Stand-up comedy - a folkloristic approach

• Main Author: Brodie, Ian Bernard, 1973-
• Other Authors: Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dept. of Folklore
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Folklore > Methodology; Folklore > Performance; Intimacy (Psychology) in the theater; Stand-up comedy; Newfoundland studies; University of Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/theses4/id/86953

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2010. Folklore Includes bibliographical references (leaves 373-404) Building on both a textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation employs folkloristic analysis to examine stand-up comedy, a professional verbal comic performance with its roots in vernacular forms of talk. It requires an audience: all broadcasts and recordings of stand-up comedy without exception are recorded in front of a live audience, which makes it unique among popular culture forms. Working backward from this observation, it is evident that an audience is vital for performances, and that the stand-up comedy performance is a collaborative act between a comedian and an audience. It emulates the intimacy of face-to-face encounter, although it is made distant by the concrete division of performer from audience by virtue of it occurring on a stage, and subsequently by the spatiotemporal distancing of broadcasts and recordings. This dissertation examines the strategies through which the stand-up comedian reconciles intimacy and distance, through examining how the various media of stand-up comedy's dissemination - amplification, broadcasting, recording, and each of their respective variations - are adapted by and used by the comedian to replicate intimacy and bridge literal distance, and how the stand-up comedian develops a biography, a persona, and observations on the local and the universal which address cultural distance.