Showing papers on "Comedy published in 1990"

Popular film and television comedy

Abstract: Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby, from City Limits to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.

Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America

Abstract: The most comprehensive analysis of the subject to have appeared in English, "Magical Reels" charts the development of Latin American film industries in a world increasingly dominated by the advanced technology and massive distribution budgets of the North American mainstream. John King sets up a historical framework to unfold the overlapping histories of cinema in the continent: the itinerant film-makers of the silent era who projected their films in cafes and village halls, the inventive use of vernacular music and local comedy in early sound pictures, the "golden age" of 1940s Mexican cinema, and the "new cinema"--oppositional cinema made "with an idea in the head and a camera in the hand"--of the late 1950s and beyond. A country-by-country account of this new wave allows detailed discussion of, for instance, Peronist cinema in Argentina, 1960s' revolutionary film-making in Cuba, state-sponsored cinema in 1970s' Brazil and Venezuela, and the struggle for democratization in Chile in the 1980s.

The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business, and Life-Style

Abstract: Stebbins begins with a history of stand-up comedy, giving vital background about the industry as it emerged and flourished in the United States and subsequently developed into a popular form of entertainment in Canada. He deals with the nature of comic performance in comedy rooms - cabarets designed specifically for stand-up comedy - and examines the career of the comic: how people become interested in comedy, how they progress as amateurs, how they survive on the road and how, sometimes, they become headliners and later writers for film and television. He also discusses the business of comedy: booking agents, comedy chains such as Yuk-Yuk's, room managers, and the comics themselves as entrepreneurs. As the first comprehensive study of a growing phenomenon, The Laugh-Makers will interest sociologists of humour and sociologists of occupations and will contribute to our understanding of Canadian popular culture.

The Cabinet of Lucy Ricardo: Lucille Ball's Star Image

Abstract: While most film stars either resisted collaborating with television in the 1940s and 1950s, or were prohibited from appearing on TV by their studio contracts (aside from occasional guest spots), many radio, vaudeville, and nightclub personalities were ready to exploit the medium, as were a number of non-star film performers who possessed identifiable "character" images. Almost every radio and vaudeville personality involved in early television had also made film appearances in the 1930s and 1940s, but, at best, they remained co-stars (Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen), supporting actors (Milton Berle, Eve Arden, Jackie Gleason), or non-narrative specialty performers (Paul Whiteman), just like their non-star film colleagues (Martha Raye, Ann Southern, Stuart Erwin, Audrey Meadows). One thing television seemed to offer all these performers was a second chance to become mass audience, audiovisual stars-a combination only film could provide before this time. Most of the early television performers achieved stardom conservatively by reproducing their radio, vaudeville, and film personalities in the new medium: Eve Arden's dry-witted radio Connie Brooks (already Mildred Pierce's Ida in a classroom) became television's "Our Miss Brooks"; Ann Southern's Susie ("Private Secretary") was one more in a long line of shrewd Trade Winds Girl Fridays; Martha Raye's aggressive, roughhousing "big mouth" film image was transferred intact to "The Martha Raye Show"; while Gracie Allen's zany "Miss Allen" character moved from vaudeville to film to radio to television with little alteration. However, a few performers from vaudeville, radio, and film found it more difficult to take this straightforward, conservative route to televisual stardom, as their previous success depended on multiple characters or images. Jackie Gleason solved the problem by displaying his comedy and musical talents in a variety show format, adding and subtracting characters from show to show (Ralph Kramden of "The Honeymooners" was developed in this manner). For Lucille Ball the task was more formidable, as she brought to television a film image that combined glamour, earthiness, musical ability, wit, and slapstick talents, as well as a popular radio role as a screwball wife (Liz Cooper, "My Favorite Husband," CBS, 1948-51). But while Lucy Ricardo of "I Love Lucy"

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

Abstract: Translator's Note Preface Book One The Warehouse Island Life and Le Havre The Mountains and the Counting-House A Father's Ghost Weimar The Outsider Between Plato and Kant Fichte and the Ego The 'Better Consciousness' Philosophy at Arms Book Two The Thinker Without a Stage Return to Weimar Goethe The Will as the 'Thing in Itself' The World as Will and Representation The Great No First Italian Journey The Unattended Lecturer Disappointment in Berlin Flight from Berlin On the Will in Nature The Mystery of Freedom The Mountain Comes to the Prophet The Comedy of Fame Chronology Editions of Schopenhauer's Works, Sources, Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in "Othello"

