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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Seite 5
... Letterman - that I place Letterman before Pryor is one sign that the book purports to be theoretical rather than historical . Letterman's abjection takes its essential American form in an abstract repudiation of the body ( which is ...
... Letterman - that I place Letterman before Pryor is one sign that the book purports to be theoretical rather than historical . Letterman's abjection takes its essential American form in an abstract repudiation of the body ( which is ...
Seite 69
... Letterman is least able to comprehend , of all forms of mind , is a particular type of female intelligence , as manifest in such personages as Jane Pauley or Teri Garr or Helen Hunt . He told an interviewer that " there is something ...
... Letterman is least able to comprehend , of all forms of mind , is a particular type of female intelligence , as manifest in such personages as Jane Pauley or Teri Garr or Helen Hunt . He told an interviewer that " there is something ...
Seite 70
... Letterman crazy . The effort to put the two worlds in gear may involve alcohol or drugs ; for Letterman , it entails speeding . " To annihilate both space and time " was the hype of American Protestant technological millenarianism of ...
... Letterman crazy . The effort to put the two worlds in gear may involve alcohol or drugs ; for Letterman , it entails speeding . " To annihilate both space and time " was the hype of American Protestant technological millenarianism of ...
Inhalt
Contents | 1 |
A Lenny Bruce Joke and the Topography of StandUp | 11 |
Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks | 28 |
Urheberrecht | |
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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
abjection adult American audi audience baby Bardamu begins blackface body Brooks and Reiner Brooks's Brown Carl Reiner castration Céline comedy teams comic concert cultural David Letterman death DeGeneres's desire Ellen DeGeneres ence escape 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 Johnny Carson joke Kant kidding Kristeva laugh laughter Lenny Bruce lesbian male male-male means Medusa Mel Brooks merely Mike Nichols Mumbo Jumbo nectarine ness Nichols and Elaine outrage pain paradox Paula Poundstone performance phallic phallus Phyllis Diller play punch line repressed Richard Pryor ridiculous routine Routledge Rupert Sedgwick seems sexual Sigmund Freud signifying monkey stand-up comedy story sublime suburban term theory thing Thoreau tickling tion trans Trapp triangulation turns University Press Wollenberg woman women York