Thought-provoking and "undeniably interesting" essays on this cultural institution of comedy and what it says about our society ( Booklist).Since 1975, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" has greeted late night–TV viewers looking for the best in sketch comedy and popular music. SNL is the variety show that launched the careers of countless comedians, including Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Adam Sand...

From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader. This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and origin...

A 2022 Best Comedy Book, Vulture"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take listeners—particularly self-described liberals—on a tour of contem...

This sweet true story stars a tiny, orphaned elephant who was given another chance.When Chhouk, an Asian elephant calf, was found, he was alone, underweight, and had a severe foot injury. Conservationist Nick Marx of Wildlife Alliance rescued the baby elephant. With help from the Cambodian Forestry Administration, the Cambodian School of Prosthetics and Orthotics, and an elephant named Lucky, Nick nursed Chhouk back to health and made him an artificial foot. One of...

Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her multi-award-winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's ...

Nearly every night on every major network,"unscripted" (but carefully crafted) "reality" TV shows routinely glorify retrograde stereotypes that most people would assume got left behind 35 years ago.In Reality Bites Back, media critic Jennifer L. Pozner aims a critical, analytical lens at a trend most people dismiss as harmless fluff. She deconstructs reality TV's twisted fairytales to demonstrate that far from being simple "guilty pleasures," these programs are actually gu...

Whether or not we like to admit it, pop culture is a lens through which we alternately view and shape the world around us. When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture, author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1...

Trenchantly on point and bursting with insight, anthropologist Grant McCracken shows American corporations how keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends can change their business practices for the better -- and ahead of the curve.Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn't realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new -- and lucrative -- market opportunity, one they could have seen com...

Welcome to Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football, Burning Man, the Ford Fiesta Movement, Rube Goldberg, NFL Films, Wordle, Two and a Half Men, a 10,000-Year Symphony, and ROFLCom Memes Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough IdeasA Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemp...

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. In a new Introductio...

Since the show's debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional world. Mad Men, Mad World is a comprehensive analysis of this groundbreaking TV series. Scholars from across the humanities consider the AMC drama from a fascinating array of perspectives, including fashion, history, architecture, civil rights, feminism, con...

Adam Sandler movies, HBO's Entourage, and such magazines as Maxim and FHM all trade in and appeal to one character-the modern boy-man. Addicted to video games, comic books, extreme sports, and dressing down, the boy-man would rather devote an afternoon to Grand Theft Auto than plan his next career move. He would rather prolong the hedonistic pleasures of youth than embrace the self-sacrificing demands of adulthood.When did maturity become the ultimate tab...