Persian comedy whispers out loud: a critical discourse analysis of Persian televised stand-up comedy

Abstract

This paper probes into the Iranian society through the ‘discourse access’ that Persian stand-up comedy provides. It is posited that Persian humorous discourse can be an effective and relatively safe communication toolkit to speak truth to power and address cultural deficits. Hence, it may be an insightful ‘point of entry’ into the below-the-surface construct of various social wrongs (e.g. social class inequality, cultural illiteracy). In particular, Persian stand-up comedy, as a young and burgeoning genre of Persian comedy, seems to be reliably reflecting such concerns in Iran. Within the general framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article inspected into a corpus of stand-up comedy performances by the Iranian participants of the first and largest televised stand-up comedy contest in Iran. The corpus included 11 stand-up comedians and 14 performances from the three seasons of the contest (2016–2022). The reflexive thematic analysis of the stand-up routines unmasked a wealth of social criticism which is discussed under four major themes of ‘economic stress’, ‘social class inequality’, ‘more equal decision-makers’ and, ‘agents of change’. The paper elaborates on Persian stand-up comedy as a potent driving force within the society to effect individual and social changes. It contends that Persian comedy can greatly contribute to discourses of awareness and transformation within the Iranian society.