Few studies have addressed comprehensively the place of jesting in early modern pulpit rhetoric. This essay documents some of the humourjests and witty speechin the period's extant sermon literature. Specifically it identifies the analytical potential of revisiting an ancient, and early modern, idea: that the laughable is a kind of deformitas (deformity). A standard approach in studies of humour from the early modern period has been to identify 'scorn' as its centraI emotional category. However, with reference especially to the sermons of Hugh Latimer in the 1540s and Thomas Adams in the first decades of the seventeenth century, I shall argue that scorn for what is deemed other, and therefore 'low', does not exhaust the range of affective rhetoric achieved by jests against 'deformities' in sermons. Pulpit jesting also generates what are called here 'self-referring' laughable deformities, with much more complex affective purposes.
This paper addresses the comic routine of Australian born U.S. comedian Gregg Turkington’s alter-ego, ‘Neil Hamburger’, from the perspective of Aristotle’s ancient conception of the risible as a species of the unacceptable, or the unseemly. In doing so, it explores two thresholds of acceptability, subjective and social, which are relevant to an understanding of Hamburger’s comic style. The paper argues that Hamburger’s style willfully violates those thresholds, risking the audience’s laughter, and yet working towards the visualization of a less normative kind of ‘unseemliness’ that underlies Hamburger’s politics: reverence for celebrity and the sacred.
An early scene in Act Two of Shakespeare's Othello is often cut or shortened. It is the one in which Iago jests with Desdemona while she waits and hopes for Othello to arrive safely in Cyprus (II.i.100–166). Critics and directors have found the scene jarring. Many productions have cut it and many editors dismissed it. This makes sense if one sees Iago's and Desdemona's exchange literally as farce, that is, as stuffing or filler. However, that perception flattens out what can instead be seen as a complex communal exchange of power and moral ideals and a delicate negotiation of a particular ethos – honestas – in a public setting, which cannot be characterized merely as an attack and a defence. This article develops a means of exploring the scene more fully by treating it as a serious dramatic exploration of Iago's persuasiveness and Desdemona's cleverness. I shall argue that the scene embodies a more complex exchange of social values than has been acknowledged. In doing so, I suggest that the rhetoric of jesting Shakespeare dramatizes here is a kind of efficacy that works by producing what is better described as a morally meaningful community than simply as a power structure facilitating self‐interest in moral disguise.
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