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

Author:

Aarons Debra,Mierowsky Marc

Abstract

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.

Publisher

Estonian Literary Museum of Scholarly Press

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Applied Psychology,Communication,Language and Linguistics,Cultural Studies

Cited by 6 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. A Preliminary Sketch on Intertextuality in Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy;Humour Theory and Stylistic Enquiry;2023

2. Nigerian stand-up comediennes performing femininity;Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA);2022-10-31

3. Impersonated personae – paralanguage, dialogism and affiliation in stand-up comedy;HUMOR;2021-02-11

4. The stand-up comedian as an egocentric communicator;Intercultural Pragmatics;2021-01-18

5. A discourse analysis of national identity in Nigerian stand-up humour;Discourse Studies;2020-03-07

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