Comics are critics
One of the premises of my work is that comics are social and cultural critics. Comics frequently operate in a critical mode, and they home in on a lot of social and cultural problems. The difference, though, between comics and bona fide critics is that comics most often try to push their critiques to the funniest possible outcome, rather than the most social conscious outcome – but not always; some try to do both.
Comics study jokes
In any case, one thing comics – especially successful comics – are intensely interested in is the joke work: how to write them, tell them, what they are and why people laugh. Moreover, their opinions about jokes might be just as good as the opinions of the social scientists and cultural critics that formally study them – a lot of the time, they’ve put in about an equal amount of time.
Academic bases
More formally [Warning: Academic jargon alert! Skip this paragraph if you want to stay sane!], at a certain level, it’s all just discourse, articulating different loci in an archive to reflect and deflect the discourse formation that is stand-up comedy. Whereas critics retroactively take apart jokes and determine their structure and content, comics use their tools to create that structure and content, and then they go further: they test it out on real-world audiences and collect data in real time.
Now, these tests are sporadic, haphazard, slap-dash affairs, highly susceptible to the whims of individual audiences and the subjective reflection of the comic – not a systematic and formal study of the performance of the joke. Oftentimes, what they really have going for them is persistence. However, the end result of this process can be a successful live show.
Jumbled positions
Often times, the theories that come from comics are a hodgepodge of different critical theories that have been circulating for decades, if not centuries. What I like to point out is when the theories of the comics overlap with the theories of the critics, and where they differ.
Successful application
And who’s to say the comic’s bizarre mix isn’t the “correct” one? After all, it got them to the stage they currently occupy, which is more than the armchair academic critic can say. True, for every successful comic, there are a host of others trying out the same premises, similar personas, etc.
These comics could fail for a number of reasons: the audience one night didn’t like the joke, so they dropped it; they failed to execute it properly on a series of nights and thought the problem was the joke, and dropped it; they didn’t try to rewrite the joke in a different way; the joke was wrong for their persona or that set; etc., etc., etc.
There are so many ways a good joke could fail! That’s why I find humor so interesting!
References:
Biesecker, Barbara. “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 350-64.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
—. “Space of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002): 328-344.
