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In the early 1960s a new style of situation comedy took over primetime as Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., I Dream of Jeannie, My Favorite Martian, and other “Outsider Sitcoms” featuring alien characters disrupting their TV environments shot to the top of the ratings. Departing from a critical approach that understands these series as reflections of the decade’s many social disruptions, The Castaways reveals the programs as emotional responses by their creators to a more personal upheaval: their loss of influence in the broadcast industry. As network executives turned increasingly to audience research, independent producers felt the ability that had been most crucial to their success in broadcasting was being devalued: gut creative intuition. Drawing on memoirs, show treatments, and other original documents, The Castaways uncovers how leading characters on the programs served as emotional proxies for their creators’ fears of industry irrelevance as they were cast out from the corporate halls of power where their series’—and personal—fates were decided.

This potpourri of satire on language use in Western culture will trigger chuckles and guffaws from an eclectic readership

In The Clan of the Flapdragon and Other Adventures in Etymology by B. M. W. Schrapnel, Ph.D., the pseudonymous critic satirizes a variety of subjects in and out of academe. These adventurous essays include lampoons on writing, language, and literature, and the collection is a delightful spoof of much in contemporary culture—especially areas of intellectual pretension. Readers will be entertained by anachronistic allusions, improbable parodies, whimsical etymologies, tongue-in-cheek word play, and stunning purple prose—examples of just some of the liberties Schrapnel takes with the language.

Dr. Schrapnel includes a wide array of audience reactions in the form of bogus letters from fictional readers, confirming that language and literature are everyone’s business. He also offers an annual list of words that writers and speakers should use more often—a lexicographer’s equivalent to the endangered species list—and coins terms such as prufrockery and grendelish.
 

During the years since his death, Federico García Lorca, Spain's best-known twentieth-century poet and playwright, has generally been considered a writer of tragedy. Three of his major plays are fatalistic stories of suffering and death, and his poetry is filled with dread. Yet most of Lorca's dramatic production consists of comedies and farces. Throughout his poetry and prose, as well as in his most somber plays, runs an undercurrent of humor—dark irony and satire—that is in no way contradictory to his tragic view of life. On the contrary, as Virginia Higginbotham demonstrates, through humor Lorca defines, intensifies, and tries to come to terms with what he sees as the essentially hopeless condition of humankind.

Although Lorca's comic moments and techniques have been discussed in isolated articles, the importance of humor has largely been ignored in the fundamental studies of his work. Higginbotham is concerned with Lorca's total output: lyric poetry, tragicomedies and farces, avant-garde prose and plays, puppet farces, and master plays. She describes Lorca's place in the mainstream of the Spanish theater and shows his relationship to some relevant non-Spanish dramatists. Furthermore, she discusses ways in which Lorca's work anticipates the modern theater of the absurd. The result is a comprehensive study of an important, but previously ignored, aspect of Lorca's work.

The Comic Spirit of Federico García Lorca includes a Lorca chronology and an extensive bibliography.

Why did Barack Obama court Jon Stewart and trade jokes with Stephen Colbert during the campaign of 2008? Why did Sarah Palin forgo the opportunity to earn votes on the Sunday morning political talk shows but embrace the chance to get laughs on Saturday Night Live? The Dance of the Comedians examines the history behind these questions—the merry, mocking, and highly contested anarchies of standup political comedy that have locked humorists, presidents, and their fellow Americans in an improvisational three-way “dance” since the early years of the American republic. 

Peter M. Robinson shows how the performance of political humor developed as a celebration of democracy and an expression of political power, protest, and commercial profit. He places special significance on the middle half of the twentieth century, when presidents and comedians alike—from Calvin Coolidge to Ronald Reagan, from Will Rogers to Saturday Night Live's “Not Ready for Prime Time Players”—developed modern understandings of the power of laughter to affect popular opinion and political agendas, only to find the American audience increasingly willing and able to get in on the act. These years put the long-standing traditions of presidential deference profoundly in play as all three parties to American political humor—the people, the presidents, and the comedy professionals—negotiated their way between reverence for the office of the presidency and ridicule of its occupants. 

