Bernie DeKoven is both a play theorist and a play practitioner. He is the author of "The Well-Played Game" (reissued in 2013 by MIT Press) as well as "Junkyard Sports," "Power Meetings," and "Connected Executives" and of the compact disc "Recess for the Soul," an assemblage of monologues about…

Repertoire: (1) a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. (2) the whole body of items that are regularly performed. (3) a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses. [https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+repertoire.] Assessing the impact of teaching on student…

This paper examines the popular representation of childcare in North America. The author argues that the influence of popular culture on society's beliefs about childcare is an unexamined area that should be addressed as part of the larger project to improve the status of childcare educators in North America and internationally. Through the…

While humor has long been documented as a useful teaching tool, it is almost entirely untheorized in terms of its potential for multicultural education. Specifically, the learning opportunities that racial comedic media offer in multicultural and anti-racist coursework is a particularly under-studied area, while research in this vein has great…

The BBC Radio 4 comedy-drama "A Higher Education" was written in 1999 to present a satire of a dysfunctional and cash-strapped university (Northfield) led by the egotistical and amoral Head of Drama, Don Crookfield (played by Rik Mayall). For those of us passionately engaged in the provision of higher education today, the satire also…

This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian's dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the…

We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos. In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that…

In traditional learning, students passively absorb the materials provided by their teachers or textbooks. Thus, their learning autonomy is insufficient, and this affects learning motivation. Students find it difficult to absorb the knowledge taught in a classroom and apply it to real life. We combined situated learning and learning through drama…

This article explores an eight-month community theatre project with young people for whom English is a second language. Working as a creative practitioner facilitating young people to explore their personal stories of transition to the UK, the drama therapist discovered comedy to be an important and poignant vehicle for expression of the emotional…

Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and…

Creative Dissertation: "The Connoisseur of Pain" is a comic noir set in Hollywood in 1962, and its central conceit is that cartoons are real, live-action films starring anthropomorphic animals that cartoonists later replicate frame by frame in order to make the violent content palatable to children. The book's protagonist and narrator is…

Rodeo clowns entertain crowds during and between rodeo events, such as bull riding and steer roping. While these events take place in the center of the arena, rodeo clowns walk along the outskirts and provide comic narrative. Between events, rodeo clowns take center stage and perform brief sketches to keep the crowd entertained. Rodeo clowns…

This qualitative study explored diverse college students' perspectives on the portrayal of college life in recent popular films. Results from this study suggest that White college students dismiss stereotypes as comedic satire whereas their non-White peers readily identify the influence of negative media representations upon their academic and…

In an application of experiential learning, assessment, and career development, this article reports a field experiment of teaching sales students adaptive selling skills via an "Improvisational (Improv) Comedy" technique: "Yes, And." Students learn this well-established theatrical improv method via classroom lecture,…

Building upon previous research into the effectiveness of using videos for language teaching purposes, this study utilized an English animated situation comedy (sitcom) as an authentic type of multimedia to teach a particular grammatical structure, namely conditional sentences. This study also aimed at investigating the learners' attitudes toward…