Parodic Satire
I need to continue with Lewis Black’s 2006 Grammy nominated HBO special, Red, White and Screwed. Black meanders through several topical and social bits, e...
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.
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...
Ron White on Entertaining
Just a quick one, so I’ll pair it with another “theory-theory” piece. In an interview with Robert DiGiacomo of Atlanticcityweekly.com (7/18/20...
Lynne Parker and Comic Frames
In an interview with Hannah Williams of Backstage.com (7/13/2017), producer Lynne Parker says a few interesting things about stand-up and humor more generally. ...
Elahe Izadi on the Benefits and Evils of Technology
When I teach courses on media theory, I like to point out that whenever a new technology appears, there are some that hail it as the thing that will finally spa...
Elahe Izadi on the Current Stand-Up Comedy Boom
Elahe Izadi, in an article for the Washington Post (7/13/2017), talks about the current “stand-up comedy boom.” Never before has so much original ma...
Ricky Gervais on Provoking Thought
In an interview with Larry Fitzmaurice of Vice.com (7/12/2017), Ricky Gervais has a lot to say about comedy and even people. All the same? Gervais says that his...
Joe Stapleton on Spontaneity and Hecklers
In an interview with Paul Seaton of Pokernews.com (7/10/2017), Joe Stapleton had several things to say about stand-up: It’s rehearsed On Spontaneity in st...
Update: James Davis’ Interview with StarTribune.com
On reading the interview, I made some updates to Intentionality – where I talk about the idea that comics are first and foremost trying to get a laugh on-...
Misch on Personas, Truth and Ethics
In his article for Splitsider.com (7/6/2017), comic, critic, writer and teacher David Misch notes that there is an idea (held by at least one professional criti...