Abstract: organizing principle operative here is the social custom, common throughout early modern Europe, of charivari.1 The abusive language, the noisy clamor under Brabantio's window, and the menace of violence in the opening scene of the play link the improvisations of Iago with the codes of a carnivalesque disturbance or charivari organized in protest over the marriage of the play's central characters. Charivari does not figure as an isolated episode here, however, nor has it been completed when the initial onstage commotion ends.2 Despite the sympathy that Othello and Desdemona seem intended to arouse in the audience, the play as a whole is organized around the abjection and violent punishment of its central figures. Charivari was a practice of noisy festive abuse in which a community enacted its specific objection to inappropriate marriages and more generally exercised a widespread surveillance of sexuality. As Natalie Davis has pointed out (\"Reasons of Misrule\"), this \"community\" actually consists of young men, typically the unmarried ones, who represent a social principle of male solidarity that is in some respects deeply hostile to precisely that form of institutionally sanctioned sexuality whose standards they are empowered to oversee.3

Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema

Abstract: Laughter comedy and related forms marriage procreation death rogue and trickster dupers and duped the fool the language of comedy reality and fantasy reflexive comedy absurd and existential comedy festivity laughter or harmony?

Comedy and Control: Shakespeare and the Plautine Poeta

Abstract: Several of Shakespeare's plays come to their conclusions at least in the logics of the works themselves mainly through the agency of a central controlling character. Theseus and Oberon in A Midsummer Nighťs Dream, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Vincentio in Measure for Measure, and Prospero in The Tempest, for instance, all appear to wield a considerable influence over the outcome of their plays. Most often aristocratic, this figure effects the drama's denouement by the discovery and control of information concerning the social world he or she is engaged (however temporarily) in governing. Such information, typically involving familial or romantic relationships, is obtained through disguise, deceit, and/ or the assistance of a subordinate character. Although versions of this controlling figure can be found in Shakespeare's histories (e.g., Richard Ш, and Hal, as both Prince and King) as well as in the tragedies (e.g., lago and Hamlet) where, however intended, their dramatic machinations bring unfortunate and unhappy results only in the comedies (including the romances) do such figures enjoy an apparently limitless measure of dramatic control. In doing so, they are frequently perceived as approximating some depiction of the dramatist's art. With his "great globe itself" speech (IV.i. 148-58 ),l for example, Prospero traditionally even notoriously has been described as symbolically embodying Shakespeare's own position as playwright. With the early examples of Marlowe's Machiavel and Barabas in The Jew of Malta as well as Shakespeare's Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and following the critical lead of Bernard Spivack in his study Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, most commentators have attempted to trace the compositional

Humor in America : a research guide to genres and topics

Abstract: Introduction Literary Humor by Nacy Pogel and Paul Somers, Jr. The Comics by M. Thomas Inge Humor in Periodicals by David E. E. Sloane Film Comedy by Wes D. Gehring Broadcast Humor by Lawrence E. Mintz Standup Comedy by Stephanie Koziski Olson Women's Humor by Zita Dresner Racial and Ethnic Humor by Joseph Dorinson and Joseph Boskin Political Humor by Stephen J. Whitfield Folklore Methodology and American Humor Research by Elliot Oring

The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s

Abstract: In the 1934 classic It Happened One Night, heiress Claudette Colbert races away from the altar and a conventional marriage and throws herself into a wisecracking rough-and-tumble affair with Clark Gable. The new brand of movies following in the wake of Capra's kooky masterpiece-and the women starring in them-are the focus of Kendall's The Runaway Bride, a look at the films that mirrored the climate of the Great Depression while at the same time helping Americans get through it. Kendall details the collaborations between the romantic comedy directors and the female stars, showing how such films as Alice Adams (with Katherine Hepburn), Swing Time (where Ginger Rogers enjoys "A Fine Romance" with Fred Astaire), The Awful Truth (with Irene Dunne), and The Lady Eve (wherein Barbara Stanwyck's shapely leg repeatedly trips naive millionaire Henry Fonda) came to be, and what they said about the 1930s. Written with erudition and enthusiasm, The Runaway Bride is a trip through some of Hollywood's most memorable moments, and a key to the national issues of an era as revealed in its films.

