Comic Performance Research Articles

A labour of love: cancel culture as an accountability practice in the comedy industry

Dominant power structures shape the way that knowledge and affect produces form and content in comedy. This includes the blatant leveling of sexualized violence, racism and discrimination against people with diverse identities who are both the ‘subject’ of comedic performance as well as workers in the industry. Those with power in the comedy industry often resist taking accountability for their violent behaviour through the articulation of ‘cancel culture’. In this paper we expand current understandings of political comedy to include the personal, specifically the use of lived experience as a political strategy for accountability. We argue that by using personal experiences of violence and discrimination as material, affected comedy workers can more publicly hold their peers accountable. We further disentangle comedians’ demands for safety from cancel culture’s prescient framing as unfounded ‘wokeness’ wielded against comedy’s affable heroes. We argue that making jokes that call attention to a comedian’s bad behaviour is a form of work and a labour of love that targeted comedy workers do to keep their industry safe.

Affective politics and neoliberal subjectivities in ‘left behind’ places: Counter-narrating regional decline within/from Finland’s ‘Capital of Pessimism’

Increased scholarly and political interest in the ‘geographies of discontent’ demands attention not only to the material—but also to the emotional and discursive—dimensions of regional inequality. Amidst growing investigation into the affective geographies of depopulation and post-industrial life, little empirical work yet explores how ‘left behind’ communities themselves contribute to broader political discourses concerning deprived places. This paper asks: what potentials do local initiatives have to transform endogenous and exogenous discourses of decline? Drawing on J.K. Gibson-Graham, we analyze the case of the Pessimists Association in Puolanka, Finland—an artists’ initiative which parodies their shrinking town through comedic performance art. Through qualitative and ethnographic methods, we find that the Pessimists’ humorous and joy-full counter-narrative of regional decline reconfigures affective norms toward shrinkage by centering abundance, belonging, and acceptance. Yet by capitalizing on Puolanka’s ‘slow death,’ the project privileges entertainment/exchange-value for exogenous audiences over its cathartic/use-value for Puolanka residents. In all, this case details how entrenched neoliberal subjectivities thwart a wholly reimagined ‘politics of possibility’ for ‘left behind’ places. But, more hopefully, it also suggests strong potential for local initiatives’ affective resonance to transform discourses of decline beyond their grassroots.

Tickling induces a unique type of spontaneous laughter.

Laughing is ubiquitous in human life, yet what causes it and how it sounds is highly variable. Considering this diversity, we sought to test whether there are fundamentally different kinds of laughter. Here, we sampled spontaneous laughs (n = 887) from a wide range of everyday situations (e.g. comedic performances and playful pranks). Machine learning analyses showed that laughs produced during tickling are acoustically distinct from laughs triggered by other kinds of events (verbal jokes, watching something funny or witnessing someone else's misfortune). In a listening experiment (n = 201), participants could accurately identify tickling-induced laughter, validating that such laughter is not only acoustically but also perceptually distinct. A second listening study (n = 210) combined with acoustic analyses indicates that tickling-induced laughter involves less vocal control than laughter produced in other contexts. Together, our results reveal a unique acoustic and perceptual profile of laughter induced by tickling, an evolutionarily ancient play behaviour, distinguishing it clearly from laughter caused by other triggers. This study showcases the power of machine learning in uncovering patterns within complex behavioural phenomena, providing a window into the evolutionary significance of ticking-induced laughter.

Stand-Up Comedy as an Erotic Art: Reframing Stand-Up Comic Performance Through the Lens of Audre Lorde

ABSTRACT Violent metaphors are common in the description of stand-up comedy. If a comedian is successful, she “kills”—vaudeville slang that hardened in the twentieth century into an aggressive, hierarchical ethos this article refers to as the dominance model that is problematic because it reproduces systems of oppression that disadvantage comedians of marginalized identities, especially women and LGBTQIA+ performers. While pervasive in the stand-up industry, the dominance model is not inherent to the art form itself but is rather a by-product of the white, heteropatriarchal culture in which stand-up was forged. A more inclusive model frames stand-up comedy as an erotic art as defined by Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic.” Lorde argues that erotic knowledge is deeply felt in the body, joyful, and shared, a description that neatly encapsulates the experience of stand-up comedy for both performer and audience and offers a fresh, feminist approach to understanding stand-up comedy performance.

