Humor Literature Reviews Samples For Students

In the essay “Hashish in Marseille”, the author shows his responsibilities in bringing social change, which is used to compare his hashish writing as a form of radical engagement. The central argument of the essay is the use of drugs in the modern society. The essay focuses on drug literature, which is a revolutionary approach that is used to bring social change to the society. The author’s narration of his experience with drugs is aimed at showing the effects of drug abuse. “With the absolute certainty, in this city of hundreds of thousands where no one knows me, of not ...

One of the most popular talks delivered by Ken Robinson was entitled “How schools kill creativity” . The speaker was deemed to be effective in asserting that education should focus on developing both, cognitive or intellectual skills as well as creative skills. Robinson used rhetorical elements that persuaded the audience in seeing the veracity of his contentions. The speaker used emotional, logical, and ethical appeal to convince the audience that contemporary educational system kills creativity through focusing only on developing academic abilities.
Robinson used emotional appeal through narrating humorous stories that enticed laughter and applause. In the almost 20 ...

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Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night revolves around the life of Viola, the play’s central character who disguises herself as a man when the story begins. Depicted as a comedy, the play describes a case of mistaken identity and a love triangle involving the three main characters. Throughout the narration, Shakespeare keeps the characters in a state of oblivion and allows the disguised female to keep her secret until the play’s finale. To bring forth the ideas and themes, the play focuses on its characters and their lives as they interact with each other.
Feste, ...

Reaction Paper

The short story by Lorrie Moore named “Birds of America” is written in English but at times the use of language makes reading the story difficult. The subtitle of the story, for example, is “People like that are the only people here: Canonical babbling in Peed Onk.” Peed Onk is short for Pediatric Oncology Department. (224) When the Mother and Father talk to each other they can seem to be speaking in a shared secret language. On the other hand the way the author uses words to balance the tragedy with lightness made a big impression on me.
The adjectives ...

In her article “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”, Jean Kilbourne raises the issue of advertisements and the way they portray women. More importantly, she stresses that they influence young boys and society to mistreat women. The general picture that is build, urges men to be more dominant, forceful and aggressive. Rather than putting emotional intimacy on a pedestal, advertisements rank sexual intimacy higher. This leaves men that actually care to be intimately and emotionally close to a woman with impugned masculinity.
I believe that there is a point to the article. Even though I was skeptical when I first began ...

Midsummer Nights Dream is a play by William Shakespeare that explains the events surrounding the marriage between Hippolyta and Theseus who was the Duke of Athens. The adventures of four young lovers also take centre stage in the play. Shakespeare makes use of magic fairies to bring out some of the most and hilarious bizarre situations in the play Midsummer Nights Dream. He uses magic to embody supernatural power of love which is symbolised by the use of love potions by people in the play to win lovers (Shakespeare, 14). Shakespeare uses magic to create an unreal world in which ...

- No. Nyagar did not deserve her death. Although greed was, and still remains, a vice in Africa particularly a very great offence in the Luo community, he was not supposed to be killed by the mob. Although he was supposed to be eliminated not to disturb the community in future, he was not supposed to be brutally murdered. Instead, I suggest the matter would have been taken before to be given a fair trial. This is why the white officers complained and threatened to take a legal action against the perpetrators.

India

- The ending of this story is comical. It is surprising ...

A Coyote Columbus story is authored by Thomas King a renowned Native American writer. This story is a masterpiece in terms of its content, delivery, and the use of literary devices to build humor among its readers. This piece is centered on the Coyote who is the protagonist in the plot of this story. King paints Coyote as being a trickster who uses his sly ways to gain control of the world. Other characters in the plot of the story do not have wit that is comparable to that of Coyote. Therefore, the Coyote uses his ability to take advantage of the ...

Classical English literature studies

Comedy – a professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh. Late Middle English (as a genre of drama, also denoting a narrative poem with a happy ending, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy): from Old French comedie, via Latin from Greek kōmōidia, from kōmōidos 'comic poet', from kōmos 'revel' + aoidos 'singer'. ("Comedy: Definition Of Comedy in Oxford Dictionary (American English)").
Aristotle defines comedy as an imitation of men, who is worse than the average, but not in their perversities, but in hilarious sense. Comedy, as a genre ...

Comic books are a part of every society in the world. They represent ideas that the young minds who read them, can understand. In essence, comic books play a huge role in depicting what the society. In many comic books, there are always the protagonists and the antagonist, while they can be seen as villains and heroes fighting for an individual cause, these characters often represent the forces of good and evil in the modern contemporary world. The essays describe America as it is seen, through examining the cultural artifact – Comic Books and American Cultural History anthology – Arguments within ...

