Aesthetically at odds, these two genres of mass humor form a Janus face of American culture. Stand-up is a surviving bastion of in...dividual expression. The comedian confronts the audience with his or her personality and wins celebration--the highest form of acceptance--or is scorned and rebuffed as a pitiable outsider. The heckler, the mood of the audience, or the temperature of the room cannot always be handled through quality control. Even when presented electronically, the jokes of a stand-up monologue cannot be underlined by canned laughter without the manipulation thoroughly exposing itself.... The sitcom, by contrast, is the technology of the assembly-line brought to art. Even when live audiences are used, their reactions are "sweetened" with carefully calculated titters, chortles, and guffaws. Large sums of investment capital must be assembled to produce a sitcom; all factors must be controlled by recognized experts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cautious understatements of irony are often in marked contrast with the overstatements and sharp emotional intensity of satiri...cal comment. Indeed, the laughter of satire appears more spiteful, contemptuous, scoring the badness of actuality, as against that of irony, which appears more concerned with the ought to be, deploring the defects of what is in comparison with ideality. As against the ironist's use of inversion to encourage thinking for oneself, the satirist employs rhetoric, analogy, imagery, and invective. While irony persuades us through our own mental exertions, satire tries by tricks of literary suggestion to convince us that its opponents are wicked and depraved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing l...aughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »