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History & The Arts
Christmas Crackers: An OpenLearn reading list
Christmas dinner wouldn't be Christmas dinner without a member of the family being forced through passive-aggressive peer pressure to don a paper crown. Join us for a quick snap through crackers.
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Can comedy change your life?
After years spent in dark comedy clubs and cramped rooms above pubs, Mary O’Hara knows what makes her laugh. But what else can a good joke do? She meets the performers and researchers who say that comedy can change how we think and even how we act.
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TV, Radio & Events
Thinking Allowed: The 'Precariat' and humour in sociology
On this episode of Thinking Allowed, Laurie Taylor and guests dicuss an emerging new class, the 'Precariat' and also neglecting humour in social science academia.
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Languages
The Language of Comedy
How do we use language in comedy? What is the social importance of comedy? What are the techniques used with language to create different types of humour? This series looks at how entertainers manipulate language to generate humour, and what this reveals about the nature of comedy and its function in society. Featuring Henning Wehn, on cross cultural humour, Isy Suttie, on crafting a joke and Graham Fellows on creating his character John Shuttleworth.
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TV, Radio & Events
Thinking Allowed - Comic snobs and the work-life boundary
Did alternative comedy leave a sense of comedy snobbery? And are our jobs bleeding into every aspect of our lives? Laurie Taylor and guests investigate.
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Society, Politics & Law
Punchlines and conclusions
During the Lenny's Britain series, we asked for your help with some research. We wanted to understand British humour - and you responded with your jokes. Thanks for taking part in the research - and now, Marie Gillespie shares with OpenLearn some of the findings.
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Society, Politics & Law
Look out there’s a banker behind you!
Richard Skellington predicts that bankers will be cast as the villain in pantomimes this Christmas
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Society, Politics & Law
Just a bit of fun: A survey of British jokes
Jokes may be just a bit of fun in our day-to-day lives, lightening a moment or breaking the ice, but they can also offer us an insight into our society – into who we are and how we socialise, says Marie Gillespie
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TV, Radio & Events
Lenny's Britain - Mind The Gap
In the last of the series, Lenny criss-crosses Britain to discover how humour can draw boundaries between some communities - and how it can also break those boundaries down.
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TV, Radio & Events
Lenny's Britain - Family Matters
We begin the series in the bosom of the family. Here, humour is a way of dealing with tensions, especially those arising from the rights of passage - birth, marriage and death.
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TV, Radio & Events
Lenny's Britain - Something For The Weekend
Whether it's a day at the seaside, DIY, gardening, having a drink or going out on the town, we Brits like to have a laugh in our leisure time. So what do we get up to in our time off? How has our leisure time changed? And do we share a sense of humour?
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TV, Radio & Events
Lenny's Britain - A Labour of Laughs
How do we use humour in the workplace? We now work longer hours than any other country in Western Europe, so are we using a particular type of humour to cope?