Classic English Literature

The classical mythological stories and beliefs of religions, great heroes, Gods, monsters, sins, right and wrong doings, souls, among others have been an inspiration for many poets and authors. Many books have been written on how God would like to have his children live in a holy fashion, virtuous all their lives and enter the gates of heaven. The fear of being thrown in hell and being cleansed for unholy, immoral and sinful acts are also described in many books.
Dante’s Divine Comedy written when he was exactly half way through life, at the age of 35 is ...

One of the interesting things about the writing of John Steinbeck is the way in which such an ostensibly egalitarian writer condescends toward so many of the characters in his novels. The life story of four peasants was told by a writer with a cheerful sense of humor and at the same time was permeated by a sad sympathy for ordinary people, who were noble, honest, faithful to each other, but did not find their place in life. Even though those people live a simple (even poor) life, they are happy, because they are not suffocating from the spirit ...

The play “The Importance of being Earnest” was written by Oscar Wilde, and was first seen in a theater in 1895. The play is a comedy which uses various literary techniques to bring out various themes in the Victorian era. Irony is a major literary technique in the play in which the protagonist named Jack uses the name Earnest as an alibi whenever he wishes to escape from his reality. He has created an imaginary character in his head in which he has a younger brother by the name Earnest (Wilde 15). In his real world, he is however ...

Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of Scout Finch, the six year old daughter of Atticus Finch, a strong father, a virtuous lawyer and the defender of Tom Robinson. Scout grows up in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s, among the other interesting and entertaining people in the town. Going through her life and growing up with her friends, she learns many lessons from her father and the town itself. Much like Atticus with Scout, this book is incredibly important because of its teachings of morality and virtue; the book teaches the ...

You Can’t Take It With You by George Kaufman and Moses Hart is a comedic play that shows how people have shallow understanding of life and how these people hold primitive thoughts about the actuality of life. It is also a play that seeks to make take life as it is and enjoy it when they still can. The play offers descriptive and episodic events inform of dialogue. While the story triggers philosophical thoughts about life and human existence, the characters in the play engages in happiness madness citing that they do so while they still can because once they ...

Using every context and all available information in their own interest, the tricksters are represented in the African American culture by small animals that make their way through stories by tricking people, getting out of difficult situations by outsmarting their much bigger opponents (Harris, “The Trickster”). In Folktales, tricksters act as fable or legendary figures that tell a story about society, about humans’ characters, personifying people, while portraying a caricatured, but vivid image of social Moravians (Rutledge 64).
The tricksters are central figures of the African American literature, exhibiting various characteristics that can be depicted in human behavior, such as ...

Introduction

Life has different attractions, points of interest, meanings or attitudes that varies across one’s existence. What might have seemed funny engaging at a young age might be considered irritating or upsetting at a more advanced age. This change in the attitude towards life is part of a process, the process of getting older and it is underlying the generation conflict. The generation conflict theme is common to the short stories that will be comparatively analyzed in this paper, respectively: Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. The generation conflict has distinct ...

Tartuffe is one greatest classic plays, written by a master of comedy Molière in seventieth century. The comedy starts with introducing the audience Madame Pernelle, the mother of head of the house Orgon. She is shocked, because no one in the family listens to her valuable opinion. Madame calls her grandson a fool, and her granddaughter a little devil hiding behind a mask of a calm young lady. The whole family thinks that Tartuffe, the boarder, who was brought to the house by Orgon is a hypocrite and unrighteous man, but Madame Pernelle and Orgon are blinded by him and do not listen to ...

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot by the Irish writer Samuel Becket is a powerful play attesting to the inevitable suffering inherent in human existence. The play depicts this agony even more poignantly by the fact that it is devoid of a well-organized plot and a conventional setting: “A country road. A tree” (Act 1). This is all the setting there is. .Devoid of these familiar elements, the audience or reader has no choice but to face one of the most fundamental elements of the play: an endless wait. As the play opens, the audience or reader meets Estragon, or rather Gogo, who is struggling ...

Introduction

David Sedaris is known as a humorist. Time magazine named him the Humorist of the Year in 2001. Many of his essays are said to locate comedy in his childhood in North Carolina. The same can be said of these two of his essays: Six to Eight Black Men and Now We are Five. This paper compares and contrasts these two essays, covering a number of elements including whether they meet abide by the ‘humorist’ tag given him, and to what extent they may be autobiographical (that is, whether they are rooted in his childhood in North Carolina), as well as ...

