This thesis analyzes how Joan Rivers’ comedy content and style changed during the first 30 years of her career and how these changes impacted Rivers’ presentation of her identity as a Jewish female comedian. This project focuses on Joan Rivers’ career in two sections: her early …
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This thesis researches the reception of British television political comedy from 1962 to 2012, exploring the continuities and contrasts in viewers' definitions, interpretations and evaluations of the genre. Television comedy scholarship has privileged the text but this first in-…
This thesis represents the first Cultural Studies analysis of the 1980s entertainment form commonly known as ‘alternative comedy’, which emerged against the backdrop of social, industrial and political unrest. However, the use of the term ‘alternative comedy’ has obscured a dive…
This thesis is an analysis of the performance reception of Aristophanes' 'Frogs' across the English-speaking world; in which I include Britain, North America, Africa and Australasia. It will draw on the growing trend of performance reception as a branch of Classical Reception, a…
This thesis re-examines the role of marriage in the golden age of seventeenth-century French comedy. It reconsiders received wisdom on the subject to challenge acceptance of the final promise of marriage as a dénouement complet to comedy. Through an analysis of the themes of dis…
Lying far outside the canon, Lucian of Samosata was for decades considered a writer of frivolous epideictic, if not an outright plagiarist, cutting and pasting together material from the golden age of Greek literature. And while the second half of the twentieth century witnessed…
The objective of this thesis is to observe and analyze the function that the obstacle accomplishes in the dramatic structure of Lope de Vega's Muslim and Christian Comedias. The Corpus of the study constitutes thirty plays written between 1579 and 1629. From the methodological p…
Examining the US Supreme Court case June Medical Services LLC V. Russo, I draw on the complicated trajectory of Louisiana law and Alexander Weheliye’s theorization of the assemblage of the nonhuman to argue that Black women in Louisiana face particular legal barriers and forms o…
This dissertation examines the history and discourse of comedic periodicals during the formative period of Japanese modernization, 1870-1910. In the broadest sense, this study argues that comedic publications were key to the birth of modern mass media in late-19th and early-20th…
Screwball comedy was a unique subgenre of romantic comedy occurring in American film of the 1930s and 40s, with an emphasis on fast-paced, witty dialogue, zany physical humor, and strong female characters. This dissertation examines the origins of screwball comedy in many subgen…
During my first year in the Professional Acting Training Program (PATP), L. Zane Jones asked my class to share our artistic statement. And there I was, a first year graduate student who couldn’t answer this simple question. I’m embarrassed to say that this was the first moment I…
This dissertation examines how several genres of American comedy represented issues relating to the women’s and gay liberation movements during the 1970s and 1980s. Television comedy writers, cartoonists, and stand-up performers responded to feminism, changing gender roles, and …
This dissertation explores the ways in which Plautus’s comedies, inherently translated works, negotiate foreign characters and foreignness within their hybrid theatrical and extra-theatrical spaces. This project is part of a larger discourse on the tension between Greek, Roman, …
Humor that takes as its comedic object the beliefs, practices, and culture of Christianity has flourished in the digital age via journalistic satire, video sharing, and social network websites. Theory of the comic's use as a moderator between the sacred and the profane provide b…