front cover of Fabulosa!
Fabulosa!
The Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
Paul Baker
Reaktion Books, 2020
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

“Richly evocative and entertaining.”—Guardian

“An essential book for anyone who wants to Polari bona!”—Attitude

“Exuberant, richly detailed. . . . A delightful read.”—Tatler

Polari is a language that was used chiefly by gay men in the first half of the twentieth century. It offered its speakers a degree of public camouflage and a means of identification. Its colorful roots are varied—from Cant to Lingua Franca to dancers’ slang—and in the mid-1960s it was thrust into the limelight by the characters Julian and Sandy, voiced by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, on the BBC radio show Round the Horne (“Oh hello Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly old eek!”). Paul Baker recounts the story of Polari with skill, humor, and tenderness. He traces its historical origins and describes its linguistic nuts and bolts, explores the ways and the environments in which it was spoken, explains the reasons for its decline, and tells of its unlikely reemergence in the twenty-first century.  With a cast of drag queens and sailors, Dilly boys and macho clones, Fabulosa! is an essential document of recent history—a fascinating and fantastically readable account of this funny, filthy, and ingenious language.
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Fetching the Old Southwest
Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain
James H. Justus
University of Missouri Press, 2004
For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain’s early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers.
James H. Justus’s Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern “new country,” a place that would, in time, become the Deep South.
Justus’s study focuses mainly on the humor from the area categorized in the federal censuses of the mid-nineteenth century as the Southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and, eventually, Arkansas and Texas. Where it is pertinent, he also includes North Carolina and Missouri in this cultural map. Although some of these pieces may not precisely reflect their cultural setting, they are assuredly refractions of it.
While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary.
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Folklore Fights the Nazis
Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940–1945
Kathleen Stokker
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
    Armed with jokes, puns, and cartoons, Norwegians tried to keep their spirits high and foster the Resistance by poking fun at the occupying Germans during World War II. Despite a 1942 ordinance mandating death for the ridicule of Nazi soldiers, Norwegians attacked the occupying Nazis and their Norwegian collaborators by means of anecdotes, quips, insinuating personal ads, children’s stories, Christmas cards, mock postage stamps, and symbolic clothing.
    In relating this dramatic story, Kathleen Stokker draws upon her many interviews with survivors of the Occupation and upon the archives of the Norwegian Resistance Museum and the University of Oslo. Central to the book are four “joke notebooks” kept by women ranging in age from eleven to thirty, who found sufficient meaning in this humor to risk recording and preserving it. Stokker also cites details from wartime diaries of three other women from East, West, and North Norway. Placing the joking in historical, cultural, and psychological context, Stokker demonstrates how this seemingly frivolous humor in fact contributed to the development of a resistance mentality among an initially confused, paralyzed, and dispirited population, stunned by the German invasion of their neutral country.
    For this paperback edition, Stokker has added a new preface offering a comparative view of resistance through humor in neighboring Denmark.
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Forty Years of Texas Storytelling
Historical and Contemporary Tales from Diverse Writers and Poets
Ted Parkhurst
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2024
A collection of thirty-plus stories by regional storytellers, each representing the Texas Storytelling Tradition as nurtured within the Tejas Storytelling Association since 1984. Contributors to this sampler of folktales, original stories, humorous and historic tales are all part of Texas Storytelling Festival history. The Festival is an annual event in Denton, Texas.
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Freudian Slips
Cartoons on Psychology
Harris, Sidney
Rutgers University Press, 1997
Renowned cartoonist Sidney Harris turns his legendary pen loose on psychiatry and psychology in the laugh-out-loud, funny Freudian Slips. This hilarious collection of 150 cartoons -some published for the first time in this book--takes a lighthearted look at pop psychology, psychotherapy, human behavior, and the psychology of everyday life as only Harris can. Freudians and Jungians are certain to agree- this book is the perfect therapy to bring a smile to the face of anyone who appreciates a clever cartoon.Harris fans will surely want to add Freudian Slips to their collection of his other delightfully witty books, including Einstein Simplified, Can't You Guys Read?, Chalk Up Another One, So Sue Me! and Stress Test, all available from Rutgers University Press.
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From the Top
Brief Transmissions from Tent Show Radio
Michael Perry
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

“Bottom line is, I’m the kind of guy who’s happy to go to the opera, but I should like to be allowed to wear steel-toed boots with my evening suit. I like to read Harper’s with a chaser of Varmint Hunter Magazine. Maybe that’s why I enjoy a good show under canvas. Here we sit, brain-deep in arts and culture, but we’re also just people hanging out in a tent, some of us wearing boots, a few of us wearing Birkenstocks, but best of all we’re breathing free fresh air filled with music.”

From Scandihoovian Spanglish to snickering chickens, New York Times bestselling author and humorist Michael Perry navigates a wide range of topics in this collection of brief essays drawn from his weekly appearances on the nationally syndicated Tent Show Radio program. Fatherhood, dumpster therapy, dangerous wedding rings, Christmas trees, used cars, why you should have bacon in your stock portfolio, loggers in clogs—whatever the subject, Perry has a rare ability to touch both the funny bone and the heart.

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