Pressestimmen
Funny Peculiar is an intelligent, integrative study of the various forms and functions of humor. Brottman explores her topic through a series of essays on the comic world of laughter, jokes, clowns, comedians, and humor therapists, all of which are examined for their serious, decidedly unfunny psychological underpinnings. Deftly written in beautifully jargon-free prose, often wry and bitingly humorous, Funny Peculiar goes to the heart of comedy, using the underappreciated work of the eccentric, self-taught Freudian scholar Gershon Legmann as one of several lenses for examining the psychology of humor. Brottman's critique of humor therapists is especially incisive and -- dare I say? -- humorous. Her book is a pleasure.
Kurzbeschreibung
Why are jokes funny? Why do we laugh? In
Funny Peculiar, Mikita Brottman demurs from recent scholarship that takes laughter-- and the broader domain of humor and the comical--as a liberating social force and an endearing aspect of self-expression. For Brottman, there is nothing funny about laughter, which is less connected to mirth and feelings of good will than to a nexus of darker emotions: fear, aggression, shame, anxiety.
Brottman rethinks not only the mechanisms of humor but also the relation of humor to the body and the senses. To this end, she provides an engrossing account of the life and work of Gershon Legman, exiled author, publisher, and sexologist, Alfred Kinsey's first bibliographer, and legendary compiler of the dirty joke. Like Freud, Legman was convinced of the impossibility of understanding humor apart from sex, and Brottman shows how his two massive works on the subject,
Rationale of the Dirty Joke and
No Laughing Matter, provide a framework for understanding the ambivalent and often hostile impulses that underlie the comic impulse in its various guises. In lively and enlivening chapters, she traverses dirty jokes, the figure of the evil clown in popular culture, the current popularity of humor therapy, changing fashions in stand-up comedy, and the connection between humor and horror. Brottman's sparkling prose, laced with wit, does not obscure the seriousness of
Funny Peculiar. It is a thoughtful and wide-ranging elaboration of the Freudian claim that joking, in point of fact, is no laughing matter.
