Live Comedy Research Articles

Risk and surprise: stand-up comedy in a relaxed venue

When investigating relaxed performance, little attention has been paid to live stand-up comedy. The relaxed performance increases the accessibility and inclusivity of live theatre performances. Yet this poses great challenges to stand-up comedy, which often entails offensiveness and physical discomfort. This article focuses on the paradox between relaxed performance and stand-up comedy. It examines the challenges and positive effects of incorporating stand-up comedy into a relaxed venue through a case study of Evelyn Mok’s live comedy performance in a relaxed venue at a comedy event ‘Comedy without Victims’ held at Battersea Arts Centre in 2019. Combining the analysis of comedian-audience interactions with an interview between the author and Mok, this article contends that, although audience interruptions may disrupt the delivery of comedy routines and place the comedian in an uncertain status, the relaxed venue reshapes the comedian-audience relationship and galvanises the autonomy of audience members, particularly those who are socially marginalised. Consequently, it enhances the subversive power of stand-up comedy in challenging ableist ideologies in theatre conventions, disturbing the existing discussions about social divisions and addressing social injustice. In this regard, relaxed stand-up comedy acts as a democratic site where comedy performance propels and expands real social transformation.

"Toda la tragedia y la comedia de la vida": sobre la mezcla de afectos y géneros en el Filebo de Platón

In Philebus 50b ff., for the first time, the pleasure that human beings take in the tragic is explicitly noted. Plato refers there to "all the tragedy and comedy of life", an expression that is at the heart of my work. In what follows I will first make some philological observations on the passage in context, then I outline Plato's conception of the tragic, illustrating it with the Phaedo. I will analyse the references to tragedy and comedy in Symposium and Laws VII. And finally I will return to the Philebus to show that in Plato's poetics "mixture" applies not only to the affections but also to the two dramatic genres, whose mixture occurs both on stage and in life.

Stand Up and Be Counted: Exploring The Role of Comedy in Society

Comedy is a multidimensional, diverse, and versatile spectacle, an identifiable art form and source of entertainment and it has a rich historical identity and purpose. It contributes to cultural identities and has more recently been proven to provide positive impacts in mental healthcare. It offers social and cultural benefit and influences social change. The growth of live comedy has a strong background in working-class venues, which has possibly predisposed it to being perceived as less significant than other performance arts such as dance and theater. Given the untapped potential for further research this empirical article sought to evaluate the potential opportunities for comedy to make a greater positive impact on local communities. To facilitate this, data were collected through surveys administered online and in comedy clubs in the West Midlands (UK). A total of 179 questionnaires were received, supported with in-depth interviews with comedy club managers. Key issues for live comedy engagement were found to include a lack of awareness, perceived price barriers, and a lack of publicity. Seventy percent of respondents agreed that live comedy could have a wider, positive social impact and also offers a platform to address difficult social issues. A number of participants expressed the importance of communitas and the opportunity to discuss difficult and sensitive issues in a structureless state of liminality.

Open Mic?

This article draws on ethnographic interviews conducted between May 2016 and May 2017 with stand-up comics in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, all of whom described the experience of being marked as, or associated with, women within the historically masculine comedic space. Drawing on feminist comedy studies, production studies, and fan studies, the article explores the cultural logics of comedic authenticity and their material effects on embodied performances of marked comics in local live comedy. It argues that marked bodies are rarely able to achieve the ideal performance of “authenticity.” While stand-up comedy is often theorized optimistically as a fruitful site from which to subvert assumptions about identity, gendered or otherwise, comics paradoxically feel pressure to conform to appropriate gender expression on stage in order to be legible to audiences and other comics historically influenced by masculine comedic taste.

Stand-up Comedy and Young India: The Expression and Construction of Identity

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the genre of live comedy outside its traditional Western setting in popular and academic understanding. I argue that its ever-growing popularity in urban India is reflective of an expanding middle-class’s search for an authentic social identity. I demonstrate – through ethnographic and analytical detail – how stand-up comedy is well-placed to offer insight into this effort to move between and beyond the twin forces of deep-seated cultural traditions and the westernisation of public culture. In addition – as my four key comedic informants were keen to emphasise – its significance does not exist merely in the detail of the content they divulge but in the form itself, as an opportunity to divulge personal reflections in an intimate, communal space.

‘Essex girls’ in the comedy club: Stand-up, ridicule and ‘value struggles’

This article presents findings from a qualitative study carried out on how audiences of stand-up comedy are entangled in ‘value struggles’. It focuses on a group who through classed and gendered ridicule are often drawn as valueless – women from Essex or ‘Essex girls’. The article explores how a group of women from Essex negotiate their value in the face of Essex girl–based ridicule, experienced while part of a live comedy audience in a London comedy club. The analysis reveals an ambivalence in how the group utilise and view their ‘Essex girl’ status, which challenges the view that this is a valueless identification. They oscillate between the joy of revelling in the Essex girl role and disidentification from the shame of this disreputable status. It concludes by highlighting how ridicule does not necessarily perform a disciplinary function and considers if the joy of ‘being Essex’ has any hope of escaping into everyday life.

