Overview

What's All the Laughing About? What makes a joke or a story funny? Inside Humor takes you on a journey through a wide range of forms of humor-from tickling and physical humor to irony and wisdom tales. Along the way, Dr. Gordon Atlas seeks to illuminate the meaning and function of each form. Drawing on his experience, teaching a psychology of humor course on a consistent basis, Dr. Atlas explores the inner experience of humor at the moment it occurs. He explores questions such as: How does sarcasm or observational humor allow an individual to cope with and deal with the problems of life? Why are some people so entertained by physical humor whereas others are enamored with language humor (puns and word play)? For each form of humor, Dr. Atlas examines the type of personality that would be particularly attracted to and utilize the type of humor discussed. Throughout the journey of this book, Atlas maintains a consistent focus on the central question: what is humor? The book is peppered with examples of jokes and humorous stories that are used to illustrate and illuminate key elements of humor and comedy. Atlas's conversational style is probing and analytical while also easygoing, fun, and entertaining. Many original concepts and categories such as the hilariously funny (the subject of some of Atlas's own research) are utilized in the quest to construct a developmental and phenomenological model of humor. The book serves as an outline for this new approach to the study of humor and provides the basis for a deeper understanding of humor as both wisdom and transcendence.

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Dr. Gordon Atlas is professor emeritus at Alfred University in New York. He received his BA in philosophy from S.U.N.Y. Binghamton and his MSW and PhD in Personality Psychology from the University of Michigan. He taught in the Psychology Division at Alfred University for thirty years.Dr. Atlas was the recipient of five Excellence in Teaching awards from Alfred University. He served as the Director of the Honors Program at Alfred for ten years. He has published numerous articles in professional journals and has delivered several lectures as an invited speaker at other universities.Most relevant to this book, Dr. Atlas taught a seminar on the Psychology of Comedy on a consistent basis at Alfred University. He has always been fascinated by humor, and while teaching the Comedy course, he constructed the basic format and content of the book through that experience. Dr. Atlas also conducted his own research on the hilariously funny, studying participants' personal examples of the absolutely funniest experiences of their lives.Dr. Atlas resides in Key West, Florida, with his wife, Jana. There he is able to enjoy several of his passions-snorkeling and underwater photography, live music, and writing.The author can be contacted by email at: gda94@yahoo.com.

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