Patrice Oppliger is Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Boston University, USA. Her most recent book is Tweencoms Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms.
Eric Shouse is Associate Professor of Communication at East Carolina University, USA. His work has been published in HUMOR, Comedy Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly.
This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses.
This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses.