Behind the Stakes, Between the Lines, Beyond the Pun: A Critical Deconstruction of Humor in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Other Popular Comedies

<p>Humor is a powerful rhetorical device employed at all levels of human discourse—from casual banter to political debate. Still, despite humor’s global prevalence, its historical transgressiveness, and its distinct potential both to neutralize and critically engage highly fraught issues, humans do not often pause to ask how humor works. And what does its working tell us about our humanness? This thesis explores the operation of humor in literature and performance, using tools provided by structuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critical arenas, to reveal how humor’s fundamental structures invite humans to entertain new perspectives and practice empathy. The study considers irony, the performance of stakes, wordplay, departure from form, timing, metatheatrics, and cross-dressing. William Shakespeare’s <em>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</em> (ca. 1595) serves as a key text, but films and television series including <em>Star Wars</em> (20th Century Fox, 1977, 1983), <em>Young Frankenstein</em> (20th Century Fox, 1974), and <em>Doctor Who</em> (BBC,1963- ), are employed among other popular examples to demonstrate diverse types of humor.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Graduate Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Libby, Jaime

Contributors dc:contributor

• Judy Halebsky, PhD
• Graham Guest, PhD

• humor
• comedy
• shakespeare
• pun
• stakes
• comic timing
• Acting
• Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
• English Language and Literature
• Other Film and Media Studies
• Other Theatre and Performance Studies
• Performance Studies
• Theatre History

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholar.dominican.edu/masters-theses/229

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.dominican.edu:masters-theses-1233