The stand-up comedian as an egocentric communicator

Abstract

Abstract The general perspective in pragmatics research on stand-up comedy is that the comedian co-produces humor with the audience. In this paper, I argue that the stand-up comedian’s communicative behavior is also partly rooted in egocentrism. To achieve this, I adopted a sociocognitive approach to intention and egocentrism in analyzing a routine that was performed in Chicago by Okey Bakassi, a Nigerian stand-up comedian. I operationalize egocentrism as one of the humor strategies of the comedian. While focusing on the propositional content of the comedian’s utterances, the analysis revealed strategies like privatization, ad hoc concept formation and ad hoc coherence, which the comedian used in individualizing the prior common ground to generate the needed incongruity for humor in the performance sphere.