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

Split Personalities

Andrew McConnell Stott

Once Upon a Time in the West

Ben Tarnoff

Map

The Human Comedy

Miscellany

Ludwig Wittgenstein watches a silly American film.

Ernest Hemingway digs at Ezra Pound.

“Hang Lenin and put Trotsky against the wall.”

The first use of the laugh track on television.

Laughter at the International Clown Meeting.

Niccolò Machiavelli, comedian.

Horace Greeley gets Edgar Allen Poe at half-price.

Whoopie cushions of Ancient Rome.

Samuel Pepys pans William Shakespeare.

Gioachino Rossini possess strong opinions about other composers.

Dorothy Parker uses “horticulture” in a sentence.

Voices In Time

Flann O’Brien Splits the Atom

c. 1940 | Ireland

Merry Pranksters

c. 1555 | Paris

Goodbye to All That

1225 | France

H.L. Mencken on Balder and Dash

1921 | Baltimore

Very Old Jokes

300 | Greece

Wordplay

c. 1592 | Padua

Lenny Bruce Loses the Crowd

1963 | Los Angeles

Charlie Chaplin Invents Himself

1913 | Los Angeles

Sense and Nonsense

1896 | London

A German Comedy Is Like a German Sentence

1865 | London

Character Study

1688 | France

Have You Heard the One About the Doltish Venetian?

1452 | Florence

Last Testament

1456 | Paris

Self-Incrimination

1875 | London

Non-Apology

1830 | Eafield

The Reply Churlish

1882 | San Francisco

Parthian Shot

1731 | Dublin

Abraham Lincoln Loses the Girl

1838 | Springfield, IL

Briefly Noted

1791 | Steventon

New Hires

1947 | Washington, D.C.

Categorical Imperatives

c. 330 BC | Athens

Roots of Laughter

1860 | London

Low and Unbecoming

1748 | Bath

The Human Element

1900 | Paris

Oscar Wilde Arranges an Interview

1895 | London

Charts and Graphs

I Died Laughing

All in the Delivery

The Fun Police

Undercover

Punked!

On the Borscht Belt

Stock Characters

Comic Relief

Name Calling

Dangerous Wit

This Just In

Contributors

Conversations

La Rochefoucauld & Rob Delaney

Quintilian & Joan Rivers

St. John Chrysostom & Charles Baudelaire

Thomas Hobbes & Viktor Frankl

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