Three poems, which have been chosen for this paper: “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson, “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, and “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats, are all very different and belong to different literary trends. However, they all are focused on the subject of death, which they depict from different standpoints, systems of beliefs, and values.
In the first poem, “Because I could not stop for Death”, Emily Dickinson describes death using the image of a gentleman, who takes her into his carriage: “He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage” ( ...

Achewood is one of the most important and critically-acclaimed internet comics of all times. He treats many important societal issues through anthropomorphic toys, including stuffed teddy bears. Specifically, in the ones that correspond to January 8th and 11th of 2006, the author Chris Onstad explores the social construction of masculinity and sexual relations. These interesting comics reveal masculinity as having to do with aggression sublimated by society, both through its norms and the market.
The first comic shows this through the invitation to “The Badass Games”. Different male characters receive a small letter that tells them to assist to ...

Bullet in the Brain is a short story written by Tobias Wolff and it is about a man, whose name is Anders, and his attitude towards life. The story is set in a bank and he cannot help but be ironic and make fun of other people’s statements. Anders behaves in such a way that people do not understand his sense of humor and this costs him his life at the end of the story.
Anders is at the bank, which is crowded, waiting in line for his turn and he is using his time to reflect on ...

Introduction

Almost Maine is a wonderful heartfelt play by New York playwright John Cariani about the extraordinary tales of love that take place in the town of Almost, Maine. The assertion of this play is that all of these stories across the town take place at the stroke of 9:00 with the northern lights illuminating the slightly surreal, cold and northern night. John Cariani throws magical realism to the bittersweet love scenes in his play with original, sentimental and ultimately pleasant entertainment. Most of the characters in the play are eccentric, but all of them fit well into the small and ...

Abstract

Three types of examples from the genres of world literature are integral to the strength of investigating the works of different periods and cultures. Different eras represented sweeping views of war, the sacred, the secular, and expressions of stories that culminated in philosophical lessons or important pieces in historical sagas. This essay develops a critique based upon the prompt which looks at the literary works of: (a) Homer’s “The Iliad”, (b) Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy – Inferno”, and (c) Elphinstone Dayrell’s “Nigerian Folk Stories”. The richly contrasting nuances of the literary comparisons provide a marvelous rubric and background from which ...

Analyze the relationship between the evolution of protagonist and the city of Barcelona in the novel "In Diamond Square" by Merce Rodoreda’s
In Diamond Square is an acclaimed and classic story of a woman caught up with her children in Barcelona civil war. She struggles in a convulsive period to feed her family as her husband fights the fascist. The novel is set during the Spanish civil war and the second Spanish republic. It is set in Barcelona and pictures Joe and Natalia all struggling to make end meet. It as well pictures Natalia’s conflictive life giving a blend ...

‘Instructor’s name’

Short fiction is one of the oldest forms of literature and has been there throughout most part of the human civilization in the form of fairy tales, parables and myths. The current model of short literature took form sometimes during the early nineteenth century in North America, and was popularized by the periodical journals. All through the history of art many forms of literature were famous during a given era, like the drama in the sixteenth century and essays in the eighteenth century. But throughout most of the nineteenth century, novels and short stories were the most popular forms of ...

Introduction

The world’s view of the image of a woman is subjected to different directions due to cultural and perceptional variations. The women situation is not yet better even though the world has made a remarkable progress in terms socialization. At different geographical areas of the world, the position of women is always undermined (Johnson & Wilson, 1995). Without a respect to their various economic and political statuses, women always bear the negative consequences of being a ‘woman’. It is evident that no customs or cultural values that favor feminism. Even though some women fall into middle or upper echelons of the society, they ...

If I should die, think only this of me:That there is some corner of a foreign fieldthat is forever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and ...

Changes in Belief System in Europe.

The earliest inhabitants arrived from Africa about 700,000 years ago. This group of people mainly depended on hunting and food gathering. They used hand tools such as axe made of stones. They also made fire to protect themselves from cold weather. History has it that the Neathernals who lived in caves were the first to bury their dead and displayed good social -organizational skills. They also performed rituals and organized themselves into strong social groups.
It was not until 35,000 years later that some technological changes started to sweep through Europe. First was the pressure-flaking technique. This ...

