Mind's Eye Re: Humour

Me too Molly - I wonder what the term 'I didn't know whether to laugh
or cry' means?

On 1 Dec, 00:06, Molly <mollyb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> would much rather be laughing.
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> On Friday, November 30, 2012 6:29:50 AM UTC-5, andrew vecsey wrote:
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> > What In find interesting is how it is almost impossible to see the
> > physical difference of someone laughing his head off and someone crying his
> > heart out. Both are a result of a sudden unexpected disclosure of truth..
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> > On Saturday, November 24, 2012 7:51:00 PM UTC+1, archytas wrote:
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> >> While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early
> >> humans, we know that by the 6th century BCE the Greeks had
> >> institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was
> >> performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy. Both were
> >> based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in
> >> both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in
> >> the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy
> >> represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success
> >> or failure often depending on chance factors. Where they differ is in
> >> the responses of the lead characters to life's incongruities.
> >> Identifying with these characters, audiences at comedies and tragedies
> >> have contrasting responses to events in the dramas. And because these
> >> responses carry over to similar situations in life, comedy and tragedy
> >> embody contrasting responses to the incongruities in life.
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> >> Tragedy valorizes serious, emotional engagement with life's problems,
> >> even struggle to the death. Along with epic, it is part of the Western
> >> heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for
> >> them, and honor. The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and
> >> militarism—many of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it
> >> valorizes what Conrad Hyers (1996) calls Warrior Virtues—blind
> >> obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning
> >> loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride.
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> >> Comedy, by contrast, embodies an anti-heroic, pragmatic attitude
> >> toward life's incongruities. From Aristophanes' Lysistrata to Charlie
> >> Chaplin's The Great Dictator to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11,
> >> comedy has mocked the irrationality of militarism and blind respect
> >> for authority. Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-
> >> making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away. As the
> >> Irish saying goes, you're only a coward for a moment, but you're dead
> >> for the rest of your life. In place of Warrior Virtues, it extols
> >> critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of
> >> physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex.
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> >> Much humour is cruel - but try and read cruelty in to 'Doctor, doctor,
> >> I've lost an electron'.  'Are you sure'?  'Yes, I'm positive'.
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> >> What do we think humour is?

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