Deon Cole on Stand-Up as Truth Telling
Deon Cole gave an interview to Amy Young of the Phoenix New Times (8/15/2017), and has a few things to say about comics and truth telling (parrhesia). What come...
Tag: Incongruity
George Lopez on Being a Truthsayer
George Lopez gave an interview to NPR’s Stacey Vanek Smith for All Things Considered (8/5/2017). in which he talks about the limits on his comedy. The ex...
Sara Schaefer on Stand-up in the Age of Trump
Sara Schaefer wrote a poignant article for The Herald (7/29/2017) about telling Trump jokes in the current era. Burnt out vs. ready for more She notes that some...
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 1. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Displacement
This is the eighth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reacti...
Aditi Mittal on the Postmodern, Stand-up’s Power and Free Speech
Some folks would say, don’t you study American stand-up? What’s with the stuff on these Indian and Pan-Asian comics? Stay in your lane! Well, I just...
Parody
Two voices Parody is another form of humor that is frequently conflated with verbal irony. In Gary Saul Morson’s read of Mikhail Bakhtin, parody is distinguishe...
Problems with Satiric Irony
I’m still talking about Bill Maher’s 2007 HBO stand-up showcase, Bill Maher: The Decider, where, after greeting the Boston crowd, Maher begins with ...
Irony: Traditional Verbal Irony
Irony has been studied since at least Classical Greece. There are a few different types of irony, including dramatic irony, where the words or actions of the c...
Victor Raskin’s Script Theory
Presuppositions, “common sense,” and scripts In proposing Script Theory, a major model seen to support Incongruity theory, Linguist Victor Raskin no...
Wise Fools Speaking Truth to Power
When talking about stand-up comedy, a lot of attention is given to the figure of the wise fool. This concept is traceable back to at least the middle ages (for...