As the host of Comedy Central's "Tosh.0," Daniel Tosh is known for his biting wit and his ability to make just about everyone laugh their head off. Daniel himself describes his wit as "insanely condescending and sarcastic," which just so happens to go directly against the way he was raised. Although as the son of a preacher his beginnings may be as far from the comedic world as possible, he has made a very lucrative career out of making people laugh. In this biography you will learn how Daniel turned his religious upbringing into a life of jokes and sarcasm. In addition, you will learn what keeps him excited about life and what he is planning for the future. From racism to sexism to politics, all you need to know about Daniel Tosh is right here, right now, in the most up to date coverage of his life.

Tosh has spent many days in the kitchen with his grandmother, Honey, watching her bake cookies and listening to tales of their slave ancestors, so when Honey's memory starts to fail, Tosh is able to help with the cookies and more. Includes a recipe for tea cakes. Full color.

There’s an entire industry built on the idea of helping people to push hard and succeed in love, work, fitness, and finances. But what about those people who would so much rather stay home and eat pizza with the cat while binge-watching Netflix? Who’s telling them that it’s OK to be a couch potato? Blair, that’s who. The creation of cartoonist and stand-up comic Mo Welch, Blair is the awkward, self-deprecating, totally relatable anti-heroine who already has 65,000 followers on Instagram and an animated show on TBS Digital. Now Blair is the face, the voice, and the attitude of How to Die Alone, the perfect self-help book for not helping yourself—and a funny, irreverent gift for millennials struggling to “adult.” Forget winning friends and influencing people—here’s advice on how to win the Worst Friend Award instead, including: Always be late, never offer to drive (anywhere), and treat your friend’s kitchen like an open bar. Plus the ins and outs of terrible dates, permission to eat cookies instead of going to the gym, and how to treat your job like the inconvenience that it is. It’s the genuinely funny, tongue-in-cheek guide to just saying no.

This legendary work consists of alphabetically arranged genealogical tables of approximately 500 Rhode Island families, representing thousands of descendants of pre--1690 settlers, all carried to the third generation, and some--about 100 families-- carried to the fourth.

What we can learn about human nature from the informative, manipulative, confusing, and amusing messages at the bottom of the web. Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In this book, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations “on the bottom half of the Internet,” he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison), and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism, and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying, and misogyny. He considers the way comment—a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking—affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling—short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, “WTF?!?”

From one of Canada's foremost investigative writers, a groundbreaking exposé on the motives and machinations behind cyberabuse - tormenting, trolling, harassment, cyberbullying, stalking, and sexual extortion - and the toll it is taking on children, youth, and adults around the world. It seems as if each week our news broadcasts, newspaper headlines, Twitter feeds, and Facebook timelines are dominated by stories of cyberbullying and other digital abuse. This isn't the playground teasing and name-calling of generations before the Internet. This new abuse's unique characteristics - anonymity, permanence, and viral audience - can relentlessly exacerbate the humiliation, pain, and danger of its victims. Ugly rumours that once snaked through school hallways and around the office water cooler are now delivered at lightning speed to the world, while sexual extortion and revenge-porn sites target those who've shared intimate images or had them stolen by hackers. Cyberstalkers who target adults destroy reputations and careers. And the splendid connectivity of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, also makes us vulnerable to "interpersonal terrorism," while apps that promise privacy and rapid deletion are ridden with loopholes. With vivid reportage, Paula Todd goes deep into the world of "extreme mean," uncovering the people who use the Internet to undermine lives rather than improve them. Through exclusive personal stories of online abuse from around the world, including the suicide of Amanda Todd and the untold costs of Rebecca Black's experience as "the most hated girl on the Internet," as well as interviews with troll-tormentors, accidental abusers, victimized kids, and adults, Extreme Mean explores the often surprising roots of online abuse, challenges current academic thinking, and offers new ways of understanding the nasty and the nefarious who erode humanity and threaten Internet freedom. Provocative, astute and compelling, Extreme Mean is a shocking yet inspiring illustration of behaviour that affects all of us. It's a call-to-arms for change, and a search for ways to turn a moral panic into a moral possibility.

What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war, a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and, more recently, Rowan Williams, in their accommodation to literature, choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast, this book develops recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine, but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.

An unfiltered, unapologetic, hilarious, and sometimes obscene assemblage of tales from the down-and-dirty traveling comedy circuit Doug Stanhope has been drunkenly stumbling down the back roads and dark alleys of stand-up comedy for over a quarter of a century, roads laden with dank bars, prostitutes, cheap drugs, farm animals, evil dwarfs, public nudity, menacing third-world police, psychotic breaks, sex offenders, and some understandable suicides. You know, just for levity. While other comedians were seeking fame, Stanhope was seeking immediate gratification, dark spectacle, or sometimes just his pants. Not to say he hasn't rubbed elbows with fame. He's crashed its party, snorted its coke, and jumped into its pool naked, literally and often repeatedly -- all while artfully dodging fame himself. Doug spares no legally permissible detail, and his stories couldn't be told any other way. They're weird, uncomfortable, gross, disturbing, and fucking funny. This Is Not Fame is by no means a story of overcoming a life of excess, immorality, and reckless buffoonery. It's an outright celebration of it. For Stanhope, the party goes on.

The essays in this collection explore taboo and controversial humour in traditional scripted (sitcoms and other comedy series, animated series) and non-scripted forms (stand-up comedy, factual and reality shows, and advertising) both on cable and network television. Whilst the focus is predominantly on the US and UK, the contributors also address more general and global issues and different contexts of reception, in an attempt to look at this kind of comedy from different perspectives. Over the last few decades, taboo comedy has become a staple of television programming, thus raising issues concerning its functions and appropriateness, and making it an extremely relevant subject for those interested in how both humour and television work.

The third Canadian edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. There is also a focus on issues of great importance in twenty-first-century Canada, such as climate change, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Jian Ghomeshi trial, Facebook, police discrimination, trans rights, and postsecondary education in the humanities. Works of different lengths and levels of difficulty are represented, as are narrative, descriptive and persuasive essays—and, new to this edition, lyric essays. For the new edition there are also considerably more short pieces than ever before; a number of op-ed pieces are included, as are pieces from blogs and from online news sources. The representation of academic writing from several disciplines has been increased—and in some cases the anthology also includes news reports presenting the results of academic research to a general audience. Also new to this edition are essays from a wide range of the most celebrated prose writers of the modern era—from Susan Sontag, Eula Biss, and Michel Foucault to Anne Carson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The anthology also offers increased diversity of representation—including, for example, a larger proportion of First Nations writers and women writers than previous Canadian editions. Unobtrusive explanatory notes appear at the bottom of the page, and each selection is preceded by a headnote that provides students with information regarding the context in which the piece was written. Each reading is also followed by questions for discussion. A unique feature is the inclusion of a set of additional notes on the anthology’s companion website—notes designed to be of particular help to EAL students and/or students who have little familiarity with Canadian culture. The anthology is accompanied by two companion websites. The student website features additional readings and interactive writing exercises (as well as the additional notes). The instructor website provides additional discussion questions and, for a number of the anthology selections, background information that may be of interest.