Rhetoric in Stand-up Comedy: Exploring Performer-Audience Interaction

Abstract

This paper looks stand-up comedy performances and the ways in which successful comedians use rhetorical techniques to develop their joke text. It identifies four of these techniques which are of specific importance in stand-up comedy: Re-Incorporations, Alliteration and Assonance, Character Footing and Intonation The role these techniques play in differentiating between jokes as text and joking as a performative interaction is explored. This paper shows that the use of these rhetorical techniques is strongly linked to audience laughter in stand-up comedy and account for instances of laughter for which previous approaches to joking provide only limited explanations. It argues that comedians use these techniques to signpost punchlines as points at which laughter is a preferred response from an audience. Complimenting this is the understanding of audience members as active participants in a performance interaction who look for, and respond to, rhetorical techniques when making decisions about laughing. It argues that rather than following a model in which laughter is a response to a joke stimulus, members of a comedy audience choose where to place (and not place) their laughter and that this is done through negotiation with the performer. This implies that, while the joke teller may “manage” the audience, s/he ultimately has no control over it. The paper suggests that against such a background the stimulus-response model that is so often implicit in joke and humour theory becomes less seductive in its ability to provide a general explanation of joking and laughter