Stand-up Comedy in Theory, Or, Abjection in AmericaDuke University Press, 23.06.2000 - 152 Seiten 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. |
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Inhalt
Image A Lenny Bruce Joke and the Topography of StandUp | 11 |
Nectarines Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks | 28 |
Analytic of the Ridiculous Mike Nicholas and Elaine May | 50 |
Journey to the End of the Night David Letterman with Kristeva Celine Scorsese | 68 |
Scatology Richard Pryor in Concert | 83 |
Skirting Kidding Ellen DeGeneres and Paula Poundstone | 104 |
Notes | 125 |
139 | |
145 | |
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abjection American audi audience baby Bardamu begins blackface body Brooks and Reiner Brooks's Brown Carl Reiner castration Céline comedian comedy teams comic concert cultural David Letterman death DeGeneres and Paula DeGeneres's desire Ellen DeGeneres ence essay excremental vision fantasy father feel female fruit funny hereafter abbreviated heterosexual homosexual homosociality horror humor insofar jazz Jerry Langford Jes Grew Jewish comedians Jews joke kidding Kristeva laugh laughter Lenny Bruce lesbian Longinus male male-male means Medusa Mel Brooks Mike Nichols Mumbo Jumbo nectarine ness Nichols and Elaine outrage pain paradox Paula Poundstone performance phallic phallus Phyllis Diller play punch line Reiner and Mel Richard Pryor ridiculous routine Routledge Rupert Sedgwick seems sexual Sigmund Freud signifying monkey skirt stand-up comedy story sublime suburban term theory thing Thoreau tickling tion trans transvestism Trapp triangulation turns University Press Wollenberg woman women York