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Chicago Humanities Festival - Weekend 1
Nov. 8th, 2009 06:13 pmSaturday
Sander Gilman: Dr. Freud's Little Jokes, or How the Jews Became Funny
An interesting lecture. Gilman's view is that "Jewish humor" is Jews joking about Jews to Jews about other Jews, primarily élites joking about non-élites. He posits that jokes about Jews as a people did not arise until Jews began to be acculturated into western European society. As the lecture title suggests, he refers a lot to Freud's work (to whom, oddly, he bears something of a resemblance).
Mary Beard: What Made the Romans Laugh?
Beard is a classics professor at Cambridge, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and blogger (A Don's Life). Her discussion centered around jokes from the Philolegos, a fourth-century compilation of jokes (which she believes to be a sort of reference book). She points out that we can't really answer the question, and that even when we laugh at the same joke, we can't be sure that we are laughing at it for the same reason.
Second City: Museum Pieces, Sketches at an Exhibition
A disappointment. For one thing, it was fifteen minutes shorter than advertised, starting fifteen minutes late, yet ending at the scheduled time. But had it been 45 minutes of great stuff, I wouldn't have minded. But the actors took vintage Second City material (from the first couple of years of SC), and performed it without any real spark. There was occasional laughter, yes, but for anyone who had heard the original work, this was but a shadow. And they didn't even do the Harry Bouras joke! (Right before the iconic Alan Arkin/Barbara Harris "Museum Pieces" sketch, there's a bit with Severn Darden as a museum tour guide, describing a work by Harry Bouras.
Darden: "Ze artist has taken leetle pieces of metal and crammed zem willy-nilly into ze frame!"
Woman, played by Mina Kolb (firmly): "I don't like it."
Darden: "Vell, you're wrong!")
Sunday:
Chicago Tribune Literary Prize: Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner doesn't generally give speeches; he prefers a conversational format, and that is what we had this morning - a conversation with the Trib's theatre critic, Chris Jones. Tony was his usual discursive, digressive, brilliant self, opining on Lincoln (he's just written a screenplay about Lincoln for Steven Spielberg), Afghanistan, current and former presidents, gay marriage, playwriting, and just about anything else that came to mind. I wish I had half his brain and articulateness.
Trickster!
The trickster is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, characters in theology and mythology. Think Loki, Odysseus, Satan. This performance showed two cultural views of the trickster. The first was presented by the storytelling team, In the Spirit (Emily Hooper Lansana and Glenda Zahra Baker), telling stories of Anansi, the spider trickster of West African stories. This was followed by Pranita Jain and I Gusti Ngurah Kertayuda, dancing a story from the Ramayana in which the demon king Ravana disguises himself in order to kidnap the princess Sita. Lots of fun was had by all, and it's always interesting to see how the same idea is manifested in a variety of cultures, separated by time and space.
Aaron Freeman: The Book of Job and the Comedy of Suffering
A guy who is African-American and Jewish probably knows something about suffering. Is suffering funny? Freeman makes it so, with this contemporary take on the Book of Job. (When G-d lets Satan make Job's life miserable, He hands him his iPhone saying, "there's an app for that"!) It was both amusing and thought-provoking. (Freeman, along with his wife Sharon Rosenzweig, has just published The Comic Torah.)
More next weekend!
Sander Gilman: Dr. Freud's Little Jokes, or How the Jews Became Funny
An interesting lecture. Gilman's view is that "Jewish humor" is Jews joking about Jews to Jews about other Jews, primarily élites joking about non-élites. He posits that jokes about Jews as a people did not arise until Jews began to be acculturated into western European society. As the lecture title suggests, he refers a lot to Freud's work (to whom, oddly, he bears something of a resemblance).
Mary Beard: What Made the Romans Laugh?
Beard is a classics professor at Cambridge, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and blogger (A Don's Life). Her discussion centered around jokes from the Philolegos, a fourth-century compilation of jokes (which she believes to be a sort of reference book). She points out that we can't really answer the question, and that even when we laugh at the same joke, we can't be sure that we are laughing at it for the same reason.
Second City: Museum Pieces, Sketches at an Exhibition
A disappointment. For one thing, it was fifteen minutes shorter than advertised, starting fifteen minutes late, yet ending at the scheduled time. But had it been 45 minutes of great stuff, I wouldn't have minded. But the actors took vintage Second City material (from the first couple of years of SC), and performed it without any real spark. There was occasional laughter, yes, but for anyone who had heard the original work, this was but a shadow. And they didn't even do the Harry Bouras joke! (Right before the iconic Alan Arkin/Barbara Harris "Museum Pieces" sketch, there's a bit with Severn Darden as a museum tour guide, describing a work by Harry Bouras.
Darden: "Ze artist has taken leetle pieces of metal and crammed zem willy-nilly into ze frame!"
Woman, played by Mina Kolb (firmly): "I don't like it."
Darden: "Vell, you're wrong!")
Sunday:
Chicago Tribune Literary Prize: Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner doesn't generally give speeches; he prefers a conversational format, and that is what we had this morning - a conversation with the Trib's theatre critic, Chris Jones. Tony was his usual discursive, digressive, brilliant self, opining on Lincoln (he's just written a screenplay about Lincoln for Steven Spielberg), Afghanistan, current and former presidents, gay marriage, playwriting, and just about anything else that came to mind. I wish I had half his brain and articulateness.
Trickster!
The trickster is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, characters in theology and mythology. Think Loki, Odysseus, Satan. This performance showed two cultural views of the trickster. The first was presented by the storytelling team, In the Spirit (Emily Hooper Lansana and Glenda Zahra Baker), telling stories of Anansi, the spider trickster of West African stories. This was followed by Pranita Jain and I Gusti Ngurah Kertayuda, dancing a story from the Ramayana in which the demon king Ravana disguises himself in order to kidnap the princess Sita. Lots of fun was had by all, and it's always interesting to see how the same idea is manifested in a variety of cultures, separated by time and space.
Aaron Freeman: The Book of Job and the Comedy of Suffering
A guy who is African-American and Jewish probably knows something about suffering. Is suffering funny? Freeman makes it so, with this contemporary take on the Book of Job. (When G-d lets Satan make Job's life miserable, He hands him his iPhone saying, "there's an app for that"!) It was both amusing and thought-provoking. (Freeman, along with his wife Sharon Rosenzweig, has just published The Comic Torah.)
More next weekend!
