Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation

STANDUP COMEDY IS ARGUABLY THE OLDEST, MOST UNIVERSAL, BASIC, AND deeply significant form of humorous expression (excluding perhaps truly spontaneous, informal social joking and teasing). It is the purest public comic communication, performing essentially the same social and cultural roles in practically every known society, past and present. Studies dealing with humor often begin with defensive, half-hearted apologies for taking so light a subject seriously or for failing to reproduce the spirit and tone of the entertainment examined; this one will argue that humor is a vitally important social and cultural phenomenon, that the student of a culture and society cannot find a more revealing index to its values, attitudes, dispositions, and concerns, and that the relatively undervalued genre of standup comedy (compared with film comedy or humorous literature, for example) is the most interesting of all the manifestations of humor in the popular culture. In this essay, at least, Rodney Dangerfield and his colleagues will finally get some respect. A strict, limiting definition of standup comedy would describe an encounter between a single, standing performer behaving comically and/or saying funny things directly to an audience, unsupported by very much in the way of costume, prop, setting, or dramatic vehicle. Yet standup comedy's roots are, as I shall discuss below, entwined with rites, rituals, and dramatic experiences that are richer, more complex than this simple definition can embrace. We must therefore broaden our scope at least to include seated storytellers, comic characterizations that employ costume and prop, team acts (particularly the staple two-person comedy teams), manifestations of standup comedy routines and motifs within dramatic vehicles such as skits, improvisational situations, and films (for example, Bob Hope in his Road pictures, the Marx Brothers movies), and television sitcoms (Jack Benny's television show, Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy). To avoid also having to include all theatrical comedy and its media spinoffs, however, our definition should stress relative directness of artist/audience communication