Exploring Sexism in Humour: A Linguistic Analysis of Comedic Performances on the Churchill Show

This paper examines the linguistic dimensions of sexism embedded within comedic performances on The Churchill Show, a popular Kenyan stand-up comedy program. Attention was paid to live performances broadcast on TV47. The paper seeks to uncover the subtle ways sexism is expressed through comedians’ utterances. Utilizing Norman Fairclough’s (2001) sociocultural framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the paper employs a descriptive research approach. Utterances from select stand-up comedy acts performed in November 2023 were gathered using purposive sampling. The collection process involved transcribing humorous statements from live performances and performing linguistic analysis to identify linguistic features that convey sexist humour. Content analysis is applied to utterances identified as sexist on the basis that they manifest or reflect unequal power structures, societal stereotypes, or gender-based discriminatory attitudes. The findings indicate that comedians employ various linguistic strategies to generate sexist humour, including juxtaposition, hyperbole, ambiguity, wordplay, pun, and irony. By highlighting the linguistic techniques that perpetuate sexism in comedic discourse, this paper enhances the understanding of the relationship between humour, language, and gender dynamics in the context of Kenyan stand-up comedy.

Joker stages: popular performance and theatrical sensibilities in Joker comics and film adaptations

ABSTRACT Clown, performer, entertainer. The Joker’s stage identities and innate theatricality have many facets. This article explores the violent clown’s theatrical sensibilities across a range of Joker comics and films with the aim of opening up a conversation between the present and the past – between contemporary Joker ‘stage performances’ unfolding in comics and a powerful mix of historical contexts and cultural continuities that, we argue, continue to inform Joker stages in comics and film. The Joker’s theatrical sensibilities, this study shows, are influenced by the aesthetics and cultural backgrounds of three intertwined phenomena: (un)happy comic performers from fictional films, stage hypnotists, and ‘theatres of pain’. From these three phenomena emerges a dialogue with historical precedents of comic performance, hypnotic spectacle and the representation of violence (sometimes with comedic elements) that not only refers back to the late nineteenth century, but continues to shape the Joker’s identity and stories, and helps us to better understand the character’s aesthetic achievements and cultural power.

Abolitionist Laughter: The Joint Movement to #StopCopCity

Abstract: In Atlanta, South River (Weelaunee) Forest is the proposed home of the $90 million Public Safety Training Center, also known as "Cop City." On June 5, 2023, when the Atlanta City Council opened the floor for public comment on Cop City, hundreds of people voiced their opposition for nearly fifteen hours, frequently using humor as a tactic of resistance. What are the radical political potentials of laughter? Which forms of laughter support the power of police, and which disrupt it? This article addresses these questions by closely attending to the comedic performances of #StopCopCity activists.

Embodying Extraness: Leslie Jones’s Black Feminist Comedic Strategy

Abstract: This article takes up Leslie Jones’s 2014 debut performance on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” in which she introduced her “#1 Slave Draft Pick” joke. Within the framework of Black Feminist Comedic Performance (BFCP), I analyze Jones’s performance to introduce the concept of “Extraness,” a strategic mode of Black feminist comedic embodiment. I schematize Extraness as performing excessive acts of self-expression, subverting stereotypes, and articulating an affective and phenomenological outsideness. The concept extends beyond mere excess, evolving into a strategic technique for self-actualization and embodied critique as it confounds linear conceptions of time and progress. The article posits Extraness as the reclaiming of the unruliness assigned to Black women’s bodies across time and space. I explore the dynamic relationship between the joke and audience perception, shedding light on the role of Extraness in shaping spectatorship, and highlight the complexity of Extraness, which may agitate some viewers’ sensibilities while fostering a sense of community among others. I contend that Extraness, though challenging for some audiences, remains an essential tool for Black women comedians to confront and reshape narratives about their experiences.

