III Contrastive Analysis Across Genres of English

Callbacks in Stand-Up Comedy: Constructing Cohesion at the Macro Level Within a Specific Genre

Catherine Chauvin

Abstract The paper is a discussion of the type of cohesive devices that can be found in stand-up comedy, focusing more specifically on callbacks. Other cohesive devices are also mentioned so as to provide some background on how stand-up comedy shows are structured. Stand-up comedy shows are indeed quite generally ignored in the discussion of genre-related cohesion-building mechanisms, and this paper aims at filling this gap. The paper uses as theoretical backdrop the functional linguistics analyses of cohesion, as well as some of the discussions of topic continuity and sequencing done in Conversation and Discourse Analysis. A short comparison with some of the devices used in literary narratives is also proposed, using the tools of French structuralist narratology (Genette’s analepses, in particular), which allows us to delve further into the specificities of the genre. It is shown that the callback technique used in stand-up comedy offers very interesting data on how a discourse can be made coherent at a macro level, vs. the inter-sentential one; such techniques should therefore be included in the repertoire of cohesion-building tokens when these are discussed across genres.

Keywords Stand-up comedy • Cohesion • Callbacks • Narratology • Narrative • Genre