Politics, Humor, and the Counterculture discusses the post-war period (1945-1972) through the lenses of three artists: Ken Nordine, Lenny Bruce, and Firesign Theatre. Their humor cut through the hypocrisy of the Cold War and the prevailing culture and expanded our horizons. From the Beats to the peace and civil rights movements, these humorists illuminate America from their unique perspectives. Vwadek P. Marciniak highlights the poetic nature of humor as well as its insights on our political and social habits: addiction, conformity, marketing, and fear. The modern is giving way to the post-modern, the fixed to an existential attitude: humanism and humor.

At once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, The Countercultural South explores the politically divergent cultures of resistance created by poor white and working-class black southern men. With humor and insight, Jack Temple Kirby traces these racially and politically opposed cultures back to the antebellum encounter between the anti-capitalistic South and the capitalist individualism identified with the North. In a wide-ranging discussion encompassing the blues, sharecropping, and contemporary black intellectuals, Kirby shows how the needful practice of black labor bargaining in the South resulted in a progressive black tradition of verbal negotiation. The conservative separatism and retro-resistance of rural whites, Kirby argues, is embedded in an inherited and adversarial frontier ethos valuing self-sufficiency and access to wilderness. With the southern landscape imaginatively as well as factually linked to social class, crime--particularly forest arson--becomes the most important form of southern white countercultural expression. Kirby continues his look at white resistance in a review of "redneck" discourse, examining the public reputation of southern whites through a range of cultural phenomena, from literature to country music to the computer network known as BUBBA-L. Original, personal, and artfully written, The Countercultural South offers fresh reflections on southern exceptionalism in American political life and culture.

From assassinations to student riots, this is “a splendidly evocative account of a historic year—a year of tumult, of trauma, and of tragedy” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.). In the United States, the 1960s were a period of unprecedented change and upheaval—but the year 1968 in particular stands out as a dramatic turning point. Americans witnessed the Tet offensive in Vietnam; the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; and the chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At the same time, a young generation was questioning authority like never before—and popular culture, especially music, was being revolutionized. Largely based on unpublished interviews and documents—including in-depth conversations with Eugene McCarthy and Bob Dylan, among many others, and the late Theodore White’s archives, to which the author had sole access—1968 in America is a fascinating social history, and the definitive study of a year when nothing could be taken for granted. “Kaiser aims to convey not only what happened during the period but what it felt like at the time. Affecting touches bring back powerful memories, including strong accounts of the impact of the Tet offensive and of the frenzy aroused by Bobby Kennedy’s race for the presidency.” —The New York Times Book Review

This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

Uncensored, uncontained, and thoroughly demented, the memoirs of Paul Krassner are back in an updated and expanded edition. Paul Krassner, “father of the underground press” (People magazine), founder of the Realist, political radical, Yippie, and award-winning stand-up satirist, shares his stark raving adventures with the likes of Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Groucho Marx, and Squeaky Fromme, revealing the patriarch of counterculture’s ultimate, intimate, uproarious life on the fringes of society. Whether he’s writing about his friendship with controversial comic Lenny Bruce, introducing Groucho Marx to LSD, his investigation of Scientology, or John Kennedy’s cadaver, no subject is too sacred to be skewered by Krassner. And yet his stories are soulful and philosophical, always authentic to his iconoclastic brand of personal journalism. As Art Spiegelman said, “Krassner is one of the best minds of his generational to be destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked—but mainly hysterical. His true wacky, wackily true autobiography is the definitive book on the sixties.”

This two-volume set surveys the profound impact of political humor and satire on American culture and politics over the years, paying special attention to the explosion of political humor in today's wide-ranging and turbulent media environment. Historically, there has been a tendency to regard political satire and humor as a sideshow to the wider world of American politics—entertaining and sometimes insightful, but ultimately only of modest interest to students and others surveying the trajectory of American politics and culture. This set documents just how mistaken that assumption is. By examining political humor and satire throughout US history, these volumes not only illustrate how expressions of political satire and humor reflect changes in American attitudes about presidents, parties, and issues but also how satirists, comedians, cartoonists, and filmmakers have helped to shape popular attitudes about landmark historical events, major American institutions and movements, and the nation's political leaders and cultural giants. Finally, this work examines how today's brand of political humor may be more influential than ever before in shaping American attitudes about the nation in which we live.

This text explores the aesthetics, underlying logics, and histories of two seemingly distinct genres - liberal political satire and conservative opinion talk - making the case that they should be thought of as the logical extensions of the psychology of the left and right, respectively.

In this book, Curt Hersey explores the history of U.S. media, demonstrating how news parody has entertained television audiences by satirizing political and social issues and offering a lighthearted take on broadcast news. Despite shifts away from broadcast and cable delivery, comedians like Samantha Bee, Michael Che, and John Oliver continue this tradition of delivering topical humor within a newscast format. In this history of the television news parody genre, Hersey critically engages with the norms and presentational styles of television journalism at the time of their production. News parody has increasingly become part of the larger journalistic field, with viewers often turning to this parodic programming as a supplement and corrective to mainstream news sources. Beginning in the 1960s with the NBC program That Was the Week That Was, the history of news parody is analyzed decade by decade by focusing on presidential and political coverage, as well as the genre’s critiques of television network and cable journalism. Case studies include Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update;” HBO’s Not Necessarily the News; Comedy Central’s original Daily Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report; and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Scholars of media history, political communication, and popular culture will find this book particularly useful.

Follows Roy and Kate Dunfey's journey from humble beginners to entrepreneurial success highlighting their family's influence and diverse contributions. When LeRoy "Roy" Dunfey called out "Hey...Dunfey" in his fried clam restaurant in the 1940s, at least seven of his twelve children would turn around. Then he’d point to the one he needed without having to remember names. Roy and Catherine ‘Kate’ Manning had met and married thirty years earlier as teenage workers in Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. With little formal education or resources, but with a store of humor, entrepreneurial zest, and spiritual roots, they collared the American dream starting out in 1915 with Dunfey’s Orchestra, a luncheonette, and a baby every two years through the Great Depression to the doorstep of World War II. Written by their twelfth child, this saga reveals the lasting influence her parents had on each of their dozen kids: around the kitchen table digesting political fare; over restaurant counters meeting a diverse world of people; into and out of convents serving as educators; on to Boston’s Parker House, Omni International Hotel boardrooms, and, for forty-five years, still around the table of the family’s not-for-profit Global Citizens Circle’s civil dialogues.

This work examines the unique and ever-changing relationship between politics and comedy through an analysis of several popular American television programs. Focusing on close readings of the work of Ernie Kovacs, Soupy Sales, and Andy Kaufman, as well as Green Acres and The Gong Show, the author provides a unique glimpse at the often subversive nature of avant-garde television comedy. The crisis in American television during the political unrest of the late 1960s is also studied, as represented by individual analyses of The Monkees, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, and All in the Family. The author also focuses on more contemporary American television, drawing a comparative analysis between the referential postmodernism of The Simpsons and the confrontational absurdity of South Park.