Narrators: Unreliable and Discordant
The idea that we can influence people with words (rhetoric) depends on the notion that the speaker is who they appear to be and mean what they say. Scholars ca...
Category: Stand Up Comedy
My academic “wheelhouse.” This site used to be entirely devoted to stand-up comedy, but as I’ve begin to branch out into my other interests, I’ve collected everything to do with stand-up here.
Comic Intent
You hear it time and time again, from both comics and scholars: in stand-up comedy the only goal is laughter by any means available (Borns; Gilbert; Horowitz; L...
Spatial Theories
The basic idea of a space for ideas comes from Aristotle, who argues that we organize ideas spatially in our mind. We group like with like into genres, topics,...
Why You Should Ask an Academic
An article published last July in the Chronicle of Higher Education reappeared in my FB news feed the other day, and it says basically what I’ve been on a...
Getting on Stage
Perhaps the hardest part of stand-up for many people is actually getting on stage. Seinfeld’s joke about fear of public speaking versus death is legendar...
Why You Should Think Jokes Through
Comedy teacher, comic and writer Jerry Corley gives three reasons to develop your writing. They are: Writing Makes it Easier to Build Structure into your Materi...
How to Write a Joke
Everything starts with the jokes. Until you’ve got material that consistently gets laughs, you’ve got nothing – and you need at least five mi...
Why Do the Work?
I hear critiques of comics, most recently of Louis CK, that “he seemed to be rambling,” through his first abortion joke. They don’t seem to r...
A Note on Spontaneity
I should preface my process by saying that writing is often unexamined. People think that jokes “just happen,” spontaneously. And they do – ...
Incongruity Theory
Incongruity Theory is based on Aristotle’s (and Cicero’s and others’) view of humor as derived from expectancy violation. Proponents of this view include James ...