Painting of thirty-five expressive heads.

Thirty-Five Expressive Heads, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, c. 1825. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing, France.

Comedy

Volume VII, Number 1 | winter 2014

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The Solid Nonpareil

Lewis H. Lapham

Once Upon a Time in the West

Ben Tarnoff

Split Personalities

Andrew McConnell Stott

Map

The Human Comedy

Miscellany

Niccolò Machiavelli, comedian.

Ludwig Wittgenstein watches a silly American film.

Samuel Pepys pans William Shakespeare.

The first use of the laugh track on television.

Laughter at the International Clown Meeting.

Gioachino Rossini possess strong opinions about other composers.

Whoopie cushions of Ancient Rome.

“Hang Lenin and put Trotsky against the wall.”

Horace Greeley gets Edgar Allen Poe at half-price.

Ernest Hemingway digs at Ezra Pound.

Dorothy Parker uses “horticulture” in a sentence.

Voices In Time

Wordplay

c. 1592 | Padua

Categorical Imperatives

c. 330 BC | Athens

Self-Incrimination

1875 | London

Goodbye to All That

1225 | France

Abraham Lincoln Loses the Girl

1838 | Springfield, IL

Oscar Wilde Arranges an Interview

1895 | London

Lenny Bruce Loses the Crowd

1963 | Los Angeles

Character Study

1688 | France

Charlie Chaplin Invents Himself

1913 | Los Angeles

A German Comedy Is Like a German Sentence

1865 | London

H.L. Mencken on Balder and Dash

1921 | Baltimore

The Reply Churlish

1882 | San Francisco

Have You Heard the One About the Doltish Venetian?

1452 | Florence

Roots of Laughter

1860 | London

Flann O’Brien Splits the Atom

c. 1940 | Ireland

Merry Pranksters

c. 1555 | Paris

Low and Unbecoming

1748 | Bath

Briefly Noted

1791 | Steventon

Last Testament

1456 | Paris

Sense and Nonsense

1896 | London

Very Old Jokes

300 | Greece

Parthian Shot

1731 | Dublin

Non-Apology

1830 | Eafield

The Human Element

1900 | Paris

New Hires

1947 | Washington, D.C.

Charts and Graphs

All in the Delivery

Comic Relief

The Fun Police

I Died Laughing

Dangerous Wit

Stock Characters

Name Calling

Undercover

On the Borscht Belt

Punked!

This Just In

Contributors

Conversations

Thomas Hobbes & Viktor Frankl

St. John Chrysostom & Charles Baudelaire

La Rochefoucauld & Rob Delaney

Quintilian & Joan Rivers

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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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