A new public sphere? English-language stand-up comedy in India

The genre of English-language stand-up comedy is increasingly becoming popular in India’s metropolitan cities. This study uses the concept of the public sphere to examine YouTube videos of a prominent Indian live comedian, Daniel Fernandes. The analysis shows that Fernandes’ verbal humor is based on several performative techniques such as linguistic code-switching, calculative pauses, and juxtaposition of incongruous things. The study, furthermore, demonstrates that English-language stand-up comedy extends the bourgeois public sphere by a satirical commentary on political, social, and cultural issues in contemporary India as well as internationally. The article also argues that the public sphere exemplified by the genre of English-language live comedy is not entirely new, but an advancement of the classical public sphere.

Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition

Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition

Robot Comedy Lab: experimenting with the social dynamics of live performance

The success of live comedy depends on a performer's ability to “work” an audience. Ethnographic studies suggest that this involves the co-ordinated use of subtle social signals such as body orientation, gesture, gaze by both performers and audience members. Robots provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of these signals experimentally. Using a life-size humanoid robot, programmed to perform a stand-up comedy routine, we manipulated the robot's patterns of gesture and gaze and examined their effects on the real-time responses of a live audience. The strength and type of responses were captured using SHORE™computer vision analytics. The results highlight the complex, reciprocal social dynamics of performer and audience behavior. People respond more positively when the robot looks at them, negatively when it looks away and performative gestures also contribute to different patterns of audience response. This demonstrates how the responses of individual audience members depend on the specific interaction they're having with the performer. This work provides insights into how to design more effective, more socially engaging forms of robot interaction that can be used in a variety of service contexts.

‘We need a committee for men's rights’: reactions of male and female viewers to reverse gender discrimination in Korean comedy

This study investigates the ideological implications of Nambowon (‘the Committee for Men's Rights’), one of the most popular sketches in a live comedy series entitled Gag Concert in Korea. The sketch humorously criticizes women who take advantage of men in various situations and always ends with a funny slogan demanding equal rights for men and the end of reverse gender discrimination. We treat Nambowon not as an idiosyncratic text but as part of Korean television programs that portray the rising social status of women as well as gender differences. Previous studies of gender and comedy have typically focused on textual meanings, and relatively little work exists to explain the audience's reception. Thus, we explore why audiences enjoy the show and whether and why there are differences in the reactions of male and female viewers to the portrayal of gender in Nambowon.

Mourning and Melancholia: Reading the Symposium

The characters Apollodorus and Alcibiades represent the melancholic and manic poles of what Freud calls the "cyclic disease" in "Mourning and Melancholia." Plato conceives of erôs as entrapped within cycles of pleasure and pain, filling and emptying, until the self recognizes its overfullness — that is, its pregnancy. Socrates embodies the "out-of-placeness" (atopia) that overfullness signifies in a world characterized by emptying and filling, the "whole tragedy and comedy of life" as the Philebus puts it. As a lure for erôs, Socrates points beyond himself; for Apollodorus and Alicibiades, however, he catalyzes their melancholic and manic positions. The reader of the dialogue is thereby cautioned not to relate to the text as containing the fullness of Socratic speech, but to see it as the occasion for the recognition of his or her own out-of-placeness in the "tragedy and comedy of life."

The Gossip of Ideology

The Gossip of Ideology

Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships

Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships

The Tragedy and Comedy of Life

The Tragedy and Comedy of Life

The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato's "Philebus" (review)

The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato's "Philebus" (review)

The tradgedy and comedy of life: Plato's Philebus

The tradgedy and comedy of life: Plato's Philebus

The poet as clown: Variations on a theme in nineteenth‐century French poetry

The “self‐portrait as a clown” which has now become a standard allegory of the artist in twentieth‐century painting, developed particularly from nineteenth‐century models in French poetry. There was a kind of metonymic fusion of Pierrot and Harlequin, the court jester, the vagabond showman, the gypsy violinist and the white‐faced circus clown. Banville, in his Odes funambulesques (1857) was the first major poet to represent the clown as a symbolic analogue of the poet, as a tightrope walker and an acrobatic, with his “vertical” aspirations from reality to ideality. Baudelaire's portrait of the failed showman and artist as victim, Verlaine's clowns reflecting the suggestive ambiguities and plasticity of the poet's aesthetics, Mallarmé's Le Pitre châtié, Laforgue's frivolous dilettante and Hamlet‐like dandy who chooses to play the role of the white‐faced simpleton, all reveal the figure of the clown, as a blatantly proclaimed actor and champion of artifice who set himself in total contrast, physically and spiritually, with his audience and society in general. An artificial rebel against realism, he perceived more profoundly than his audience the comedy of life, that “all the world's a stage.”