Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 May 18

= May 18 =

Bloomberg Business
While doing a WP:BEFORE check on James Richardson Corporation, I discovered its Bloomberg profile. This immediately made me decide not to nominate it, since Bloomberg provides large, detailed profiles of companies — but then I discovered that this is a really minimal page with no significant coverage. Do they have a subscription-based service, some sort of database that one might find with a university subscription? Or is this profile likely to be the only thing that Bloomberg provides for this corporation? No point in nominating it if we can assume that they have lots of coverage, but no point in paying attention to Bloomberg if this profile is it. Nyttend (talk) 00:59, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Don't know if this helps but Google has about 1200 hits on "james richardson pty ltd". They seem to be a major manufacturer in Australia and possibly Israel and were involved in a landmark court case in 1992. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 00:57, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Portuguese gains in WWI?
In article aftermath of World War I it says, Portugal was one of the countries gaining territory following the war. This is news to me. What territory did Portugal gain? Boot Blues (talk) 07:45, 18 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Portugal lost control over some of its African possessions during WW1, but regained them at the end - Portuguese Empire says "At the Versailles Conference, Portugal regained control of all its lost territory, but did not retain possession (by the principle of uti possidetis) of territories gained during the war, except for Kionga, a port city in modern-day Tanzania."  The Kionga article says "The Kionga Triangle was the only Portuguese territorial gain, de facto, for their participation in the First World War." -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 08:00, 18 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Actually, Kionga (now spelled Quionga) is part of Mozambique today. Marco polo (talk) 13:30, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Our Kionga Triangle says that the territory originally lay de facto in German East Africa (now Tanzania), although it was on the wrong side of the Ruvuma River, which should have been the boundary between German East Africa and Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) according to a provisional agreement of 1886. So it was righting a historic wrong (in Portuguese eyes anyway) rather than a "spoil of war". Alansplodge (talk) 16:55, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Cultural attitudes towards slapstick comedy - is there a relationship?
I am wondering if there is a relationship between using slapstick comedy to convey humor and the cultural background of the population. I've heard that children are more likely than adults to experience laughter in slapstick comedy, but what about children of different ethnic-cultural groups? Or adults of different ethnic/cultural groups? 140.254.226.235 (talk) 20:21, 18 May 2015 (UTC)


 * There are many types of humor kids can't understand, like complex puns, sexual humor, etc. So, it would make sense that they would laugh at those types of humor they can understand, like slapstick and bathroom humor.  I don't see any reason why that would vary by culture.  StuRat (talk) 23:41, 18 May 2015 (UTC)