Margaret Edson’s play, Wit is an incredibly moving and yet funny play. In the opening scene, we are introduced to Dr. Vivian Bearing. She is an English professor specializing in the works of John Donne, and she is diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Vivian tells the audience, “There is no stage five” (Edson 12). Vivian knows from the first moments of the play that she is going to die. In fact, she tells the audience as much within the first few pages: “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die ...

1. PART 1

The world is full of connections; life connects humans to things, and vice versa. And this is very much portrayed through literary works. For instance, a very important family matter is talked about in Walker’s Everyday Use, and that is all about remembering and considering one’s own heritage. When Dee Wangero said “You just don’t understand your heritage” (America Public University System 375), what she meant is that they seem to forget their heritage – which points them to the quilts. A heritage ought to be very meaningful to every member of any family. One ...

Background

Much Ado About Nothing is a play by William Shakespeare that dramatizes a number of contemporary topics such as Love, friendship, society, customs, parent-child relationships and villainy. Considered one of the great writer’s best comedies, the play combines aspects of robust hilarity with some serious discussions of honor, friendship, love, relationships, court politics, and shame. The play is considered a joyful comedy that ends with multiple marriages and has no death. Shakespeare introduces the reader to a group of individuals having a past with each other from the point where Beatrice asks the messenger if all soldiers have returned from the war. Although ...

Historical Essay: The Diary of Anne Frank

As the title of the book suggests, Anne Frank’s diary is the published diary of the titular Jewish girl in the 1940s. It begins before the Holocaust hit the world on her thirteenth birthday in June 12, 1942 and abruptly ends two years later on fifteenth birthday after the capture of her family by the Nazis. The diary begins with descriptions of the experiences and thoughts of a Jewish girl on the brink of womanhood in an anti-Semite atmosphere. It then describes the life of the Franks in hiding after the Nazis reached their home in the Netherlands. The ...

Loneliness is part of human condition

Steinback’s novella Of Men and Mice is set in a grim economic dystopia of migrant workers on a Californian ranch where the two protagonists Lennie and George share the dream owning their own farm someday despite the meagre conditions they were subject to. The novella has been applauded as well as criticized for its staunch realism or what was portrayed as realism in cases of excessive sentimentality. In this paper, we shall compare and contrast the two main characters of Lennie and George in order to reflect on a theme that is relevant for each and every one of Steinback’s ...

The picture illustrates the moment from the 13th canto of the Dante’s famous poem. The Divine Comedy as a literature work is divided into three parts: the Inferno, the Purgatory and the Paradise. In this poem Dante Alighieri summed up all the common ideas about the afterlife and united them under the one storyline. The Inferno is considered to be the most important part of the poem because it provides the description of hell. This image became so popular and traditional that it was used in many other literature and art works. According to the Dante’s theory the ...

Little Women is the story of four sisters growing up in a cash strapped household when their father is called to fight in a war. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March are all very different in nature from one another, their love for the family being one of the few commonalities. Jo is always portrayed as being an independent, free spirited tom boy who feels no need to blend in with the society. Although this trait makes her a sore sight for most high society folks, there are several people in the story who love her for what she is and understand ...

James Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America” and David Hernandez’s “Pigeons” are both poems which explore racism. The two poems are very different from one another in pace, tone and in use of imagery. However, there are also a few similarities between them. Overall, Hernandez’ poem leaves a stronger image in the reader’s mind, and therefore it is arguable that it does its job in conveying its theme more effectively.
Hughes wrote “I, Too, Sing America,” in 1932. At this point in history, African-American individuals were not accepted in American society. They were discriminated against, segregated from white ...

A Response to a Sonnet by Shakespeare

Abstract
I am going to write about my response to ‘Sonnet 130’. I chose this sonnet because it made me laugh at Shakespeare’s stated attitude to his lover, because it is so unexpected when you first read the poem, but the the sonnet is read you come to understand that Shakespeare is also making a serious point baout love and the stereotypical images of feminine beauty that were dominant in his day. Those stereotypical images have their parallel in our society too, because through the media images of what women should look like ideally are carefully used to ...

In the modern world, it is clear that each and every person has to reflect on his or her own actions and compare them with what one observes from others, be it in the real world or in the world of films and fiction. The story of Amelie, within the movie with the same title, is among the movies that really teach us a lot, and from which I find a feeling of real humanity displayed in a rather comical manner.

The story revolves around the life of Amelie Poulain - a young lady who grew up in isolation from the outside world ...