The Names of Comedy

Abstract: Unlike tragic dramatists, who have usually inherited their characters' names from history or myth, comic writers are name-givers. They have always confronted a fundamental choice: whether to give "speaking" names, expressing the nature of the characters, or "accidental" ones, which allow for greater independence and for change. These different attitudes towards naming are bound up with the larger debate about the truthful or arbitrary nature of language itself: the debate formalized in Plato's dialogue "Cratylus", and continuing today. This book takes the "Cratylus" as its starting point. It examines the way individual dramatists and varieties of comedy are drawn either towards the position of Plato's Hermogenes, who believes that names are arbitrary impositions, or towards the essentialist view held by Cratylus himself. It claims that although the bias of comedy is inherently Cratylic, it is a bias perpetually being modified and corrected by the rival approach to naming. The first chapter is concerned with Aristophanes, and with the varying onomastic allegiances of Menander, Plautus and Terence. The second examines English mediaeval drama, partly in relation to the introduction and spread of surnames, while the third considers the contribution of Hermogenean and Cratylic attitudes to modes of comedy established during the early 16th century and their subsequent polarization in Shakespeare and Jonson. At the heart of the book lie two chapters on Shakespeare, naming and names. Chapter five looks at a group of Shakespeare plays - the Fenriad, "Romeo and Juliet" and "Othello" - in which naming strategies associated with comedy are made to operate within alien contexts. The book ends with general chapters on namelessness in tragedy, comedy and folklore, and its consequences for social and personal identity. A brief epilogue traces the history of English comic naming from the Restoration to Beckett.

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus

Abstract: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus had a unique one-performance world premiere in the ancient stadium of Delphi in 1988 During 1989 it was performed at the National Theatre, London, and in unique historical spaces in Saltaire and Carnuntum In it Tony Harrison remakes the fragmentary text of a satyr play by Sophocles into an astringent comedy for our times, incorporating into the action the two Edwardian papyrologists who discovered the original This edition contains the text both as it was performed in Delphi and in the version performed at the National Theatre

The faint aroma of performing seals: the 'nervous' romance and the comedy of the sexes

Abstract: Heterosexual love may be a \"many splendored thing,\" but it is also a game with quite precise though not immutable sets of rules or conventions. Courtship, seduction, adultery, and marriage are all highly codified and regulated activities, subject to individual inflection but never open totally to individual control. Being so fundamental to the perpetuation of \"culture,\" heterosexual intimacy poses a specific paradox which is integral to the way romantic comedy operates; namely, \"affairs of the heart\" are so personal and so individual and yet at the same time so readily familiar and so conventional. Since time immemorial, poets, dramatists, and the like have been singing the praises and \"tricking out\" the problems involved in love and its vicissitudes, yet there is a profound resistance to conceiving of the game of love in terms of a regime of conformity. Hence, the term romantic has come to signify something of a revolt against the norms, against the cultural regimentation of desire, against marriage. The grand passions experienced by Anna Karenina, Catherine Earnshaw, and the Lady of the Camelias represent a determined apotheosis in defiance of duty, convention, and marriage, the ultimate destination of which is death rather than a dishonorable compromise to the mundane. Such heroines represent one particular extreme which cannot be tolerated within the genre of romantic comedy. The other extreme is the acknowledgment of marriage as stultification, a far less noble sacrifice of individual desire. It is between these two polarities that the comedy of the sexes operates and oscillates, preserving passion while regulating desire within a workable, livable orbit. Thus, as I have considered elsewhere, the \"screwball\" romantic comedies of the 1930s solve the problem by validating love as a kind of totalizing intimacy which receives its most valuable expression in the form of play. (2) The screwball films celebrate heterosexual relationships founded upon vitality, charisma, and an almost childlike sense of playfulness. However, these idealized visions of romance are very firmly located within a certain era which, since the end of World War II, has been cast persistently (at least within the genre of romantic comedy) as some kind of golden age of simpler options, a heterosexual arcadia.

