Browsing by Subject "Laughter"
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Item Effects of laughter on pain tolerance and muscle soreness induced by eccentric exercise(2017-08-08) Lapierre, Stephanie; Tanaka, Hirofumi, Ph.D.Chronic pain affects 116 million people, a number larger than the total affected by cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes combined. Currently there is not a singular treatment known to provide relief from chronic pain, and the treatments that do exist are not effective for all. Novel ways to effectively treat chronic pain are needed. Laughter has been known to provide a multitude of health benefits, however it is not universally accepted as a treatment for pain. The purpose of this study was to investigate if laughter provided by comic relief can influence pain tolerance and muscle soreness compared to an uninteresting documentary. Forty, young and healthy participants were recruited from the University of Texas at Austin and underwent a randomized cross-over experiment. Each participant was exposed to a comedy video eliciting laughter as well as a documentary after inducing delayed onset muscle soreness in one leg at a time. Pain tolerance was tested on each participants’ leg before and after the videos. An interaction of time and treatment was found to be significant in a mixed model: after watching the documentary video participants’ pain tolerance was decreased by 13.3 N compared to the comedy. Pain tolerance in the sore leg was decreased by 17.3± 5.0 N after viewing the documentary video, but did not change after watching the comedy. Similar results were seen in the control leg (p<.05) (20.6±5.0 N vs. 1.5±3.4 N). There was no interaction of leg and treatment, and no dose response was elucidated. We speculate that thirty-minutes of watching a comedy eliciting laughter provides psychological changes through the gate control theory and physiological changes through released endorphins that significantly influence pain tolerance. It is possible that thirty minutes of a comedy provoking laughter can provide pain relief that can restore the quality of life of individuals suffering from chronic pain.Item The heart-shaped cookie knife : Miss Lonelyhearts as accelerated Bergsonian comedy(2015-05) Sheridan, Mark Timothy; Kornhaber, Donna, 1979-; Houser, HeatherThis report provides a new examination of the nature and function of laughter in Nathanael West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts, using Bergson's theory of comedy as a critical lens. This approach allows us to understand the close connection between mechanization and comedy in West's novel, and also to recognize the text's hitherto untold significance for post-industrial American literature. Building on Bergson in original ways, and incorporating the work of twentieth-century theorists such as Fredric Jameson, I argue that Miss Lonelyhearts illuminates a proto-postmodern cityscape where comedy is governed by the mechanizing logic of capital and media. West's characters, figured as comedic machines, are pushed to their biological, psychological and mechanical limits in this world, and laughter marks the moments of their breakage. Synthesizing several disparate strands of criticism on comedy, irony and media, my reading accounts for the ways in which laughter functions and malfunctions in this text, and the means by which West produces comedy from such profound tragedy.Item How to Think Like a Comedian (And Not Be One)(2020-05) Raju, SindhuThis paper is a tribute to a fascination with comedy. It focuses specifically on humor analysis pulling apart the pieces that explain why something is funny. The three legs of this paper are how to analyze humor, what is truth in comedy, and techniques for creating humorous content. The paper does not concern itself with psychological or evolutionary explanations for humor, but rather on the preexisting elements of the content itself. The expected conclusion is a loose formula for comedy, estimated to be some combination of truth and incongruity: a reconciliation of paradox. The methodology is rooted in the three years I spent studying comedy – stand-up, improv, short stories, sketch, satire – with a fervor that is achieved only before the dream is deferred. As I plan to leave college with subdued comedic aspirations, I take this thesis as a last chance to lay it all down –to tell others and remind myself of all that I’ve learned, and the impact of internalizing the comic’s worldview.Item Why we laugh when nothing's funny: the use of laughter to cope with disagreement in conversation(2010-05) Warner-Garcia, Shawn Rachel; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Hinrichs, LarsThe phenomenon of laughter has intrigued many philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and – most recently – linguists. While laughter is conventionally thought of as a component of the phenomenon of humor, this paper seeks to empirically illustrate how laughter may be used in unconventional ways, i.e. in response to nonhumorous (and in fact discordant) sequences in conversation. The term coping laughter refers to laughter that attempts to remedy, correct, reframe, or distract from something that is undesirable in a conversation. This paper proposes that there are two types of coping laughter (IN-laughter and RE-laughter) that accomplish different functions based on who initiates the laughter. Eight data samples are analyzed within the analytical frameworks of politeness and conversational framing with special treatments of the evolution of laughter and the structure of conflict.