Department Research

Brodie, Ian. 2009.
Stand-Up Comedy: A Folkloristic Approach.
PhD diss. Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Building on both a textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation employs folkloristic analysis to examine stand-up comedy, a professional verbal comic performance with its roots in vernacular forms of talk. It requires an audience: all broadcasts and recordings of stand-up comedy without exception are recorded in front of a live audience, which makes it unique among popular culture forms.

Working backward from this observation, it is evident that an audience is vital for performances, and that the stand-up comedy performance is a collaborative act between a comedian and an audience. It emulates the intimacy of face-to-face encounter, although it is made distant by the concrete division of performer from audience by virtue of it occurring on a stage, and subsequently by the spatiotemporal distancing of broadcasts and recordings.

This dissertation examines the strategies through which the stand-up comedian reconciles intimacy and distance, through examining how the various media of stand-up comedy's dissemination – amplification, broadcasting, recording, and each of their respective variations – are adapted by and used by the comedian to replicate intimacy and bridge literal distance, and how the stand-up comedian develops a biography, a persona, and observations on the local and the universal which address cultural distance.