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Barry Humphries 

The Guardian/BBC/The Telegraph. I had heard through a friend of Barry’s that Barry wasn’t doing well. I’d been in correspondence with this friend who alerted me to Barry’s appreciation of Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh, an edited volume that I’m currently working on. Barry was to have provided some blurb for the book.  barry humphriescomedydudley…

Private Eye at 60

‘Still funny, still unpredictable, still annoying all the right people’: Private Eye, 60 years on — The Telegraph. free speechhumourpeter cookprivate eyesatire

Bowie’s Bookshelf

Pretty naff cover what with the Aladdin Sane lightening bolt layered over a decent photo. The UK cover is better. Anyway, the books (and periodicals) have a strong dose both of sophisticated and pretty basic humour, counterposed by books of philosophical interest, especially if one is wary of regressive Leftism. The following are the most…

Cognitive and emotional demands of black humour processing: the role of intelligence, aggressiveness and mood

This in Cognitive Processing. A total of 156 adults rated black humour cartoons and conducted measurements of verbal and nonverbal intelligence, mood disturbance and aggressiveness. Cluster analysis yields three groups comprising following properties: (1) moderate black humour preference and moderate comprehension; average nonverbal and verbal intelligence; low mood disturbance and moderate aggressiveness; (2) low black…

Dead Sea Tapes

Chuffed to come across this recently broadcast (previously blocked) programme. Among the featured gems are The Dead Sea Tapes, Peter’s views on religion, his taste in reading and much more besides. I have a chum  who used to live around the corner from Perrin’s Walk in Ellerdale Road, near the convent (or was it a girls school) mentioned in…

The Undiscovered Peter Cook

Hopefully this will find its way onto youtube. “Following the death of Britain’s greatest satirist in 1995, Peter Cook’s widow Lin locked the door of his house and refused all access to the media. Until this year, when she invited her friend Victor Lewis-Smith and a BBC crew inside to make a documentary about the…

Farts and philosophy

Christina Pazsitzky, comedian and philosophy major, talks about her approach. These days it seems that a significant number of philosophers have long-since traded in TRUTH for self-aggrandizing activism posing as inquiry and so now, more than ever, the health of liberal culture depends on the Shakespearean fool pricking the elites, the common clay, and everything in-between — some of…

The Central Scrutinizers

Released on this day in ’79 Zappa’s target was, according to some sources, motivated by the banning of music in revolutionary Iran. The target we do know Zappa had in mind was the ascendancy of the fundamentalist Right of the ’80s and the idiotic PMRC proposal . . . but now the target is more appropriately applicable to the regressive…