 * We have an article on slapstick and then we have that perennial favorite, laughter. Bus stop (talk) 00:29, 19 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The Three Stooges and the World Wrestling Federation came from the Atlantic. But Jackass and Looney Tunes came from the Pacific. Charlie Chaplin was born in London, which covers the rest of the world, so safe to say we all rather like seeing people fall down. If they go boom, that's even better. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:17, 19 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I have heard that Mandarin Chinese simply don't care for slapstick, and that may be wrong, but there's no Mandarin article linking to slapstick. See also the utter failure of Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus. Sehen Sie dieses Sketsch. μηδείς (talk) 01:46, 19 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't know what the Fliegender Zirkus is supposed to demonstrate here, but rest assured that Monty Python is quite popular in the German speaking world, and I think their slapstick goes hand in hand with the verbal and cultural and whateveral components of their humor. In its totality, it is far more effective in the original, or, if your English isn't up to it, in overdubbed German versions, than in MP's version of German with British accents.
 * German theatrical history (Possen, Schwänke, ...) includes a lot of slapstick humor, continued by 20th century comedians such as Karl Valentin, Loriot, ... (I don't know how universal, but doesn't slapstick have something to do with Schadenfreude too, which so often is gleefully ascribed to German culture? :-) ---Sluzzelin talk  02:00, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. As Mel Brooks (not to be confused with Mel Blanc) said, tragedy's when I cut my finger, and comedy's when you have an anvil fall on your head and die like an accordion. Helps when "you" are either arrogant, rich or otherwise worthy of verbal or doodle satire.
 * Not even Roger Rabbit likes seeing babies get hurt, which (along with being fluffy) makes him sort of likable (a "babyface", rather than "heel"). In this case, his misery must come from absurd, unexpected circumstances or it isn't funny. Same with fail videos (previously known as America's Funniest Home Videos): If a good kid is trying hard to make a difficult basketball shot and suddenly he falls through the floor, into the sewer and dies instead of just tripping or something, that's a fail well done! InedibleHulk (talk) 02:25, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The issue is that when Fliegender Zirkus was first run as a pilot on German TV it was a huge Flopp. The same thing mit Seinfeld: ein zusammener grosser Flopp.  Of course es ist moeglich dass mit der Zeite die Dingen entwickelt haben moegen. μηδείς (talk)
 * Slapstick is probably the most basic and universal form of humor. I doubt that its appeal is very culturally specific, though sophisticates might want to deny that they find it funny. It is absolutely not true that Mandarin speakers dislike slapstick, as this article demonstrates. The Mandarin Wikipedia is not a good guide, as it is much more limited than the English version. As for Seinfeld, it involves very little slapstick, aside from the occasional gag by Kramer. Marco polo (talk) 15:33, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, in the strict sense of the word, no. But it has a lot of humor based on humiliation, which is sort of the essence of slapstick as it has come to be understood. --Trovatore (talk) 17:14, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Film marketers have the motivation to answer this question empirically. From an older study, cited by the other two linked below: " ... slapstick comedies seem more popular in the Far East than in any other part of the world" wrote Ronald Carroll (Oct., 1952) on p. 167 of "Selecting Motion Pictures for the Foreign Market", Journal of Marketing, 17(2), 162-171. Lots of tables, comparing popularity of half a dozen classic movie genres, including slapstick, by region and country. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1248042 (free registration required to read - you don't need JSTOR subscription to read 3 articles every 2 weeks). Alas, later marketing studies of film genre that cite this study do not themselves include slapstick as a variable. They do, however, validate genre preferences by nationality, for example, Ramya Neelamegham and Pradeep Chintagunta (1999), “A Bayesian Model to Forecast New Product Performance in Domestic and International Markets,” Marketing Science, 18(2), 115-136. (see esp. p. 129 on comparative national genre preferences for action, thrillers, and romance) http://www.jstor.org/stable/193212, with more recent studies corroborating such preferences cited in open access article by Dalia Salazar (2014) "Getting the Show on the [International] Road: Identifying and Analyzing the Movie Signals Responsible for International Blockbusters in a Globalized Marketplace" pp. 65-86 starts on p 81 of PDF -- Paulscrawl (talk) 07:22, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

This is strictly WP:OR (there are most likely some references for this aspect of the question; I just don't have any right now), but in societies/cultures where other kinds of produced-for-the-public humor may be taboo (e.g. sexual humor) or dangerous (e.g. political commentary/satire), slapstick is just about the only other option. Take, for example, Thai and Cambodian cinema. Whereas in traditional art forms (Thai/Lao mor lum, Khmer ayai and kamphlaeng), sexual innuendo is par for the course, comedy in movies is so slapstick-ish that it makes the Three Stooges look refined. And it is enjoyed by young and old alike. Somebody mentioned Seinfeld above. That brings to mind a related anecdote. A young Cambodian man was visiting my house one time and Seinfeld was on. He said "I don't get it. Why is this so popular? It's not even funny. There's nobody falling down, no crazy sound effects, no men disguised as women (...) It's not a comedy at all." This suggests that what we find to be funny, or at least what we expect in a comedy, is somewhat culturally conditioned.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 08:13, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Slapstick goes in and out of fashion in the UK, so it's difficult to say whether it's an intrinsic part of our humour. There was Norman Wisdom, who certainly crossed a cultural boundary, becoming a superstar in Albania. There was Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. More recently Miranda Hart's comedy relied on physical awkwardness, but she is perhaps better known now for more serious acting (series Call the Midwife). Itsmejudith (talk) 16:42, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Forgot Mr Bean! When slapstick's done as well as that, it doesn't have much trouble being recognised across the world. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:42, 20 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Indeed, Mr Bean is a very good example of exportability, when the majority of laughs aren't linked to language. Apart from silent movie classics, I also thought of Jerry Lewis's acclaim outside the US, and Louis de Funès's popularity in the German speaking world (in both cases often only broadcast in overdubbed versions in the ancient 1970s and -80s, and in those countries unfortunate enough to have 99% of films dubbed on TV at the time). ---Sluzzelin  talk  00:20, 21 May 2015 (UTC)