I’ve talked a bit about how John Limon defines a genre of “absolute stand-up,” as marked, in part, by authorial intent. Yet he also distinguishes his absolute form from serious, extrinsic forms by noting how the audience responds.
Limon’s rules for absolute stand-up are as follows:
- “If you think something is funny, it is.”
- “Individual reservations are irrelevant.” People who don’t agree with the general audience response are wrong.
- “Individual recantations are invalid.” Once you’ve laughed, you can’t take it back.
- “You cannot be retroactively disabused by a critic. To criticize a joke is to miss it.”
- “A joke is funny if and only if you laugh at it.” Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke.”
- “Your laughter is the single end of stand-up.” (pp. 11-13)
So only item three deals with the intentions of the comic. The bulk of the theory places responsibility on the audience. Limon argues that unlike “serious art,” stand-up does not need to appeal to any outside judge for a decision that endures.
Serious Art
For Limon, serious art is what we might call “high culture” art, which requires professional critics. In performance art, like ballet or opera, where the art is expressed in the moment, the decision falls to the professional critics who witnessed the event. When the art form is more enduring, such as a novel, the decision is deferred: “posterity will judge,” thus these high forms have claims to seriousness (13). Of course, many have critiqued such a high/low distinction as elitist in nature, thus this distinction is fairly quickly dispensed with. Further, now that we have video, more and more critics can weigh in on performance art, after the fact.
Stand-up
On the other hand, he argues that laughter by individual audiences is the sole indicator of humor – any given act of laughing in the moment retroactively defines humor as such for that moment. The requirement of laughter thus indicates that it is incorrect to define a joke or bit as funny or not, but instead we must place it in a time and a place; we must state “it was/was not funny when…” Funny changes from a stable traitor quality of a routine, bit or joke to a state the audience is in after hearing or reading it, and it is the achievement of this state that is the comic’s goal.
Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke” (12). As Limon puts it, “the audience cannot err, it cannot feign, it cannot be misled” (13). Laughter is a very limiting criteria, but Limon argues it is involuntary and less ambiguous than smiles or other indicators. When I talk about the difference between Silverman and Bill Maher’s racist incidents, this is a primary indicator: people laughed – and continued to laugh – with and at Silverman, few, if any laughed with or at Maher.
Limon also arrives theoretically at what Betsy Borns arrived at inductively: that a large number of comics downplay the individuality of members of the audience in favor of the reaction of the group. As just one example, Lenny Bruce reportedly once said, “Audiences individually may be idiots, but together they’re a genius”; taken together, they’ll tell you what is or is not funny (Borns, 27). Comics don’t have to please everyone all the time; they simply have to please enough of the people (and not completely alienate anyone) to elicit tacit approval from those who are not actually laughing – these people shouldn’t be incensed enough to disrupt the show, but they don’t have to love it.
Boos and hecklers
However, more hostile reactions from a few members of the audience can negate this tacit approval. Borns notes in the case of the individual audience member who is not at all happy, “one can always yell, ‘Hey, what the hell are you talking about?’ and, most likely, you’ll get an answer” (25). And, as I’ve noted in Dying Laughing, where they tell sixteen stories about hecklers and boos, audience dissent is certainly recognized as a possibility. But when such interruptions occur, the audience as a group also may go farther; Borns notes the audience may mutiny and take back control, as Royale Watkins describes in the movie.
Thus, Limon notes that a stand-up act can be measured as separate from the absolute form (and therefore consequential) by registering “the irruptions of alien impulses.” This can perhaps be easily seen when the audience’s tacit approval fails – the most extreme case being audience outrage (13-14). Negative audiences (protesters, critics, hecklers, boo’ers and walk-outs) do more than indicate that the text was not humorous; they mark the rupture of the humorous event. Thus, like the criterion of expectation inherent in incongruity theory, Limon’s laughter criterion creates a false dichotomy between humor and serious persuasive discourse.
This presents another danger of the heckler or booer. To a certain extent, criticisms after the fact and from people who weren’t there are informed by the criticism of those who were – if people in the immediate audience responded negatively, the critic has more to go on. On the other hand, by Limon’s logic, if the immediate audience finds it amusing, the comic has no need to defend it once it’s filmed or digitized. Therefore, when the act is interrupted before it can be laughed at, the comedian has truly failed. Once the act is disrupted, the uptake of the original humor is no longer possible – any response by the comic is not guaranteed reception as humorous, and thus the comedian needs to be wary.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Limon, John. Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
