Reviews for Cambridge Introduction to Comedy

The average rating for Cambridge Introduction to Comedy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-24 00:00:00 Abdul Bari The publisher's blurb on the back cover of this book suggests that it sets out to answer three questions: - How do we identify something as comedy? - How does reading a comic text differ from reading other kinds of texts? - How does comedy relate to social, cultural, and political issues? This is an ambitious brief, and two out of three isn't bad. Weitz's Introduction is largely successful as an investigation of "comedy's patterns, characteristics and mechanisms" and its analysis is well supported with numerous examples from a wide range of (mainly dramatic) texts. Although not primarily a history, there is also enough of a chronological structure for the reader to get a feel for the development of comedy from Ancient Greece to the present day (with a huge gap between Athenian New Comedy and the commedia dell'arte, with only a few references to the Vice figure in medieval English drama to hint at what people may have been laughing at in between). However, the analysis becomes less easy to follow, and the use of academese increases, with the last two chapters, which try to tackle "Comedy's range" and "Comedy and society" - the latter in particular is rather confusing and arbitrary in its attempt to link comedy with a variety of modern and post-modern -isms. This may be an inevitable result of the subject matter - there seems to be an increasing divergence between "comedy" and "the comic" here, with the latter taking precedence - but the result is that the book ends abruptly rather than memorably: with a whimper of box-ticking, followed by a perfunctory two-paragraph conclusion instead of a thorough restatement. A minor irritant was the use throughout of textbook-style grey side-boxes of additional material, which broke up the flow, and would have been better integrated into the main text itself. In conclusion, a useful and comprehensive book, but one that attempts to do a little too much, and not clearly enough.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-28 00:00:00 Eric Gregg Me gusta la forma en la que explica el psicodrama, es entendible y rápido de leer