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Author: John Limon Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822380501 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
Author: John Limon Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822380501 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
Author: Calista McRae Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501750984 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.
Author: Maggie Hennefeld Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478003413 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
Author: Eddie Tafoya Publisher: Universal-Publishers ISBN: 1599424959 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention. The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a look at the works of specific comedians such as Steven Wright, whose three decades of performances comprise a single picaresque tale, and Richard Pryor, whose 1982 masterpiece Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip serves as modern America's answer to Dante Aligheri's epic poem, Inferno. The result is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.
Author: Eid Mohamed Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443862037 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
Who Defines Me: Negotiating Identity in Language and Literature is a collection of insightful articles that represent an interdisciplinary study of identity. The articles start from the premise that identity is, and always has been, unstable and mutable; which is to say that identity is constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed – only to be deconstructed and reconstructed again, in turn to be deconstructed and reconstructed (and so on ad infinitum). Time and place are variables. So, too – as Who Defines Me underscores – are ethnicity, religion, politics and power, race and color, nationality, gender, culture, language, and socio-economic status. With all of these variables in mind, Who Defines Me focuses on language and literature as the portal through which identity is explored. The overarching rubrics under which the explorations are conducted are Arabs and Muslims, race identity in America, and language identity.
Author: Patrice A. Oppliger Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030372146 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.
Author: Jared N. Champion Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496835506 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raúl Pérez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.
Author: Matthew R. Meier Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317328949 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.
Author: John Limon
Author: John Limon
Author: John Limon
Author: Calista McRae
Author: 
Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Author: Eddie Tafoya
Author: Eid Mohamed
Author: Patrice A. Oppliger
Author: Jared N. Champion
Author: Matthew R. Meier