Why study stand-up?
When people ask me what I do, I usually come to the stand-up comedy work because it’s popular and accessible to most people. Everyone has a favorite joke or humorous story, and we like to hear them. Everyone can express an opinion on what is funny. However, the question comes up: Why? Why study stand-up as an academic? Why do jokes and comics matter? Well, that’s complicated.
A simple answer is the above, “Everyone is familiar with humor,” because, and this leads to another answer: “Jokes are everywhere.” Another answer is that the intellectual Kenneth Burke called literature, “Equipment for living,” meaning that we look to popular culture for stories on how to live our lives. If we’ve never seen a black person or a gay person before, but we’ve watched them on television, we may still feel comfortable around this new person because they aren’t completely foreign to us – we think we know who they might be (for better or worse). We also watch shows and see how people work through difficult situations, and if we find ourselves in a similar situation, we might act the same way. It’s the entire reasoning behind the After School Special. The same can be true of situations we encounter when watching sitcoms and stand-up, but more usually, we learn “What not to do.”
Further, I wonder what can be accomplished by a comic in a joke. My thought is, if we can understand what happens when a person with questionable motives says questionable things to people who may just want to laugh, we can understand just about any persuasive situation.
What am I doing?
I call what I do “critical rhetoric,” (though some cringe when I say it). It’s a way of reading informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jean François Lyotard (Biesecker). I treat humor and stand-up as the result of an implicit understanding, a social contract we follow, but don’t think too hard about, and I try to understand its rules.
The problem is, humor is not a thing, like a car or a desk or a glass of wine–there are social contracts that tell us how to act around these things and what to think about them too, but we always have the thing itself to reference. Humor and why we laugh is abstract. Yes, there are concrete things that get caught up in it, like the body of the comic–male/female, white/person of color, fat/skinny, etc.–or the space of the club, but those aren’t always essential to the jokes these people tell or the reasons why we think we laugh.
Further, there’s not just one contract, one understanding, one set of rules, one model. There are multiple ideas, and all of them are completely in our heads–made up. These ideas were learned from other people, circulate in the ways we all talk about them, and change over time.
So I don’t presume to know what humor or stand-up “really is.” Instead, I read how people talk about it, and try to figure out what they think it is. I try to look for similarities in thinking in the statements of audience members, comics, theorists and critics. I try to look for differences within a person’s own arguments and actions, and between their arguments and the arguments of others. I try to look for differences in interpretation of events that seem similar. Particularly when these differences are large and both (or many) sides are popular, I treat the difference or gap as important.
Implications
Kendall R. Phillips characterizes these gaps as “spaces of invention; spaces within which the possibility of new actions (or utterances or selves) can be imagined” (332). These spaces give us wiggle room to do things differently. Perhaps we don’t have to just do what others have done before, but have the option of doing something completely different – that’s why the rules change over time! So maybe we could change them, too. This is the potential for action, and perhaps politically meaningful action.
What I watch
When critiquing stand-up, many people, including scholars, begin with a joke, act or comic they think is funny (or that other people think is funny), explore why it is funny (usually from one of the three main modes: incongruity, superiority, or relief), and from there attempt to chart its political effects (if any). In other words, they start with funny stuff and try to read politics onto it.
In my “Cases,” I try to come at the problem from the opposite side–I look for jokes that are in dispute (“not funny”). I wait for a comic to slip up, provoking a critical response, then I try to read everything that people say about the incident. While a joke that “works” –that follows the rules and passes without comment–may operate politically, no one is talking about how or why. However, a joke that is disputed generates a lot of discussion.
These discussions are largely self-defeating because of the assumptions of the critic. They presume to know why the joke is funny. They assume they know how humor works and what effects it can produce. They presume to know why the comic is telling the joke. Thus they often find one of four things: 1) the joke has no political effects because it was a trivial matter, 2) the joke has no political effects because the audience laughed rather than getting upset or immediately doing something, 3) the joke was not funny (and therefore should not be considered a joke at all) because some in the audience got immediately upset, or 4) the joke should not be funny (and therefore should not be considered a joke at all) because of its serious, political implications.
Inherent in these findings are separations between the humorous and the serious, and between the political and the apolitical (or at least, pre-political). I try to point out such distinctions in studies on humor, especially the early theories. Some of these critics explicitly state such views, but many others perform the distinction in the way they go about their criticism.
Instead, I try to recognize the possibilities. I recognize the joke as both serious for some audiences and humorous for others – and perhaps it operates in both ways (and others) at the same time for some audiences. Thus I try to avoid binary distinctions. I try to read the joke in multiple different ways. I try to point out potential problems with the joke, but also the potential problems with the responses and I try to imagine where and when the joke would have worked and what it could do.
It is worth mentioning that I can only discuss comics whose works or deeds are known. Hoards of comics try new things, regularly cross the line, etc. Only a bare few of these have achieved success, but many more have been ostracized, banned from clubs, and been denied opportunities for greater exposure and economic success. These failed stand-ups might be a better gauge of the limitations of the form, but we must work with what we can get.
References:
Biesecker, Barbara. “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 350-64.
Burke, Kenneth. Counter Statement. Berkeley: University of California, 1968.
Charland, Maurice. “Property and Propriety: Rhetoric, Justice, and Lyotard’s Différend.” Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminancy. Ed. John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998. 220-36.
Charland, Maurice and John M. Sloop. “Just Lyotard.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 288-97.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1984/2002.
—. The Différend. Trans. George Van Den Abeele. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1988.
—. “Lessons in Paganism.” The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989/1993. 122-154.
Lyotard, Jean François & Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1999.
Phillips, Kendall R. “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere.” Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 231-48.
—. “Space of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002): 328-344.