Medieval and Early Modern Italian literary texts include abundant tricks, usually played by clever people on simple-minded victims for amusement or profit. What makes a series of actions a trick? Are tricks only comic or can they cause tragic consequences? How does the interaction between the trickster and the tricked develop throughout the story and …

The Italian poet Giovan Battista Marino (1569-1625) was imprisoned many times during his life, due to his witty and irreverent attitude towards some of his patrons and the Catholic Church. Experiencing harsh detention in Naples as well as in Turin, Marino managed to escape prison with literature. The metaphor of an escape through pen and …

4:00 pm CT / 5:00 pm ET “If my Tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me: will you command me to use my Legges? And yet that were but light payment, to Dance out of your debt…” So the epilogue to Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 – an epilogue suggesting that the actor who proposes …

4:00 pm CT / 5:00 pm ET What lies behind laughter? What is its agenda? What do we do when we laugh at something (or someone laughs at us)? The talk will seek to offer answers to these questions along two avenues:  by examining, first, the debate on whether Jesus laughed that takes place between William of Baskerville and Jorge …

4:00 pm CT / 5:00 pm EST Dark Serial Humor sketches out why recent Italian television comedy has, with few exceptions, remained a local phenomenon as it is rarely exported beyond the nation’s borders. The talk then looks at some moments of serial humor in four of Italy’s most popular, recent tv (non comedy) exports with …