Al Capp's cartoons of Dogpatch's favorite son revealed as satiric culture for the common man.

Using a cultural approach to classical myths, this book examines how they affect psychoanalytic theory, historical experience, elite culture, popular culture, and everyday life. Berger explores diverse topics such as the Oedipus Myth, James Bond, Star Wars, and fairy tales.

A comprehensive encyclopedia of the 1930s in the United States, showing how the Depression affected every aspect of American life. In two volumes, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Thematic Encyclopedia captures the full scope of a defining era of American history. Like no other available reference, it offers a comprehensive portrait of the nation from the Crash of 1929 to the onset of World War II, exploring the impact of the Depression and the New Deal on all aspects of American life. The book features hundreds of alphabetically organized entries in sections focusing on economics, politics, social ramifications, the arts, and ethnic issues. With an extraordinary range of primary sources integrated throughout , The Great Depression and the New Deal is the new cornerstone resource on a historic moment that is casting a shadow on our own unsettled times.

A portrait of the cartoonist offers insight into his complicated character, covering such topics as the childhood accident that cost him his leg, his turbulent apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, and his conservative political views.

More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain. Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg-leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country. With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.

Just as a distinctive literary voice or style is marked by the ease with which it can be parodied, so too can specific aspects of humor be unique. Playwrights, television writers, novelists, cartoonists, and film scriptwriters use many special technical devices to create humor. Just as dramatic writers and novelists use specific devices to craft their work, creators of humorous materials?from the ancient Greeks to today's stand-up comics?have continued to use certain techniques in order to generate humor. In The Art of Comedy Writing, Arthur Asa Berger argues that there are a relatively limited number of techniques?forty-five in all?that humorists employ. Elaborating upon his prior, in-depth study of humor, An Anatomy of Humor, in which Berger provides a content analysis of humor in all forms?joke books, plays, comic books, novels, short stories, comic verse, and essays?The Art of Comedy Writing goes further. Berger groups each technique into four basic categories: humor involving identity such as burlesque, caricature, mimicry, and stereotype; humor involving logic such as analogy, comparison, and reversal; humor involving language such as puns, wordplay, sarcasm, and satire; and finally, chase, slapstick, and speed, or humor involving action. Berger claims that if you want to know how writers or comedians create humor study and analysis of their humorous works can be immensely insightful. This book is a unique analytical offering for those interested in humor. It provides writers and critics with a sizable repertoire of techniques for use in their own future comic creations. As such, this book will be of interest to people inspired by humor and the creative process?professionals in the comedy field and students of creative writing, comedy, literary humor, communications, broadcast/media, and the humanities.

The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor’s legacy in popular culture—including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms—and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

This is a sociocultural history of the visually oriented mass media forms that beguiled American society from the 1890s to the end of World War II. The purpose of the work is to show how revolutionary technological advances during these years were instrumental in helping create a unique culture of media-made origins. By focusing on the communal appeal of both traditional and new modes of visual expression as welcome diversions from the harsh realities of life, this book also attends to the American people's affinity for those special individuals whose talent, vision, and lifestyle introduced daring new ways to avoid the ordinariness of life by fantasizing it. Also examined is the sociocultural impact of an ongoing democratization process that through its nurturing of a responsive media culture gradually eroded the polar postures of the elite and mass cultures so that by the mid-1940s signs of a coming postmodern alliance were in the air. Illustrated. Before his retirement Wiley Lee Umphlett served as an administrator/professor at the University of West. Florida for more than twenty-five years.

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.