Unpacking the comedian-audience dynamic in stand-up comedy

The praxis of public stand-up comedy performance typically implicates a co-operative and strategically reciprocal interaction between the comedian and the audience, and stand-up scholarship has exhaustively discussed both as constituting elements agential in the production and consumption of the genre. But the discourse of stand-up comedy as a cohering universe of the tiers of interaction that follow performing experience to different publics, performer-audience intimacy, understanding the peculiar agency of stand-up audiences, and the unbundling of person and comic persona, is still being realised in scholarship. By probing the intricacies of the interplay between performance and audienceship, we gain insight into the comedian’s capacity to realise, react and manipulate the emotions, energy and expectations of the audience; and conversely, the audience’s receptivity, participation and feedback, as significantly influenced by the comedian’s material, delivery and tone. In the light of this, the paper attempts to unpack and frame the power dynamics, social identity and cultural provenances that inform the comedian-audience symbiosis by analysing the praxes of engagement between them that constitute jokes as co-authored, and laughter as interactionally accountable and as a political-collective. The paper seeks to reaffirm the agency of the stand-up audience in an autopoeisis of laughter and metalaughter; as well as divest the abject, intricate and blurry connections between authenticity and performativity that twine together the comic as an offstage everyday self, from the onstage persona.