Teaching

This course traces the history of comedy, surveying literatures and performance cultures from all over the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. We study multiple types and genres of comedy as well as techniques, tropes, and themes of comic plots. This class will be part history class, as well, because many of comedy’s basic components (recognition, surprise, and character) depend on their historical and cultural context.

The course explores the following questions through a vast reading of plays and theorists: 

• Which jokes are time-bound? Which are time-less?

• What are the figures, characters, and tropes that pop-up time and again? 

• How does comedy disrupt? How does it unify?

• What’s the role of the body in comedy?

• What role does comedy play in creating culture? Reflecting culture? How can we learn about a culture through its comedies? 

This course introduces students to comedy theory in order to hone their craft, get a laugh, and express a point of view in their work. The material in the course explores the structural, political, and ethical dimensions of laughter, which will enable students to identify and play with comic frames in their own performance, writing, and studies of comedy. Students exercise these theories by analyzing various comedic works, writing research papers, and developing their own creative pieces that put the theory into practice.

The course explores the following questions through a vast reading of theory and screenings of comedy: 

• Why do we laugh?

• What are the different types of laughter?

• What are the ethical bounds of comedy?

• What is comedy’s relationship with matrices of power? Who gets to laugh? Who gets laughed at? 

• Most importantly, what is comedy’s purpose? What is it supposed to do? And how does it do it?

This course studies examples of comedians who have crossed national borders to work in vaudeville, circus, film, theatre, television, and stand-up. The work these comedians do reveals an inherent quality in comedy: that of crossing borders, challenging cultural assumptions, and broadening horizons of citizenry and belonging. Comedy is a social and communicational tool built around fostering an emotional connection (that of laughter) between the performer and the audience. Therefore, it is uniquely suited to address these matters in unexpected and powerful ways.

Students ponder and discover answers to the following questions: 

• What have comedians learned from crossing the border? 

• What challenges did they face? 

• How did they translate their stories, their jokes, and their cultural background for a new and foreign audience? 

• What are national borders? What power do they represent? And how do they define us?

A survey of theater and drama from a variety of global traditions, with a particular emphasis on exploring how these works are informed by their historical, societal, and cultural contexts. We read selected plays and theoretical texts with an eye to examining dramatic form and theatrical style and practice. We also view a number of performances, either recorded or live.

By the end of this course, students:

• Explore and identify a variety of global theatrical traditions and styles in their historical contexts to illuminate theatre’s essential dialogue with society.

• Define and describe key elements of dramatic forms, theatre aesthetics, and conventions.

• Analyze, compare and contrast the ways diverse theatrical cultures express themselves in both dramatic and theatrical forms.

• Practice multiple ways of experiencing, thinking about, and responding aesthetically to theatre in both oral and written form.

• Recognize and critique key theoretical concepts, playwrights and plays.

• Articulate the relationship between drama and theatre by the standards of their times and places as well as in selected contemporary iterations.