TABOO WORDS IN 33 MINUTES OF CHRISS ROCK YOUTUBE VIDEO: SOCIOLINGUISTICS STUDY

This research aims to classify types of taboo words and analyze the function of taboo words in Chris Rock's 33-minute YouTube channel; This research aims to classify types of taboo words and analyze their functions in Chris Rock's 33-minute YouTube performance. The study is based on the theories of Batistella (2005) and Raymond D. Liedlich (1973). Using a qualitative descriptive method, the data was sourced from the Laugh Planet YouTube Channel. The findings reveal three types of taboo words: obscenity, epithet, and profanity. Specifically, there were 3 instances of obscenity (1.7%), 1 epithet (5%), and 1 profanity (5%). Additionally, four functions of taboo words were identified: creating attention, endearment, discredit, and providing catharsis. The analysis found 2 instances of creating attention (2.5%), 1 of endearment (5%), 1 of discredit (5%), and 1 of providing catharsis (5%). Among these, obscenity was the most frequently used type of taboo word, while creating attention emerged as the most common function. The study underscores the prevalence and diverse roles of taboo language in comedic performances, highlighting how such words are strategically employed to engage audiences, express affection, criticize, and release emotions. Chris Rock's skillful use of taboo language not only enhances his comedic impact but also reflects broader linguistic and social dynamics. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the nuanced ways in which comedians use taboo words to connect with their audiences and convey complex messages, ultimately enriching the discourse on language and humor in contemporary media.

The language of Nigerian stand-up comedy

Nigeria is complexly multilingual. Arising from this, Nigerian stand–up comedians employ a variety of linguistic strategies to communicate with the audience. This research investigates the peculiarities of language use in Nigerian stand-up comedy by analysing patterns of code choices in the comic performances of four comedians. Because the stand-up comedy industry is predominant in the Southern part of Nigeria, the comedians chosen for this study are representative of the three geopolitical zones of southern Nigeria. The analysis of the data indicates that (1) although Nigerian stand-up comedians primarily use Nigerian Pidgin (NP) they also employ language alternation and code-switch between NP, English, and a variety of indigenous languages. (2) NP is mainly used in the oral medium. Consequently, features of orality: repetition, parallel structures, anaphora, lexical cushioning, semantic extension, metaphor imagery, sentence fragments, and rhetorical devices, are other dominant features of Nigerian stand-up comedy.

A Revisionist Account of the Campū

Abstract The Sanskrit word campū is usually understood to refer to a literary composition that combines prose and verse. I argue that this sense of the word was not available before the tenth century CE, and the vast majority of compositions that have been called campūs, either in premodern commentaries or in modern scholarship, were not and could not have been so called by their authors. This is true of almost the entirety of so-called “campū literature” in Kannada. The reference to campū as “a particular type of composition consisting of prose and verse” in Daṇḍin’s Mirror of Literature (ca. 700 CE) was probably not a definition, despite the fact that it has almost-universally been taken as such by the tradition of Indian poetics and modern scholarship. I propose that the campū might have originated as a subliterary comic performance, and that Daṇḍin (unknowingly) and Trivikramabhaṭṭa (knowingly) helped to establish the now- familiar sense of the word.

Mimicry of European Football Commentary: Arap Uria’s Comic Lip-Sync Impressions in Kenyan Social Media

ABSTRACT The popularity of football in Africa is evident in the widespread viewership of televised top world league matches across the continent. Entertaining as they are to African fans, the broadcast images raise significant questions regarding the political implications of sports television as a medium for conveying cultural content. The matches are often played in far-off places and feature hardly any African commentators. New media technologies present African users with a host of technological affordances that enable them to challenge the hierarchical logic of industrial media production and the restricted communicative space of sports television. Comedy is a common form of political engagement with televised football images. This article analyses lip-sync impressions by a Kenyan comedian, Arap Uria, who records short parody videos that comment on iconic moments in football matches and posts them on social media platforms. Reading the audiovisual texts as politically motivated comic performances, this article argues that Uria’s lip-sync commentaries are a significant part of the contemporary sports television consumption culture in Kenya. The article discusses the place of the football commentator as a cultural mediator as well as how lip-sync performances can generate protest through artistic truth, remixing and parody.

Towards a New Poetics of Comedic Performance in Kenya Following COVID-19

ABSTRACT Stand-up comedy in Kenya before COVID-19 relied on close proximity between comedians and their audiences. However, COVID-19 disrupted this arrangement and subverted the performance space of ‘traditional theatre.’ This article examines alternative comic spaces embraced by selected Kenyan stand-up comedians during COVID-19. The article seeks to answer two fundamental questions: (1) What was the nature of the alternative spaces where the stand-up comedians performed during COVID-19? (2) How did the alternative sites of comic performances redefine how stand-up comedians engage with their audiences? To answer these questions, we conducted research on major stand-up comedians on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter to obtain primary data, which we analysed and interpreted drawing on theories of humour and of social performance. We argue that the comedians, motivated by the need to maintain the relevance of their work and their audiences, used the digital ecosystem and devised variant alternative comic spaces innovatively to push the threshold of poetics of comedic performances individually and collectively.

