You, The Public

Abstract

This article considers the operations of direct audience address in the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee. By analyzing the grammatical and interpellative operations of Lee's address to various audiences, both ‘live’ and televisual, it considers the perverse kind of pleasure that arises from being addressed, and insulted, as though one were part of a collective entity of which one may or may not feel ‘part’. In particular, it identifies certain confusions inherent in the personal-pronoun ‘you’ when it is deployed by a performer onstage, or on camera. Via close analysis of excerpts from Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (2009) and 90s Comedian (2006), the author suggests that Lee's meticulous attention to grammar reveals the pronoun 'you' as the site of tensions between stand-up's supposed intimacy and directness, and the distance necessarily interposed by the formalities of the performance situation. This reading problematizes what many scholarly and anecdotal accounts of stand-up frame as its friendliness, its claims to intimacy or directness, its ability to make spectators feel as if the comedian is addressing them as part of a one-on-one conversation. Drawing on what Denise Riley has named ‘linguistic unease’, a feeling that emerges from the gulf between the embodied scene of speech and the formal necessity of linguistic convention, this article suggests that a one-on-one conversation is no guarantee of friendly intimacy. It suggests that Lee's stand-up mobilizes precisely this sort of linguistic unease in order to call attention to the formal, conventional nature of the stand-up address. In so doing, it troubles recourse to an easy collectivity, a notion of ‘the public’ that ignores its implication in commercialized structures of entertainment.