The Legacy and Power of Performance Poetry: A Reading List
MTV might take credit for getting spoken word on the pop cultural radar, but it’s a tradition that spans millennia and continents.
Imperial Humo(u)r
Imperialism, experienced as both royal subject and new colonizer, has been a key element in the development, continuity, and disruption of American humor.
Racist Humor: Exploratory Readings
An introduction to the history and theory of racist humor and the social role it plays in Western societies.
Laughing Matters
Sophia McClennen, author of Trump Was a Joke, discusses how political satire decoded the chaos of the forty-fifth presidency.
Mad About Nixon
No other personality appeared more often on the cover of Mad during the first fifty years of the satirical magazine’s life.
The Laugh Track: Loathe It or Love It
The use of a laugh track began with radio, and was taken up by the new medium of television in 1950. Both viewers and critics have loathed it ever since.
The Mockumentary: A Very Real History
What's the appeal of humor masquerading as seriousness? An entire movie genre stands ready to shed light on that question.
Fake News: A Media Literacy Reading List
Compiled by graduate students in a 2016 course on “Activism and Digital Culture,” at University of Southern California.
La Pelona: The Hispanic-American Flapper
Flapperismo was no more appreciated by Hispanic guardians of traditional femininity than it was by Anglo-American ones.