Hannah Gadsby: Emotional Capital and Affective Economies in Stand-Up Comedy

Being a stand-up comic requires skills: the ability to craft jokes and perform them; the capacity to “read the room” and adapt material during the performance; and business savvy needed to network with fellow comics and industry gatekeepers. Comedians are performers as much as they are business entrepreneurs for their own brand. Negotiating these demands requires emotional capital which, like other forms of capital, is unequally distributed and identity-contingent. High levels of performances of emotional capital can inform success by ensuring good working relationships with others in the industry and developing content that will effectively elicit laughter across communities. Comics attuned to patterns of comedy patronage understand that they are selling entertainment as well as an emotional experience and learn to comply with affective dictates of this performance genre. But not all comics are compliant, nor can they be when affective demands posing as natural are meant to favor cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, able-bodied men. By contrast, Hannah Gadsby is a gender non-conforming, neurodiverse, white, lesbian stand-up comedian whose very existence in comedy venues as well as their comic material itself troubles traditional constructions of emotional capital necessary for effective comedy performance while simultaneously defying the emotions typically demanded from comic performances. They resist and are sometimes unable to deploy the kinds of emotional capital presumed necessary for securing success in the industry. Gadsby’s perceived deficiencies in emotional capital tell us much about the ascendant affective economies circulating today—in green rooms and on stages across the world.

Quick-Witted Eccentrics: The Genre and Genders of Screwball Comedy

Focusing on the type of funny woman that came to life in the Hollywood screwball comedy genre of the 1930s and 1940s, this article explores the intersections of genre and gender. The particular type of female comedic performance associated with the screwball comedy is characterized by an accelerated speed of dialogue, in which the woman demonstrates rhetorical skill, wit, and quick intelligence, as well as eccentric behavior that leads to comical situations. By taking a closer look at specific scenes from canonical screwball comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, and His Girl Friday, as well as less widely known films, such as Four’s a Crowd and Take a Letter, Darling, the article demonstrates how the comic effect stems from the incongruity between the woman’s gender performance and conventional scripts of femininity, without however making the woman the object of the joke. Instead, the woman’s actions serve as the motor of the comic by radically disrupting the man’s sense of authority and the patriarchal order, by extension. The article argues that by featuring women as agents who disrupt the established or conventional order of things, the screwball comedy genre makes possible the emergence of a new way (or ways) of inhabiting femininity.

DANDA NATA OF ODISHA: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ITS CULTURAL AND RITUALISTIC DIMENSIONS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO BOUDH

Danda Nata is a vibrant folk tradition celebrated in rural and tribal communities of Odisha, with Boudh district standing out for its unique variations. Held annually during Chaitra (March–April), the festival spans thirteen or twenty-one days and culminates on Maha Vishuba Sankranti. The celebration is marked by rhythmic drumming, energetic dance, dramatic acts, and comedic performances, blending spiritual rituals with theatrical expressions. Central to the festival are the devotees, known as Danduas or Bhoktas, who undertake vows of austerity and devotion, guided by the Pata Dandua or Pata Bhokta. The event unfolds in four phases: Dhuli Danda, Pani Danda, Agni Danda, and Suanga Danda. Each phase involves distinct rituals, physical endurance, and purification through sand, water, and fire. The final phase, Nrutya Danda, features dance, music, and satire. Boudh’s Danda Nata is distinct for incorporating Bandana, a devotional recitation, Dalapuja, a special puja performed before Meru, and Sola Suanga Danda Nata, which includes sixteen forms of dramatic and satirical performances. These elements add depth to the festival, blending humor, folklore, and religious themes. The worship of Lord Shiva and Goddess Kali ties Danda Nata to both Hindu and indigenous traditions. The performance, accompanied by instruments like the dhol, mahuri, flute, and mardal, remains a dynamic cultural experience. In Boudh, Danda Nata continues to evolve, preserving its spiritual and artistic heritage, making it a unique and living expression of Odisha’s folk traditions.

