International Studies in Humour

Volume 7, Issue 1 (2018)                        ISSN 2052-3475

cover of the issue      front page     back of front page     journal’s link page

EDITORIAL:

Introducing the Volume of 2018.

Ephraim Nissan, London                              [editorial]  (p. 1)

OBITUARIES:

Giacoma Limentani (1927–2018)

Ephraim Nissan, London                               [obituary]  (p. 2–3)

REGULAR ARTICLES:

HUMOUR THEORY / LITERARY THEORY:

Sense and Humor in Russian Formalism. Part II.

Basil Lvoff, New York & Moscow             [full paper]  (pp. 4–18)

 Keywords:  Andrei Bely; Bakhtin; Bergson; comedy; comic; construction; Digital Humanities; Eikhenbaum; formal cause; gaiety; Gogol; interplay; joke; McLuhan; meaning; medium is the message; merry; Opoyaz; Ortega y Gasset; ostranenie; parody; psychologism; reversibility; Russian Formalism; Schillinger; Shklovsky; teleology; tragedy; Tynianov; vnenakhodimost’; Yarkho; zaum’.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES:

The Pious Fool: A Sometimes-Hermetic Jewish Humor Trope.

Linda Weiser Friedman, New York

Hershey H. Friedman, New York             [full paper]  (pp. 19–33)

Keywords:  Religion; Judaism; Jewish humour; talmudic trope of the pious fool (chasid shoteh); talmudic trope of the pious ignoramus (am-haaretz chasid); pious fool jokes; hermetic humour; Jephthah; wise fool; sacred fool; holy fool; the Brisker type of pious fool in Jewish humour; Litvak character in jokes; “two-fer” (a joke that manages to mock two tropes at the same time); the Wise Men of Chelm trope; the scary sanctimonious type.

A Taxonomic Survey of Types of a Pious Fool Throughout Cultures.

Ephraim Nissan, London                        [full paper]  (pp. 34–111)

Keywords:  Religion; Judaism; Catholicism; Buddhism; Jewish humour; Sicilian clerical humour; congregation fooled by a trickster; antecedent of the “Yom Kippur in Tammuz” tale; the pseudo-messiah Sabbatai Ṣevi’s 1658 celebration of all three pilgrimage festivals in one week; the Wise Men of Chelm trope; the Schildbürgerbuch; Marcolf and the Marcolfian tradition; charivari; devout simpleton into winning champion; the “I don’t know” tale; pious fools in Yiddish literary texts; Isaac Leib Perez; Isaac Bashevis Singer; Giuseppe Pitrè’s 1885 Edition of the 18th-Century Avvenimenti Faceti; wakward sermon; notables fed cat excreta believed to be manna; owl mistaken for a soul in Purgatory; Haskalah humour; the anti-Hassidic Joseph Perl; the anti-religious Abraham Goldfaden; Goldfaden’s disablist character of Kuni-Leml; mockery by the Esotericist George Gurdjieff; the sacred fool (across cultures); the Fool’s Mass (medieval Feast of Fools); etymology of clown; etymology of buffoon; Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina’s 1864 novel Il re dei re; (pseudo-)pious abstention from saving a life; foolish boaster: Akkadian aluzinnu and Greek  ἀλαζών.