humour, one designed to cover all examples of all types and to provide the foundations for a full account of the global phenomenon. Incongruity theory and the new theory are contrary in the strict logical sense of the term...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book is a study of the interrelationship between comedy and selfhood. While most people have a clear idea of what is meant by comedy, the notion of a self is much more enigmatic and therefore requires illumination. The book is accordingly divided into two parts: the first attempts to clarify what is meant by a self, and the second applies the resulting schematization of selfhood to the phenomenon of laughter...read more

Explores the history of laughter, emphasizing the ways in which it has been used as a means of political subversion

Product Description: First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explores the history of clowns and clowning from early sacred origins to the Marx Brothers

Explores the history of laughter, emphasizing the ways in which it has been used as a means of political subversion

A humorous guide for hopeless pessimists celebrates the futility of life with such phrases as 'I cannot retrieve my inner child, for it is dead and buried in my backyard' and 'I am not afraid of failure, in fact, I'm getting used to it.' Original.