Callbacks and Narrativity
The preceding remarks can lead us to a short[1] discussion of whether, because of these characteristics, a “narrative” is created, or not. As was said before, a stand-up comedy show is, and is not, one narrative, even though some shows may be closer to narratives than others. A stand-up comedy show does not normally consist in the telling of one anecdote that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is, at best, a collection of short narratives. Eddie Izzard calls the different “parts” of the show “vignettes” in one interview.[2] Obviously, literary narratives and everyday- conversation narratives are not necessarily linear either, and the more complex the narrative, the less linear it might be. But the kind of organization, with a sequence of events, that is typical of a narrative (cf. Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1997, 2001, 2004, 2006) is generally not found at the level of the show.
The complexities of ordering in literary narratives were discussed by Genette (1972) in particular, who noted that the temporal ordering of narratives was often intricate. He discusses, for instance, the presence of prolepses, which hint at something that will happen later, and analepses, which refer back to something that was mentioned before. He also mentions previous references to the question, such as the use of the term Ruckgriffe by Lammert, for which Genette suggests a translation as “retroceptions”.19 Analepses and Ruckgriffe can in fact be reminiscent of what has been discussed here under the term “callback” for stand-up comedy. But partly because of the heterogeneity of the content of shows again, the comparison may not be entirely viable as there may be no real sustained story line involved. The opposition that he also makes between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic devices (devices that function within the story or are, basically, comments from the outside) would have to be delved into in more detail to see to what extent it may apply to stand-up comedy shows or not. Genette also argues that some (homodiegetic) analepses are completive (Genette 1972), as they add something that was left unsaid; others are called repetitive. Delayed closure (examples 20, 21) may thus be completive in nature, although random material occurs between the two “parts” of a (sub-)story in ways that it does not in a more traditional, self-contained narrative. In fact, a typology of cases may be devised: sometimes, the material that is re-imported is part and parcel of the new context in which it is used, which we could call grafting, as in the Et voila example in Force Majeure (example 17), where the fresh use of the phrase does conclude the new section relevantly as well as being a callback. In the cases of delayed closure (examples 20, 21), something is mentioned again but is not necessarily woven into a new context; it is just a delayed continuation of one preceding sequence. Now, whether they are graftings or maybe “just” re-injections, the presence of callbacks generates connections and creates parallels, which, even in the absence of strong connections, can contribute to the creation of thematic or formal motives: as he discusses the formal parallels between two sequences of Definite Article, Glick (2007) uses the terms: “subtle poetic repeating patterns”. They construct something that is, at least, a formal whole, in which an impression of unity is created. And if interpretation, again, is to be sought at the general level and not just linearly, this also goes towards creating a unified, though not unique, narrative as well.
