Humour, vitality, and the lone togetherness of social media

This Centre for Modern Studies lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and an opportunity to meet Professor Weitz.

Eric Weitz is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin, and is the President of the Irish Society for Theatre Research. Eric also serves on the Board of Directors for two socially engaged theatre companies; these are the Dublin-based Smashing Times Theatre Company and Collective Encounters in Liverpool. As an academic who previously worked as a professional actor and director in the U.S., his research interests in humour studies focus on theatre practice and performance. As well as comedy in the work of playwrights such as Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Conor McPherson, his articles cover a diverse range of subjects including clowning, trickster spirits, and online humour.

He edited a collection of essays on The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre in 2004, and has also contributed to important reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, the Oxford Encyclopedia for Theatre and Performance, and the Routledge Handbook of Language and Humour. His three single-authored book publications are The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (2009), For the Sake of Sanity: Doing Things with Humour in Irish Performance (2014), and his most recent book, Theatre and Laughter, which came out earlier this year from Palgrave. This summer he has the honour, and the herculean job, of hosting the 28th Conference of the International Society for Humor Studies, the largest global gathering of scholars who work on comedy.