A01=David Ellis
Author_David Ellis
Category=ATXD
Category=JBCC1
Category=JHM
Category=QDTQ
Defining Comedy
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780718898601
- Publication Date: 30 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers and psychologists, along with experts from the social sciences and linguistics, have made vain attempts to formulate a general theory of comedy. Passing in review all the usual suspects, including Hobbes, Kant and Bergson, as well as several recent theorists of comedy from America, and while not of course forgetting Freud as well as authors such as Stendhal and Baudelaire, David Ellis suggests that, although comedy is undoubtedly an important topic, with profound implications for both social and private life, there have been better ways to pass one's time than in a fruitless search for an overarching explanation of what it is and how it works. Written in a jargon-free, entertaining style, with illustrations from both famous comic writers and present-day performers in Britain and America, this is a book that can be read with pleasure by all with an interest in comedy, whether they are specialists in the matter or not.
David Ellis is emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Kent. His many previous publications include a tribute to the Wittgensteinian Frank Cioffi, The philosopher in shirt-sleeves (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Blasted with Antiquity: Old Age and the Consolations of Literature which was published by the Lutterworth Press in 2023.