Although the focus is on humor, The Dance of the Comedians illuminates the process by which Americans have come to recognize that the performance of political comedy has serious and profound consequences for those on all sides of the punch line.

The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish community

Disdained by many Yankee residents as Catholic lowlifes, the growing Irish population of the Lowell, Massachusetts, “paddy camps” in the nineteenth century proved a tempting source of cheap labor for local mill owners, who took advantage of the immigrants’ proximity to exploit them to the fullest. Displaced by their cheaper labor, other workers blamed the Irish for job losses and added to their plight through repression and segregation.

Now in paperback and featuring a new preface, Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps demonstrates how the Irish community in Lowell overcame adversity to develop strong religious institutions, an increased political presence, and a sense of common traditions.

The Texanist, Texas Monthly’s perennially popular back-page column, has become the magazine’s most-read feature. With an inimitable style and an unassailable wholesomeness, columnist David Courtney has counseled many a well-intentioned Texan, native or wannabe, on how to properly conduct him- or herself. Until the July 2016 issue, an original illustration by the late award-winning artist Jack Unruh, depicting the Texanist in a situation described in the column, accompanied the Texanist’s sage wisdom. Unruh’s peerless illustrations displayed a sly wit that paired perfectly with Courtney’s humorous ripostes.

The Texanist gathers several dozen of Unruh’s most unforgettable illustrations, along with the fascinating, perplexing, and even downright weird questions that inspired them. Curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, the Texanist advises on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it’s served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos? The Texanist addresses all of these important subjects and more. Whether you heed the good guidance, or just enjoy the whimsical illustrations, The Texanist will both entertain and educate you.

Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition.

With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.

Following the most solemn moments in recent American history, comedians have tested the limits of how soon is “too soon” to joke about tragedy. Comics confront the horrifying events and shocking moments that capture national attention and probe the acceptable, or “sayable,” boundaries of expression that shape our cultural memory. In Tragedy Plus Time, Philip Scepanski examines the role of humor, particularly televised comedy, in constructing and policing group identity and memory in the wake of large-scale events.

Tragedy Plus Time is the first comprehensive work to investigate tragedy-driven comedy in the aftermaths of such traumas as the JFK assassination and 9/11, as well as during the administration of Donald Trump. Focusing on the mass publicization of television comedy, Scepanski considers issues of censorship and memory construction in the ways comedians negotiate emotions, politics, war, race, and Islamophobia. Amid the media frenzy and conflicting expressions of grief following a public tragedy, comedians provoke or risk controversy to grapple publicly with national traumas that all Americans are trying to understand for themselves.

A remarkably perceptive portrait of the Lone Star State, this collection of pieces from the New Yorker, the Nation, and other publications presents highlights of bestselling author Calvin Trillin’s classic writing on Texas subjects.

"Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so's you'd know it." So Calvin Trillin introduces this collection of articles and poems about a place that turns up surprisingly often when he's ostensibly writing about something else. Whether reporting on the American scene for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary for the Nation, or writing his memoirs, Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists that "this has not been by design . . . there has simply been a lot going on in Texas." Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin's family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe that the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself in the family's imagination.

Trillin on Texas gathers some of Trillin's best writing on subjects near to his heart—politics, true crime, food, and rare books, among them—which also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making "snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials," he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux, but quite believable, LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. Trillin takes us on a mouthwatering pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly proclaimed the best in Texas and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry—who rejects all of his "sleepers." He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest on a South Texas ranch and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer "Joe Bob Briggs" fueled a war between Dallas's daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power—Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold.

Sure to entertain Texans and other folks alike, Trillin on Texas proves once again that Calvin Trillin is one of America's shrewdest observers and wittiest writers.