The Comedy of Entropy: Humour/Narrative/Reading

Abstract: Entropic comedy is the phrase coined by Patrick O'Neill in this study to identify a particular mode of twentieth-century narrative that is not generally recognized. He describes it as the narrative expression of forms of decentred humour, or what might more loosely be called 'black humour.' O'Neill begins his investigation by examining the rise of an essentially new form of humour over the last three hundred years or so in the context of a rapid decay of confidence in traditional authoritative value systems. O'Neill analyses the resulting reorganization of the spectrum of humour, and examines th implications of this for the ways in which we read texts and the world we live in. He then turns from intellectual history to narratology and considers the relationship, in theoretical terms, of homour, play, and narrative as systems of discourse and the role of the reader as a textualizing agent. Finally, he considers some dozen twentieth-century narratives in French, German, and English (with occasional reference to other literatures) in the context of those historical and theoretical concerns. Authors of the texts analysed include Celine, Camus, Satre, and Robbe-Grillet in French; Heller, Beckett, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Joyce in English; Grass, Kafka, and Handke in German. The analyses proceed along lines suggested by structuralist, semiotic, and post-structuraist narrative and literary theory. From his analyses of these works O'Neill concludes they illustrate in narrative terms a mode of modern writing definable as entropic comedy, and he develops a taxonomy of the mode.

Fred Allen's radio comedy

Abstract: Acknowledgments Illustrations 1. An Introduction 2. The World of a Smalltimer, 1894-1932 3. The Fred Allen Shows, 1933-1949 4. Creating Radio Comedy 5. Fred Allen and Radio Censorship 6. Fred Allen's Comedy of Language 7. Fred Allen, Satirist 8. Allen's Alley, 1942-1949 9. An Epilogue Appendix: The Complex World of Network Radio Notes Index

Shakespeare and the rival playwrights, 1600-1606

Abstract: Introduction 1.Hamlet and the eyases 2. Portraits of the Iron Age: Troilus and Cressida 3. 'The Word will bring on summer:' All's Well that Ends Well and Chapman's mythic comedy 4. Othello, a man killed with kindness 5. Royal Measures: Measure for Measure and Middleton's comedy of disillusionment 6. Anger's priviledge, Timon of Athens and King Lear.

Who is Laughing Now?: The Role of Humour in the Social Construction of Gender

Abstract: The sociology of knowledge is employed as a synthesizing framework to organize application of conclusions, drawn from studies of humour in other contexts, to gender relations. Humour plays a significant but dual role in the accomplishment of gender as taken-for-granted reality. First of all, since humour generally affirms societal standards, its key function is ideological buttress of the patriarchal status quo. However, in addition to this conservative, social control function, there is a subversive, rebellious aspect of comedy which serves to challenge male hegemony.

Deceptions and Delusions in Herodotus

Abstract: NOT EVERY SELF-INTERESTED charlatan is condemned in any society that values ingenuity. The Hellenes admired the lies of shrewd Odysseus, worshipped Hermes, patron of thieves and sharp entrepreneurs, and found admirable the hedgehog deceits and shams of Aristophanes' comic heroes.' Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy describe cheats and their dupes. After the development of history, philosophy, biography, and the later genres of the novel and hagiography at times would explore popular delusions and false prophets. History proper, from Herodotus on, supplies examples, large and small, of political, religious, and other entrepreneurs who hatch schemes at the expense of the credulous. Frauds require a knowing agent, usually one who works for his own profit or advance. On another hand, we have unplanned delusions, as when groups share a belief in a natural or supernatural event without anyone's being the richer for it. Individual or mass delusions and panics enrich the fabric of historiography and implicitly provide lessons for the attentive audience. Herodotus certainly plays to his Greek audience's pleasure in descriptions of deception and delusion, allowing the listener's or reader's amused perception of a different reality. The responsible historian tried to separate fact from fiction, sham from truth, charla tan from dupe and clearheaded exposer of deceit.

The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy

Abstract: Janet Coleman brilliantly recreates the time, the place, the personalities, and the neurotic magic whereby the Compass made theater history in America. The Compass began in a storefront theater near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and lasted only a few years before its players including David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman moved on. Out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater and a radically new kind of comedian. "They did not plan to be funny or to change the course of comedy," writes Coleman. "But that is what happened." "For anyone who is interested in theatre, underground theatre, improvisational theatre, and the sheer madness of trying something new with a repertory group, "The Compass" will prove a welcome history with fascinating details." Norman Mailer "Janet Coleman has done a spectacular job of capturing the history, the almost alarmingly diverse cultural influences, and the extraordinary people who made up the Compass." Neal Weaver, "Los Angeles Village View" "Engrossing. . . . An open window on a part of the theater that should be known." Arthur Miller "A valuable chronicle of an important chapter in the history of comedy and theater." William Wolf, "New York Observer" "The eruptive, disruptive talents who made the theater memorable are the same ones who make "The Compass" a good read." Jay Cocks, "Time" "A moving, inspirational, anecdote-studded feast." "Publishers Weekly""

