ONLINE: Just in time for Halloween, we begin this course with Ha! Aah!!! The Painful Relationship Between Humor and Horror. Examples ranging from Sigmund Freud and Immanuel Kant to Abbott and Costello show how these genres share a mordant view of our relationship to pain, an obsession with the human body and its multifarious fluids, and a subtext of death and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and vomit gags. Next comes Comedy vs. the Apocalypse, which looks at how humans use humor in terrible times to affirm that the purpose of life is to do more than just survive. We’ll see how comedy has always laughed at tragedy — from the Black Death to the Holocaust and 9/11 — and how humor can help get us to tomorrow. Finally, The Secret Life of Jokes. From Henny Youngman’s one-liners to the epically filthy The Aristocrats, every joke ever told shows how comedy works, using the same basic components as all art forms: tension and resolution, pattern recognition, misdirection and surprise. | Lecture + Q&A.
Max enrollment: 200.
