Ebook: Comedy for dinner - and other dishes

Examining the phenomenon of political humor requires a vast and comprehensive approach in theoretical and pragmatic terms. Since it’s impossible to cover the immense complexity of this field of research we selected a precise target: the White House Correspondents' Dinner, i.e., the last frontier in the wild west of politics. In brief, this study aims to think about the relation between laughter and politics. In the midst of this love-hate battle, we all understand Humor as a complex subject with various derivations that inhabits the present moment in a gracious state. From movies to television, from Arts to Politics, being funny and having a sense of humor is a key factor to understand the historical momentum. Addressing specifically the event White House Correspondents' Dinner we aim to explore the phenomenological and political implications of this exemplary case-study. This means trying to understand the importance of having politicians laughing at themselves, among them and at each other, by them and by others. This sui generis event, anchored in both and simultaneous offense and defense rhetorical strategies, is undoubtedly one of the most incongruous and relevant events in the political order worldwide. We hope to highlight that singularity in this special cooking of comedy in the heart of the American political process. We also offer other political side dishes. The book was meant to be a collection of academic essays that would cover different areas and forms of access to the topic, in the attempt of showing the complexity of a phenomenon that has massive political implications and can uncover and reveal one of the oldest relations in politics: humor and power. So, it is that tensional relation that becomes the background of this study collection, which operates as a pretext and provocation. The White House Correspondents' Dinner was a sort of focus imaginarius where every text would converge. Since we could not build a full book just with this topic of study, we replace that univocity with a multidisciplinary approach and therefore a multiplicity of texts and reflections on diverse political settings where humor is played and degustated.