Abstract
In Chapter 1, I discussed how the art of joking became more closely associated with the personality and life of the comic from around the time of the rise of the ‘sick comics’ in America, and how that ethos and approach infiltrated comedy styles in Britain and Ireland. There are many ways in which a comedian will connect with his or her audience and I will return to the subject in more detail a little later in this study. From more traditional (at times) and contemporary standpoints; the means by which a comedian will attempt to connect with an audience is tied intimately to ideas of self-expression. That is, the comedian is communicating to the audience something drawn from the experience of his or her own life. The comedian may well frame the performance of him or herself as:
The real deal: this is me exposing the humorous side of my life... [so much so] that some comedy audiences refuse to believe the material is prepared at all, expecting comedians to produce a new set of jokes every night, as though they were evangelists speaking in tongues.1
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Notes
Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World of Jokes (London: Penguin), 2006), p. 113.
Mort Sahl, quoted in Oliver Double, Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (UK: Methuen Drama, 2005), p. 70.
Frank Skinner, Frank Skinner (London: Century), 2001), p. 80.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life In Quest Of Narrative’, in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. by David Wood (London: Routledge), 1991), p. 20
Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London: Routledge), 2001), p. 45.
Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25 (1996), 19–43 (p. 21).
Erving Goffman, cited in Eelka Lampe, ‘Rachel Rosenthal Creating Her Selves’, in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd edn, ed. by Phillip B. Zarrilli (Oxon: Routledge), 2002), pp. 291–304 (p. 299).
Henry Bial, ‘What is Performance’? in The Performance Studies Reader: Second Edition, ed. by Henry Bial (Oxon: Routledge), 2007), pp. 59–60 (p. 59).
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (Oxon: Routledge Classics), 2003), p. 186.
Erving Goffman quoted in Richard Schechner, Between Theatre & Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 1985), p. 311.
Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-up Comics (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 279.
Alison Oddey, Performing Women (London: Macmillan Press), 1999), p. 21.
Neal R. Norrick, ‘On the Conversational Performance of Narrative Jokes: Toward an Account of Timing’, Humor, 3:14 (2001), 255–73 (p. 256).
Rebecca Emlinger Roberts, ‘Standup Comedy and the Prerogative of Art’, The Massachusetts Review 41:2 (2000), 151–60 (p. 157).
Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications), 2002), p. 28.
Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16:1 (1986), 22–7 (p. 23).
The study of play occupies a vast territory. Erving Goffman’s concept of framing, through which to understand notions of play behaviour, is widely recognised. Richard Schechner’s discussions on playing are far-reaching, Schechner describes the ‘play net’, to explicate his ideas on playing in culture and performance. Models and explorations of what constitutes playing are also prevalent in the diverse fields of anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. This is not all that play is; rather this constitutes a sample of the depth of knowledge that exists around ideas of playing in a culture. For an introduction to ideas of play, see Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook, ed. by Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (Oxon: Routledge, 2001)
See also Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge), 2002)
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (Oxon: Routledge), 2005).
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge), 1980) pp. 13–20.
Sophie Quirk ‘Who’s In Charge?: Negotiation, Manipulation and Comic Licence in the Work of Mark Thomas’, Comedy Studies, 1:1 (2010), 113–24 (p. 116).
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1997), pp. 12–14; and Sophie Quirk, ‘Who’s In Charge?’, p. 116.
John Morreall in Sophie Quirk, ‘Who’s In Charge?’, p. 116. For further discussion, see Simon Critchley, On Humour: Thinking in Action (Oxon: Routledge), 2002), pp. 87–8
Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’, in Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge), 1999), pp. 150–1.
Lawrence E. Mintz, ‘Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation’, American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 71–80 (p. 75).
For a more comprehensive discussion on the trickster, see Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. by R.F.C. Hull, 2nd edn (London: Routledge), 2006), pp. 257–60.
See also Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World of Jokes (London: Penguin), 2006), pp. 41–2.
Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage Publications), 2005), p. 3.
Andrew Stott, Comedy: The New Critical Idiom (Oxon: Routledge), 2005), p. 60.
Richard Schechner, ‘The End of Humanism’, PAJ, 4:1/2 (1979), 9–22 (pp. 12–13).
Philip Auslander, ‘Postmodernism and Performance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. by Stephen Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2004), pp. 97–113 (p.107).
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Colleary, S. (2015). The Comic ‘i’. In: Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343901_3
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