As opposed to stand-up comedy and sketch comedy, a situation comedy has a storyline and ongoing characters in, essentially, a comedic narrative. The situation is often composed of comedic sequences se ...
Some themes (with examples) that underpinned late 20th century British humour were:Innuendo Innuendo in British humour is evident in the literature as far back as Beowulf and Chaucer, and it is a prev ...
BBC News reporters and broadcasts are now and have in the past been banned in several countries primarily for reporting which has been unfavourable to the ruling government. For example, correspondent ...
The British Broadcasting Company broadcast its first radio bulletin from radio station 2LO on 14 November 1922. Wishing to avoid competition, newspaper publishers persuaded the government to ban the B ...
Everyday and psycho-pathological contexts Contexts of exaggeration include:Manipulation The boasting and bragging by arrogant or manipulative people has been sent up on stage since the first appearanc ...
The most common type of visual gag is based on multiple interpretations of a series of events. This type is used in the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps. Lead actor Robert Donat was kidnapping ...
Funny Business is a documentary style television series about the craft of comedy consisting of six 50-minute episodes. The first episode aired in the UK 22 November 1992. The show was also shown in G ...
Carlin's most famous routine was his "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television", in which much of the humour is derived from a sudden, rapid-fire delivery of the seven words. The remainder of the routi ...
When one seeks to explain an event, the understanding often depends on the frame referred to. If a friend rapidly closes and opens an eye, we will respond very differently depending on whether we attr ...
Puns can be classified in various ways:The homophonic pun, a common type, uses word pairs which sound alike (homophones) but are not synonymous. Walter Redfern exemplified this type with his statement ...
The English metaphor derives from the 16th-century Old French métaphore, which comes from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over", in turn from the Greek μεταφορ? (metaphorá), "transfer", from ...
Hyperbole (/ha??p?rb?li?/ hy-pur-b?-lee; Greek: ?περβολ? hyperbolē, "exaggeration") is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong ...
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. "Meaning" here refers to whatever should be captured by a good diction ...
Common themes in paradoxes include self-reference, infinite regress, circular definitions, and confusion between different levels of abstraction.Patrick Hughes outlines three laws of the paradox:Self- ...
By creation of a paradox, Plato's Euthydemus dialogue demonstrates the need for the notion of contradiction. In the ensuing dialogue Dionysodorus denies the existence of "contradiction", all the while ...
