This senior seminar asks how “humor” structures diverse literary forms and styles, from satire and parody to irony, panegyric, caricature, and mockery. While this course might sound like fun – and hopefully will be—we will undertake our study in a rather serious way, reading theorists such as Marx and Freud alongside critical studies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Our time together will be spent reading and viewing materials that use various representational strategies to draw attention to, expose, critique, and sometimes affirm existing relations of power. In our class discussions, we will pay close attention to how “humor” combines rhetorical style and material context to either constitute or interrupt social norms. Our primary material will range across short fiction, novels, comics, on-line animation, film, and television programs. Historical background might include pieces by Jonathon Swift, John Dryden, Thomas Carlisle, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. Contemporary literature might include novels by Zadie Smith (White Teeth), Ruth L. Ozeki (My Year of Meats), and Jonathon Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), and short fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Diaz, and others. I will guarantee some episodes of contemporary situation comedy or sketch programming as well as a range of YouTube offerings and other public domain experiments. A fifteen page research paper will be required.