Some Introductory Notes on Stand-Up Comedy
We will only focus here on what is relevant to the analysis; Double (2014) can be consulted for a more detailed presentation.
Stand-up comedy is a type of comedy that was for a long time particularly associated with the English-speaking world, although it is now much more international. Its birth and development in the U.S. and the U.K. has sometimes been linked to such local traditions as that of the music hall, or of the vaudeville (Double 2014). It started around the 1950s-60s in the U.S., and gained prominence in the 1960s-70s. In the U.K., a creative alternative[1] scene also emerged in the 1980-90s and, nowadays, many comedians have become household names, some of them (Eddie Izzard, in particular) filling stadiums and arenas as big as Wembley and the O2[2] Some of them are television personalities as well as performers. The comedians that are quoted by others as “models”, or the founding fathers, so to speak,[3] tend to be American: Richard Pryor, for instance, is often quoted as a model by fellow comedians. But they may also, albeit less commonly, be British: Billy Connelly is thus often quoted by fellow comedians as an inspiration. Since we will be focusing on U.K. shows in this paper, we will be dealing with a relatively long-living, and active scene.
A stand-up comedy show is a form of live humorous performance during which the comedian is typically alone on stage, with very few or no accessories except a microphone, and speaks on a variety of topics for a given length of time. There are exceptions to this, since Bill Bailey, as was mentioned in the preceding section, is also a musician and uses instruments on stage, and some (Jimmy Carr, Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran) also use screens and projections. The use of props nevertheless tends to be kept to a minimum. A succession of one-liners can constitute the whole of the show (as in Tim Vine’s case), but more often than not, one-liners, if they are present, are included in the structure of the show, or can be present in certain dedicated sequences (Jimmy Carr), with other sequences combining videos and one-liners, or interaction with the audience. A performance (a show, or gig) can last from a few minutes, for collective shows and/or for newcomers, to somewhere between 1 and 2 h for an individual performance. During this time span, the comedian speaks, and entertains the audience. The formats and types of humour are truly varied. Some of the shows can be rude or crude, but clearly not all shows are: Izzard’s and Bailey’s are not. There also is a tendency for observational humour to constitute the default basis of a show. The comedian either shares personal anecdotes with the audience or points out “observed” facts (have you noticed that this always happens when..?), focusing for instance on weird behaviour or surprising connections. As mentioned in the preceding section, it is also important for each comedian to create their own identifiable persona. This comedy form is therefore both varied and unified, but there are strong marks that “delineate” it and signify that the show is a stand-up show, like the microphone, the quasi-absence of props, the energetic monologue.
What can be said to be partly constitutive of the genre is also the relationship that is built between the performer and his/ her audience. Unlike traditional theatre, stand-up comedy generally does not recognize the existence of a “fourth wall”, the invisible frontier that separates the stage from the rest of the room and assumes that the space of the stage is also the space of fiction, a different world that has no direct interaction with the floor. There is no symbolical opposition between the stage and the floor in stand-up comedy, which means that interaction with the public is possible, although, again, the amount of interaction may depend on the personality and style of the comedian. Some interaction can be forced upon the comedian and not be elicited when a member of the audience directly hails the comedian (that is called heckling). The more famous and renowned the comedian and the larger the room, the less interaction there may also be and the more the space of the stage becomes a symbolically separate space again. There is a connection between this aspect of stand-up comedy and its content: what is often discussed on stage is supposed to be “real life”, and normally not fiction, which is another interesting dimension of the genre.
The subject matter of shows also clearly varies, as yet another specificity of the genre that is directly relevant to this study is the fact that comedians move from one topic to another with constant shifts. Ross Noble, for instance, is known for his “tangents”. This means that the shows might not always be, or at least appear to be, structured, which also makes the analysis of cohesion markers and coherencebuilding central and interesting. Callbacks, which we will define further down, are one of the ways in which a continued flow of heterogeneous topics can be made to form a whole. But it is also clear that no stand-up comedy show is truly or evidently a “whole”: it is often made up of successive parts that are clearly disconnected. Performances are both collections of unrelated items and a specific kind of unit, which we will now explore.
- [1] Although it is difficult to explain it in just a few lines, “alternative” - the word is used by thecomedians themselves - refers to a form of comedy that is (meant to be) different from whatexisted before, in its contents (for instance, maybe, self-reference, i.e., using one’s own life ascomedy material, for U.S. performers in particular, but not only them) or form (improvisation;performances in small venues such as pubs and clubs; humour is no longer based on jokes...).
- [2] Wembley Stadium in London sits 90,000 people and the O2, 20,000.
- [3] Or mothers, although a number of them are men. Examples of women performers are, for instance,Ellen DeGeneres and Elaine May in the U.S.; in the U.K., Jo Brand and Sarah Millican, who arementioned in this paper, are also women.
