How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedy

• Authors: Debra Aarons , Marc Mierowsky
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other intended behaviours. Austin accentuated the idea of speaker intention, on one hand, and hearer’s response to that intention if successfully conveyed, on the other. We consider some of the speech acts used in the work of selected standup comedians to analyse the way they determine the relationship of performer and audience. We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the licensing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and the success of these speech acts in shaping the social lives of the audience. We show that this relationship is at the forefront of standup comedy’s social impact and that it can generate heightened consciousness of the social and political environment of the time.  Finally, we consider the question of whether socially critical standup can have any noticeable effect on the attitudes or behaviour of both live and digitally mediated audiences.

Keywords

EN

comedian; persona; play frame; performance; standup; speech act

• Publisher: Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies
• Journal: The European Journal of Humour Research
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 4

Dates

published

2017

online

2017-12-31

Contributors

author

Debra Aarons

author

Marc Mierowsky

Identifiers

DOI

10.7592/EJHR2017.5.4.aarons