Abstract
This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.
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