False Immortality in Measure for Measure: Comic Means, Tragic Ends

Abstract: E NDING WITH MARRIAGE EMPHASIZES THE SURVIVAL of the type through procreation; ending with death emphasizes the extinction of the individual creature. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare stops short of explicitly disparaging both "worlds to come," but the abrupt and formulaic comic ending encourages a suspicion that the aftermath of marriage and death alike is merely a biological process with no regard for human consciousness. To expand on Horace Walpole's aphoristic version of the genre distinction, "the world is a comedy to those that think" about the persistent traits of their species, "a tragedy to those that feel" their own mortality and that of the individual things they love. Measure for Measure is, from this perspective, a tragicomedy. 1 The play certainly portrays and extols the orderly perpetuation of human life, human society, and human virtue. Yet it also takes the three figurations of immortality to which people most commonly cling-the hope for genetic and spiritual heirs, the hope for divine salvation, and the hope for undying fame and honor-and undermines our faith in each of them, even as it undermines our faith in the comic formula as a whole by the unsatisfying impositions of marriage that conclude this death-filled play. Which is the means, and which the end, between the perpetuation of the species and the experience of individual life? Of these comic and tragic concerns, which one comprises sufficient meaning to expose its counterpart as merely an arbitrary ending? The first part of this essay will offer an abbreviated summary of the play's implicit comic argument for the systematic reproduction of the human race. A longer second part will argue, less conventionally, that the play persistently subverts the comic promises of immortality, encouraging instead a suspicion that we are each tragically betrayed by the supposedly benevolent biological and political systems to which God has abandoned His human offspring.

Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric

Abstract: Professor Fraker argues that the "Celestina", however original or singular, does not embody a new discourse, and falls easily within the literary norms of its time. Thus on the one hand it belongs to a genre, comedy, the term taken in a sense perfectly accessible to the two authors and their contemporaries. On the other, the detail and fabric of the work is in great part genuinely rhetorical. In his approach to the question of genre, Professor Fraker draws on four texts familiar to students at the time of composition of the work: the description of the comic plot in the section on "narratio" in the "De inventione", the essays of Evanthius and Donatus which introduce the latter's commentary on Terence, and the commentary proper. Throughout his study Professor Fraker maintains a sense of paradox: the "Celestina", by any standards unique, is nevertheless entirely conservative and traditional if considered from the viewpoint of form or mode of discourse.

Unruly Eloquence R. Bracht Branham: Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. (Revealing Antiquity, 2.) Pp. x + 279; 4 illustrations. Cambridge, Mass, and London, Harvard University Press, 1989. £21.95.

Abstract: In this learned and original book, Branham argues that too much interest has been taken in Lucian's sources and topicality and not enough in his literary aims and methods and the qualities which distinguish him as a 'serio-comic' writer. B.'s chief interests and contributions are on the subject of humour, not only that of L. but also the theories about to geloion held by Plato and Aristotle and the views on humour held by a variety of post-war scholars, mainly Transatlantic, a field in which your reviewer admits complete ignorance. B. takes as read some more obvious features of L.'s humour and concentrates on a few works (the dialogues Anach., Symp. JTr., Menippus = LSJ Nee, and DDeor., together with Demon, and Alex.) to illustrate some of the subtler points he wishes to make. He discusses how humour is employed by L.'s Cynic forbears, Diogenes and Crates, and also by Socrates, as represented by Plato, arguing that it was in serious use of humour that Demonax most resembled Socrates. B. analyses the humour of Plato's Euthydemus and L.'s Anacharsis, showing how Socrates and the two sophists 'speak a different language', while much the same is true of Solon and Anacharsis who view Greek athletics from completely different perspectives. Solon, despite his reputation as a sage, is inept at explaining Greek athletics and their purpose to Anacharsis, who is ridiculously uncomprehending, and, like Lycinus, Momus etc., is often one more voice of L.; thus B. uses Anacharsis to argue that ' the establishment of excluded, neglected or alien perspectives is fundamental to L.'s satiric strategies', an important source of Lucianic humour being the deliberate juxtaposition of characters speaking with the voice of 'widely disparate traditions'. (Here I would interject that this generalisation doesn't work well for many other dialogues.) Next B. gives an account of L.'s Symposium, showing how L. switches to the role of ironic narrator to reveal this feast as a travesty of the Platonic Symp. and anything but a learned party with L.'s guests fighting physically rather than competing intellectually. B. writes appreciatively of the comic fun of DDeor., JTr. and related works, and, taking his cue from Friedlander's article, Lachende Gotter, argues that, as the gods by their very nature enjoyed jokes at their own expense as suggested by the characterisation of Dionysus in the Frogs, L.'s portrayal of the Olympians is a pious and successful attempt to revitalise their role in the literary life of the second century. Perhaps so; I prefer to think of L. as a persistent, if genial, scourge of the Olympians and Zeus in particular; cf. Timon init., and CQ 49, 1956, 237.