Edge Impulse-based automated machine learning for comedy performance evaluation

The evaluation of comedic performances presents a challenge due to the subjectivity of humor and various performance factors. This paper proposes a potential solution to this problem by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), particularly automated machine learning (AutoML), to develop an automatic comedy show scoring system using a diverse Chinese acoustic dataset and the Edge Impulse platform. The proposed method involves analyzing complete video recordings of performances by the renowned Chinese comedy troupe, Deyunshe, to assess audience responses and critical acoustic elements that contribute to a comedic performance's success. The study collected five comedic clips, totaling approximately 50 minutes, segmented and labeled them for training purposes. This study systematically explored various configurations using Edge Impulse to optimize accuracy and minimize loss, yielding encouraging results that demonstrate the potential of AI-driven scoring systems. The study identifies several avenues for future research, including enhancing the quality and quantity of training data, refining classification algorithms, and exploring alternative machine learning techniques to further improve accuracy and loss rates. Moreover, the research highlights the potential benefits of integrating real-time scoring systems, which could facilitate audience engagement and refining comedic material. This innovative approach demonstrates the potential to develop a more sophisticated, accurate, and reliable method of evaluating comedic performances, offering valuable insights into audience preferences, enabling the production of high-quality comedic content, and fostering a more objective evaluation of talent in the competitive world of comedy, which could significantly benefit the entertainment industry.

Sexual jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy

Nigerian stand-up comic artists explore emerging social, religious, and political issues as materials for comic entertainment within their performance space and community of practice. One of the resources for comic performance is the recourse to sexual contents which are deployed to reduce apprehension around stereotyped norms about sex and sexuality in the Nigerian sociocultural context. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative data using social media skits, audio-visual disks and semi-structured interviews, this article examines sexual jokes as ideological texts and rhetorical devices that embody the struggle between conservatism and postmodern conceptions of sex and sexuality. It highlights the recurrent themes and creative discourses of sexual humour which stand-up comedy performers exploit as artistic tools for the engagement of gender roles, sexual myths, sexual politics and social contradictions within a vulnerable socio-political and economic context. We adopt social relief theory and incongruity theory of humour comprehension to provide a nuanced understanding of sexual jokes and the sociocultural inhibitions that surround them. The dominant themes in these jokes include male sterility, faking orgasm, commodification of sex, prostitution, rape, and the use of aphrodisiac. The results indicate that sexual jokes are circulating within the comedy performance space as forms of protest against stereotyped sexual culture. In this way, male and female comedians, working with the tools and ideology of postmodernism, help to satirise conventional sexual values and radicalise their audiences against normative construction of sex and sexuality.

UPACARA ADAT MAPAG PENGANTEN

Abstract This research is Fetch of Bride Traditional Ceremony (Islamic Studies in Lengser Dance Innovation by Student Art Group of SMKN 1 Cikedung), intend to describe Islamic studies and innovations contained in the Lengser dance offerings at SMKN 1 Cikedung. This research used a descriptive analysis method with a qualitative approach. Data collection techniques using: direct observation, interviews, literature studies, and documentation. time and place of research are located in the village of Cikedung Lor on Sunday 20 March 2022 at the wedding ceremony of Mrs. Wiwin Suciatin and Mr. Andre Yulian. The findings of the research show that: There is an innovation in the offering of the Fetch of Bride Ceremony by the Students Art Group of SMKN 1 Cikedung a comedic performance of Ki Lengser and Ambu. Besides that, the next innovation is the Mimi Rasinah Kelana Mask Dance at the procession to welcome the arrival of the groom to the bride's residence. As for Islamic studies in offerings Fetch of Bride Traditional Ceremony by the Students Art Group of SMKN 1 Cikedung contained in the contents of the opening of the Rajah which first asked for forgiveness from the God, and then the use of dancer costumes that are closed and cover the headscarf, and Islamic symbols are hidden in the Kelana Mask Dance.

What's the Deal with Sophists? Critical Thought and Humor in Ancient Philosophy and Contemporary Comedy

Abstract While committed to the argumentative and reasoned discourse recognizable in the work of contemporary professional philosophers, the actual practice that both Socrates and Diogenes routinely engaged in was in many ways more similar to stand-up and other forms of contemporary performative comedy. This paper analyzes the commonalities between Socrates’s and Diogenes's public philosophizing in Ancient Greece and performative comedy in the contemporary world, and emphasizes the subversive rhetorical efficiency and skeptical significance of public irony for their audiences. The paper begins by exploring the ways in which ancient philosophers relied on irony and humor to promote skepticism and critical thinking, analyzes contemporary comic performances that seem similar, and concludes with reflections on the varieties of philosophical activity and experience.