Bill Maher is a comedian. He also sells an invisible product, and that is comedy. Perhaps by doing what he does, it helps him see and understand others who do the same thing. Coarse throughout most of the film, Bill Maher makes his point proven time and time again. When he wasn’t referring to God as his imaginary childhood friend that promised security and purpose, he was exposing the blunt truth to true believers.
'The Fool is more important to the play than he may at first seem.' By considering the dramatic presentation of the Fool, evaluate this view. The Fool is more than just a jester who is present to provide some comic relief in the tragedy of King Lear; like many of Shakespeare’s fools, he is shown as a highly intelligent character who the audience likes not just for his entertainment, but his insightfulness. Therefore, he is central both to the plot, as he criticises and advises Lear, potentially setting his later clarity into the motion, and to the audience’s understanding of the characters in the play. The first impression most have of the Fool is that his presence serves as form of comic relief, in order to set a lighter tone to the play; however, because of this, his death is crucial to the bleak ending of the play.
The narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” appears to thrive off his own insanity, evident in the way that he says “Hearken! And observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story”; no sane person could recount for their murderous and torturous actions “healthily” and “calmly”. Furthermore, the way in which he constantly reassures the reader of his sanity ultimately has the counter effect of expressing the insanity which he possesses as shown by his rhetorical questioning of “how, then, am I mad?”, “Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this?” and “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body”. If the protagonist was in fact sane, why would he feel it were his duty to constantly remind the reader of the fact that he is not “mad”?
Seeing Titus flirt around both sanity and insanity was common. Towards the end of the play, Titus’s extreme actions without any thought prove his true insanity. As for Hamlet, having the idea to first fake insanity demonstrates that he still has sane intellect. Being such similar characters to each other in each of their plays, they differentiate when it comes to Titus’s honest insanity and Hamlets feigned insanity. Titus the returning Roman General comes back from a victorious war with the Goths.
Contrast Kent’s and the Fool’s attitude towards Lear. What point of view does each represent with regard to our evaluation of Lear as either villain or Hero? One major difference in the attitude taken by Kent and the Fool toward Lear is the approach they both take when speaking to him. The Fool’s lexis is in the form of riddles; he gives wisdom in folly so to the audience his lexis seems complex and comedic however at second glance is in fact wisdom. The Fool appears to speak the mind of the audience, informing Lear of his rash and unwise decisions- “Thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left noting i’th’middle.” This honesty spoken by the Fool interrupts the natural order of being as in Elizabethan times Lear was seen the ‘the embodiment of God- his equal on earth’ therefore such a ‘lowly’ person as the Fool would not be permitted to be so blunt and honest.
Through this observation he develops a completely new style of comedy that made him the successful comedian he became. More in depth there was a time when martin was studying philosophy and he applied what he learned to comedy, to better understand the thought process of his audience. He noticed that when a comedian provides a cue or a punch line, the audience would feel that that would be the only appropriate time to laugh. A man appeared on “The Tonight Show,” and Martin carefully observed the comedian’s performance. He said, “I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.” (111) Martin felt that the audience was forced to laugh not because of the joke or because the man was being funny, but because of the cue that was provided.
The author clearly makes fun of these secret agencies through his humor. This can be seen when he introduces the almost fictional novel by stating that “This is a true story” (1). By the time the reader reaches a few pages in, he/she can clearly see that this is most likely false and is simply criticizing the secret agencies in the US government. 2. I believe the author, Jon Ronson, uses humor most effectively.
The sheer number of insults and implications made by the author coupled with a healthy sprinkling of aristocratic inside jokes would indicate that he essentially wrote this book for himself and other like-minded intellectuals of the enlightenment that disapproved of the status quo or could at least appreciate his cheeky sense of humor. I found the book very enjoyable and caught myself laughing out loud many times at the boldness of Voltaire’s slickly woven asides. He spent so much time attacking other people and their ideas though, I began to wonder if he would ever express his own ideas. Amid all of his negative commentary, I think it
Largely a creature of words, Falstaff has earned the admiration of some Shakespearean scholars because of the self-creation he achieves through language: Falstaff is constantly creating a myth of Falstaff, and this myth defines his identity even when it is visibly revealed to be false. A master of punning and wordplay, Falstaff provides most of the comedy in the play (just as he does in 2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry V). He redeems himself largely through his real affection for Prince Harry, whom, despite everything, he seems to regard as a real friend. This affection makes Harry’s
He made very intelligent arguments contradicting his accusers and stuck to his principles all the way to his sentencing of death. Yes he was stubborn and annoying and bothersome but did he really CORRUPT the youth? No, I think he was just doing what he thought he was supposed to and honestly I believe he only had good