Sexuality and Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage

Abstract: It can hardly be denied that Renaissance drama, at least in its English manifestation, constitutes a body of plays as highly charged with eroticism and as profoundly concerned with questions of sexuality as any in historyincluding Restoration comedy, which is often thought of as obsessed with sex and dominated by lubricity. Considering the impressive range of notable dramatists (even if Shakespeare were to be artificially excluded) and the immense variety of human experiences and relationships staged in their tragedies, comedies, histories, tragicomedies, romances, masques, and other entertainments, it would be arrogant, not to say naive, to attempt more than the most speculative generalizations about the sexual attitudes that helped shape these productions. The principle holds even if we were to consider just a single facet of such a complex topic-the bent, predilection, or special inclination of particular playwrights, let us say, the commercial pressures on theatrical companies, the individual talents of actors or groups of actors, the expectations of audiences (some of them more specialized or elitist than others), or what we might nowadays call the psychosexual mind-set of the age. In addition, of course, there is the forbidding problem of evidence. Historians such as Lawrence Stone and social theorists such as Michel

The Battle of the Sexes in Euripides' Ion

Abstract: Euripides' Ion has suffered from the attempt to find in the play an overriding message or moral. Verrall and his successors saw the Ion as an attack against Apollo and organized religion; Wassermann and Burnett argue that it defends orthodox piety; Gregoire and Loraux view it as a hymn or lament on Athenian national pride; and Knox and Gellie respond that the Ion is pure comedy with no deeper meaning. There is of course some truth to each of these interpretations, but it does not follow that the play's ‘real meaning’ lies somewhere in between them. I suggest that we read the Ion not as an abstract argument but as drama, and in particular as a social comedy whose ‘meaning’ lies not in an underlying message but in the action itself and in the conflicts among the play's characters, human and divine, male and female, foreign and Athenian.Such conflicts, in this play at least, focus attention upon the role of the gods, the place of foreigners in Athens, and relations between men and women. Of these three subjects, the first two have dominated discussion of the Ion, both by those who find them central to the play's religious or nationalistic theme, and by those who consider them incidental to the play as comedy. I shall first show that the third area of conflict — relations between men and women — is equally important in the Ion and reflects an important issue in contemporary Athens. Second, I shall argue that the gender issues raised somewhat provocatively in the first half of the play are upstaged by the melodramatic excitement of the second half. And I shall suggest, in conclusion, that although it is only one of many social and family conflicts in the drama, the battle between the sexes shows how the Ion raises important and difficult questions without becoming an ‘issue play’.

Scripts: Writing for Radio and Television

Abstract: Introduction PART ONE: PRESCRIPTIONS Style Formats Comedy Writing Journal Writing Proscriptions PART TWO: SCRIPTS Commercials Features Documentaries News Public Service Announcements Editorials Reviews Teleplays PART THREE: POSTSCRIPTS Common Writing Errors Teaching Suggestions A Note to Writing Teachers (But Students, You May Read This If You Want To)

The conversion of the Jews and other essays

Abstract: The conversion of the Jews Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage Saul Bellow and ghetto cosmopolitanism Jewish comedy and the contradictions of culture Allen Ginsberg's survival Bernard Malamud and the return of the repressed Malamud - the still, sad music a portrait of Delmore Zuckerman's travels where's papa? the truants gates of Eden elusive trilling criticism and culture in defense of the imagination the partisan ambition and the American scholar three honest men an American procession the last Trotskyist.