For professional comedians, their primary goal is to make people laugh. For everyone else humor can be the envelope in which another message is sent and therefore will be received with pleasure. This book is designed precisely to help you make your own efforts at humor more effective in achieving the primary goals of your interaction: to solidify friendships, preserve a marriage, obtain employment, close sales, conduct therapy, defuse conflict, or simply enjoy life more.Humor is a quality nearly all of us claim in ourselves and one which we seek and highly value in others. We love a sense of humor in our dates and mates, our children, and everyone with whom we have social contacts. When humor making is successful, we are drawn closer to other people and share a bonding emotional experience. We enjoy life more and our troubles seem to lessen instantly. There are many proven ways to enhance our senses of humor in ourselves and even our children. Humor making can be taught and developed to a very high level, thus increasing our chances for social and even economic success.Just Kidding: Using Humor Effectively is for adults who enjoy humor and who would like to be funnier. It includes definitions of funniness and examples of both helpful and harmful humor. It describes the relevant comedic and psychological rules for making humor effective. The book points out the danger signs for offensive humor and how to make the decision to “say it or stuff it.” Examples of successful and unsuccessful humor from comedians to politicians are used throughout to illustrate the many varieties of humor and how context and audience make a difference. Finally, a variety of fun exercises are offered to build the skills for effective humor making.

Product Description: This is an updated edition of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, published in 2006. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: • An acclaimed and thoughtful author: David Denby has been writing insightful film reviews since the 1970s. Formerly a columnist for The Atlantic and New York magazine, he has been with The New Yorker for the past decade. His nonfiction account of Western literature, Great Books , has been praised for its intelligence and breadth of scope...read more

Product Description: Combining developments in the field of social movement theory regarding framing, collective identity, and emotions with insights from humourology, the seventeen essays in this book show the power of humour in framing social and political protest across a wide range of historical and spatial settings...read more

Product Description: Book by McGhee, Paul (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Multidisciplinary in nature, this work should be of interest to scholars working the anthropology, sociology, folklore, social psychology, linguistics or literature, as well as to historians and philosophers. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: '...a brilliant, insightful work. It will surely become the authoritative study on this complex subject' - "Choice". 'There are so many good things in this volume that it is difficult to select the best. I found the chapter concerning American, British, and Australian jokes about one another particularly fascinating, illustrating as it did the different stress on achievement, equality, and status in each of these societies' - "London Sunday Telegraph"...read more

Product Description: Bestselling humorists offer guidance for identifying and developing your own sense -- and style -- of humor and using it to your best advantage in the workplace.

Product Description: This is a wide-ranging investigation into the nature of humour and its place in present-day British and North American society. From dirty jokes to feminist cartoons, from dinner-table wit to situation comedies, Michael Mulkay examines the principles behind our sense of humour...read more