Comic Performance Research Articles

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Clown politics: history, populism, and tragic farce

ABSTRACT Contemporary right-wing populism mixes comic performance with authoritarian and reactionary sentiments in troubling ways, as much recent work has observed. We might thus be said to be living in an era of ‘tragic farce’ in which Marx’s famous distinction between genres of historical action has collapsed. To engage with these questions, this article focuses on the clown as a figure in which aesthetics and politics intersect in crucial ways. Through readings of Adorno, Deleuze, Agamben and Žižek, I show how the clown has been an enduring concern for theory. I also analyze Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker, including the furor that greeted its release, in order to argue for a mode of aesthetic populism in which the category of ‘people’ remains a virtual or potential category that can drive artistic practice. To describe this, I draw on what Deleuze, in his philosophy of cinema, termed fabulation.

Peculiarities of Humorous Dialogues of the Japanese Comic Performance Genre of Manzai

Introduction. Researchers have pointed out that dialogue itself may be considered from the point of view of intercultural interaction. This is connected with the process of forming intercultural foreign language communicative competence that at recent times has been frequently carried out through information and communication technologies etc. Due to that, we have chosen as the object of our research the humorous dialogues of the Japanese comic performance genre of manzai, which we retrieved from the educational and entertainment video (one of the means of edutainment technology). Methods. Based on the classification of the peculiarities of the dialogues such as communicative, psychological, and linguistic ones developed by Ukrainian researchers we made an analysis of the Japanese dialogues of manzai genre and distinguished their functional types. Results. The analysis of the mentioned above dialogues revealed that first of all the dialogues may be considered as the ones of the combined type from the point of view of their functions. As well as we have clarified that dialogical unities of the analyzed dialogues often may have combinations of peculiarities such as psychological and linguistic ones or linguistic and communicative ones. Also, we have defined the peculiarity which provides the comic effect in these dialogues and serves as the base for what dialogue of such kind is developing. Conclusion. To sum up, it was found that the mentioned above peculiarities of the dialogues play a significant role in the process of forming intercultural foreign language communicative competence. Therefore, we consider this research useful for developing exercises for Japanese language students to form competence in dialogical speech using the educational and entertainment videos of the Japanese comic performance genre of manzai.

Становление жанров драматургии в контексте развития жанрово-родового сознания первых чувашских писателей

The paper deals with the little-studied problem of the folklore origins of drama genres in Chuvash literature. The aim of the study is to identify the folklore origins of individual genres of national drama as the genre-mode consciousness of the first Chuvash writers. Children’s and youth role-playing games, the wedding ceremony, the folklore genre “peyĕt”, which include the characteristic features and elements of drama and theatre serve as the primary sources of Chuvash drama. It is these sources that influenced the formation of the comedic and tragic consciousness of the first Chuvash writers G. Komissarov, K. Ivanov, F. Pavlov and others. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it considers the origins of drama forms through the lens of genre-mode consciousness formation among the first Chuvash writers. Ethnographic descriptions and terms involved as the research material are considered as one of the foundations of the national dramatic art. The results of the study showed that “văiă” (game, puppet theater), “kamit” (comic performance), “peyĕt” (plot songs) act as the fundamental ethnic constants in the development of comedic and tragic consciousness in Chuvash fiction. These influenced the emergence of various genre-style directions in national drama, namely the formation of the genres of comedy and tragedy.

Verbal Humor in Stand-up Comedy “Rock & Roast” with the GTVH Theory

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) has been a significant pragmatics theory since Attardo and Raskin put it forward in 1991. Six knowledge resources (KR) are included in GTVH: script oppositions (SO), logical mechanisms (LM), situations (SI), targets (TA), narrative strategies (NS), and language (LA) to analyze verbal humor. As a comedic performance on stage, stand-up comedies have experienced explosive popularity in China in recent years. This paper extracted four excerpts from the final round of a stand-up comedy TV show “Rock & Roast” Series 5 and applies qualitative research to analyze them with the theory of GTVH. From the analysis, different KRs of SI and TA showed up to give the audience several interesting contents. In the SO KR, from the most to lowest abstract level are all used in the script. At the same time, LM, NS and LA KRs as tools serve for the contents. It is obvious that LM varies among these excerpts, but NS are usually the same and LA can be absent in the performances. The straightforward content KRs of SI and TA are more obvious, LM, but NS and LA are sometimes unnoticed, which are essential tools to make the text effective. It suggests the feasibility of combining Chinese stand-up comedy with pragmatics theory and it extends the traditional studies in this field.