Painting of thirty-five expressive heads.

Thirty-Five Expressive Heads, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, c. 1825. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing, France.

Comedy

Volume VII, Number 1 | winter 2014

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Miscellany

Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed in 1947, “A typical American film, naive and silly, can—for all its silliness and even by means of it—be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learned a lesson from a silly American film.”

Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

—Philip Sidney, 1582
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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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