Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in AmericaDuke University Press, 23.06.2000 - 160 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 3
... turn from Zionism and Marxism. Freud's joke theory, which centers on the covering up of laughter's sources in aggression and sex, has at least the merit of elucidating the suburban moment of American comedy and culture, if suburbs grew ...
... turn from Zionism and Marxism. Freud's joke theory, which centers on the covering up of laughter's sources in aggression and sex, has at least the merit of elucidating the suburban moment of American comedy and culture, if suburbs grew ...
Seite 5
... turns out to be the mode of DeGeneres and Poundstone's familiar, mainstream appeal, though it is in the event so self-denying an appeal that it allows them to escape from audience view altogether. The final paradox is that their ...
... turns out to be the mode of DeGeneres and Poundstone's familiar, mainstream appeal, though it is in the event so self-denying an appeal that it allows them to escape from audience view altogether. The final paradox is that their ...
Seite 13
... turn their jokes into jokes, as if the comedian had not quite thought or expressed a joke until the audience thinks or expresses it. Stand-up is all supplement. Freud describes in the teller-told exchange a system of transitive ...
... turn their jokes into jokes, as if the comedian had not quite thought or expressed a joke until the audience thinks or expresses it. Stand-up is all supplement. Freud describes in the teller-told exchange a system of transitive ...
Seite 19
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Inhalt
1 | |
11 | |
Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks | 28 |
Mike Nichols and Elaine May | 50 |
David Letterman with Kristeva Céline Scorsese | 68 |
Richard Pryor in Concert | 83 |
Ellen DeGeneres and Paula Poundstone | 104 |
Notes | 125 |
Works Cited | 139 |
Index | 145 |
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