How do you keep going when your world is falling apart? Discover the powerful story of stand-up comic Anthony Griffith and how to navigate grief through persistence, faith, humor and love. Now available in trade paper. Just as Anthony’s career in stand-up comedy launched him onto the stage of The Tonight Show, he and his wife Brigitte faced an unimaginable personal nightmare: their two-year-old daughter, Brittany Nicole, was dying from cancer. While Anthony performed under bright lights, he struggled not to succumb to the darkness of losing a child. In this stirring memoir, Anthony Griffith and his wife of more than thirty years, Brigitte Travis-Griffin, share the powerful story of living between life’s funniest moments and its most heartbreaking tragedies. With humor and deep insights into the human spirit, Behind the Laughter explores Anthony’s life and career as well as the bonds between parent and child and husband and wife. The surprising twists along Anthony’s path highlights experiencing God’s sustaining presence in the darkest moments as well as the sweetest dreams. Behind the Laughter explores: Powerful, relatable emotions and lessons that are universal and inspiring New perspectives on difficult topics that everyone can relate to The power of finding humor in spite of adversity Find true inspiration along with laugh-out-loud humor in this remarkable story of resilience and grace in the face of loss.

" An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object of the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for a nod..."

Reproduction of the original.

CHOICE2000 Outstanding Academic Title Comedy, tragedy, and religion have been intertwined since ancient Greece, where comedy and tragedy arose as religious rituals. This groundbreaking book analyzes the worldviews of tragedy and comedy, and compares each with the world's major religions. Morreall contrasts the tragic and comic along twenty psychological and social dimensions and uses these to analyze both Eastern and Western traditions. Although no religion embodies a purely tragic or comic vision of life, some are mostly tragic and others mostly comic. In Eastern religions, Morreall finds no robust tragic vision but does find significant comic features, especially in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the Western monotheistic tradition, there are some comic features in the early Bible, but by the late Hebrew Bible, the tragic vision dominates. Two millennia have done little to reverse that tragic vision in Judaism. Christianity, on the other hand, has shown both tragic and comic features—Morreall writes of the Calvinist vision and the Franciscan vision—but in the contemporary era comic features have come to dominate. The author also explores Islam, and finds it has neither a comic nor a tragic vision. And, among new religions, those which emphasize the personal self come close to having an exclusively comic vision of life.