Ithaca College

Mary Ann Rishel, Emerita Prof, Writing, has recently published an article on comic theory in the Modern Language Association book series, Options for Teaching.   

Mary Ann Rishel, Emerita Prof, Writing, has recently published an article on comic theory entitled “For Better or Worse…A Marriage of Humor and Comedy” in the Modern Language Association book series, Options for Teaching.  Edited by Bev Hogue, Teaching Comic Texts examines how these texts can be deployed in classrooms as literary or cultural study.  Rishel’s paper describes how humor and comedic theory offer a new paradigm for conceptual webbing where humor is language and comedy is a narrative shaped by that language.  In addition to all their traditional literary functions, humor and comedy become rhetorical.  This constructs a new aesthetic.