The transgressive rhetoric of standup comedy in China

How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other intended behaviours. Austin accentuated the idea of speaker intention, on one hand, and hearer’s response to that intention if successfully conveyed, on the other. We consider some of the speech acts used in the work of selected standup comedians to analyse the way they determine the relationship of performer and audience. We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the licensing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and the success of these speech acts in shaping the social lives of the audience. We show that this relationship is at the forefront of standup comedy’s social impact and that it can generate heightened consciousness of the social and political environment of the time. Finally, we consider the question of whether socially critical standup can have any noticeable effect on the attitudes or behaviour of both live and digitally mediated audiences.

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Dialogic catharsis in standup comedy: Stewart Huff plays a bigot

Humor - International Journal of Humor Research ◽

10.1515/humor-2016-0026 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Susan Seizer

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Standup Comedy

AbstractThis essay investigates the cathartic creative process of a standup comic who recounts, in a video-taped interview with the author, the act of transforming a painful meeting with a bigot in a bar into the stuff of comedy. Through reflexive engagement with his own creative process, Stewart Huff recounts building a scenario that splits his experience into two voices, enacting a breakthrough into performance within the taped interview itself. Taking to heart Bakhtin’s insight that parody involves a hostile relation between the speaker and another, and that introducing someone else’s words into our own speech results in a double-voiced narrative, I analyze Huff’s performance as a classic example of double-voiced parody. The transformation from horror to humor is an empowering performative

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Whose Joke Is It Anyway?: Originality and Theft in the World of Standup Comedy

Theatre Journal ◽

10.1353/tj.2014.0005 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 66 (1) ◽

pp. 55-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

George Pate

Keyword(s):

The World ◽

Standup Comedy

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Finding the “Funny Bone” in the Class Skeleton

Identifying, Describing, and Developing Teachers Who Are Gifted and Talented - Advances in Higher Education and Professional Development ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-5879-8.ch005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 56-62

Author(s):

Kyle Seiverd

Keyword(s):

High School ◽

High School Student ◽

Standup Comedy ◽

A Performance

Some teachers have the natural ability to captivate their students, while others struggle to maintain classroom control. Utilizing comedy as a tool to deliver and maintain an audience's attention is something that comics and GATEs have in common. Some teachers use videos, memes, or one-liners to their class laugh. For the author, a career in comedy began with family joke telling. It was when a high school student enrolled in standup comedy class that he unlocked his comedic talents and better prepared himself to become a teacher. The highs and lows of joke writing, stress of a performance, and its connection to teaching are described in detail.

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Harnessing Luck as an Industrial Product

Reality Radio, Second Edition ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633138.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ira Glass

Keyword(s):

Golden Age ◽

Personal Narrative ◽

Industrial Product ◽

Brussels Sprouts ◽

American Life ◽

Standup Comedy

The very notion of a radio documentary “fan” would have sounded weird at one time—back when the word documentary might have evoked thoughts of sonic Brussels sprouts. The producers who have done the most to change that, and to prompt talk of a new golden age, are the masters of the personal narrative. Several of our essayists have been at this since the 1980s or even the 1970s, but in the mid-1990s Ira Glass created a show devoted to the narrative and gave it a distinctly urban, and urbane, sensibility. As Ira makes clear, every story on This American Life has a point, a “moment of reflection,” a larger meaning of some sort. Some of those stories are tied to the news; many more are not. TAL stories tend to lead to epiphanies of the sort found in literature or the most cerebral standup comedy. In his essay, Ira tells the story of his evolution from NPR reporter to TAL impresario, and describes with detailed examples how he hears and reassembles stories.

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The Transnational Life of Diversión

Diversión ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479836017.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Albert Sergio Laguna

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Popular Culture ◽

The United States ◽

South Florida ◽

Media Content ◽

Demographic Changes ◽

Standup Comedy

This chapter investigates the flows of ludic popular culture between Cuba and the United States in order to elaborate its central contention: the movement of popular culture is indicative of the intensification of transnational contact born out of political and demographic changes on both sides and is a means by which this intensification occurs. The first part focuses on standup comedy by island-based comedians who appeal to Cubans who have arrived in Miami since 1994 and the racialized and gendered underpinnings of their acts. The second half explores how popular culture produced in the United States circulates in Cuba through a phenomenon called el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paqueterefers to the sale and circulation of media content primarily produced off the island, mainly from the United States. In addition to keeping up with American sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters, people on the island can now watch artists who have left Cuba permanently perform nightly on South Florida television. Analyzing the movement of popular culture between the island and the diaspora highlights how intensifying transnational contact, continuity, and exchange are affecting and reflecting the lives of Cubans on and off the island culturally and economically.

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