Misdirection is a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.Managing the audience's attention is the aim of all Th ...
Surprise is intimately connected to the idea of acting in accordance with a set of rules. When the rules of reality generating events of daily life separate from the rule-of-thumb expectations, surpri ...
Observational comedy is a form of humor based on the commonplace aspects of everyday life. It is the most common type of humor used in stand-up comedy, although it is present in other media, such as f ...
Lichtenberg was the youngest of 17 children of pastor Johann Conrad Lichtenberg. His father, ascending through the ranks of the church hierarchy, eventually became superintendent for Darmstadt. Unusua ...
The word comes from the Greek σαρκασμ?? (sarkasmos) which is taken from σαρκ?ζειν meaning "to tear flesh, bite the lip in rage, sneer".It is first recorded in English in 1579, in an ...
The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Nordic Bronze Age or the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south, east and west from the 1st century BC, c ...
As in the wit of Dorothy Parker's set, the Algonquin Round Table, witty remarks may be intentionally cruel (as in many epigrams), and perhaps more ingenious than funny.A quip is an observation or sayi ...
Before 221 BCE The Classics of ConfucianismThe Four BooksThe Great Learning is a chapter from the Classic of Rites (see below).The Doctrine of the Mean is another chapter from the Classic of Rites.The ...
Shen Zhou was born into a wealthy family in Xiangcheng, near the thriving city of Suzhou, in the Jiangsu province, China. His genealogy traces his family’s wealth to the late Yuan period, but only as ...
A West Indian is a native or inhabitant of the West Indies (the Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago). For more than 100 years the words West Indian specifically described natives of the West Indies, ...
Thomas was born in Kingston, Jamaica and began his career in entertainment at local dancehalls like the 'Adastra Gardens' and 'Success'. In 1949, he earned himself a year-long engagement after he had ...
Mento draws on musical traditions brought over by African slaves. The influence of European music is also strong, as slaves who could play musical instruments were often required to play music for the ...
In Buddhism, bhāva is the continuity of life and death, conditioned upon "grasping" (upādāna), the desire for further life and sensation. This bhāva is the condition for the arising of living bein ...
Further information: Theory of humorHistory: Incongruity, the superiority theory of humor, and deformity The ridiculous often has extreme incongruity (things that are not thought to belong next to eac ...
It has been proposed that the work was composed between 360 and 347 BC, and that it is among the last of the late dialogues of Plato, many of which do not figure Socrates as the main speaking characte ...
