Stand-Up Comedy and Addressivity

Abstract

This chapter highlights the linguistic value of addressivity in two Youtube downloads of Joan Rivers' stand-up comic performance, Live at the Apollo. Despite the devotion of the six articles of Comedy Studies 2(2) to analyses of the data, very little was said about the linguistic content and identity of the performance. Despite the givenness of a performer's deployment of linguistic resources in any kind of stage performance, the salience of some of the stand-up comedy-specific linguistic forms—repetition, disfluencies, formulaicity, paralanguage, timing, parenthetical expressions, figurative language, direct audience address—is foregrounded in Rivers' performance. These forms are located within and interpreted with Bakhtin's notion of ‘addressivity'. It is argued that her elaborate audience interaction and thematic preoccupation with social, biographical and autobiographical issues are one macro act of addressivity, foregrounding the complex intersection of speaker (comedian), listener (present audience) and third person/superaddressee (non-present audience/previous discourses).