Punching Up in Stand-up Comedy: Speaking Truth to Power

The essays in Rashi Bhargava and Richa Chilana's collection evaluate what it means to "punch up" in stand-up comedy, particularly in the comedic histories of non-Western nations. The volume offers a global perspective on punching up, moving away from the heavily Anglicized focus that is found in the Americas and the United Kingdom. But the volume does not just fill a gap with respect to scholarship on comedy or humor from other nations but aims to reevaluate stand-up's relationship with politics by building on insights derived from a Western tradition of stand-up. Bhargava and Chilana argue that "all stand up performances are political and no jokes are innocent" (6), a state of affairs that they maintain compels us to "revisit our notion of what constitutes the political and vice versa" (23).To do so, Bhargava and Chilana lean on Rebecca Krefting's theory of charged humor, humor that intends "to create a more equitable world by challenging its divisions and cultural exclusion" (6). They also acknowledge and at times criticize the familiar triumvirate of incongruity, relief, and superiority theories often used to explain how jokes and phrases within the narrative of stand-up routines elicit laughter by defying expectation (incongruity), offering consolation (relief), or "punching down" by poking fun at group or individual (superiority). On Krefting's account, however, for those who perceive humor to be an inherently complex art form that locates itself in political, cultural, and social contexts, "punching up" amounts to "understanding comedy's embodiments, dilemmas, negotiations, and limits of attempted subversion" and to appreciating the "variegated nature of identity, intersectionality, and the existence of multiple, multiplying and intersecting hierarchies" (4) in the politics of humor.The collection is divided into three thematic sections. The first, "Punching In and Punching Up: Origins, Limits and Possibilities," reevaluates the political in stand-up comedy through a series of essays that trace its histories and legacies in non-Western countries. Essays in this section include a history of Moroccan stand-up, a discussion of Indonesian comedy, an exploration of the Jameel Comedy Club and its influence on and relationship with urban culture in France, an exploration of comedy within the caste system in Mumbai, and an investigation of the performance strategies used by transnational and racialized comedians. While these essays do important work in presenting comedic histories of oft-ignored nations and cultures, in certain cases, they only provide a description of comedic contexts rather than an analytical and political argument as to why they are particularly important to consider. That being said, accounts of, say, Black stand-up comedians as well as Native American humorists in the US reinforce how critical historiographies of the genre can be a political development in itself.The second section, "Gendered Experiences and Stand-up Comedy," focuses on gendered dynamics within comedy, especially on the hierarchies of and interplay between gender(s) within different cultural contexts. Essays in this section variously explore Persian female stand-up's capacity for grappling with patriarchy-induced traumas in Iran, examine female-led situated comedy in India and its role in exposing gender inequity, and evaluate Hannah Gadsby's Nanette in relation to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry. All three essays offer outstanding analyses of the dynamics of gendered and intersectional communities that show how stand-up can work to dismantle the dominance of institutionalized power structures—a phenomenon scholars like Krefting, Joanne Gilbert, Julie Webber, Cynthia Willett, and more have long observed in the potency of political comedy in the cultural politics of US humor.The third and final section, "Comics and the Audience: Connections, Ethics and Efficacy?," explores stand-up comics in relation to their presented persona on stage and their real-life personality as well as the interanimation between them that fosters ethical engagement and criticism of hegemonic influences on society, both individually and across demographics, and the role of the audience as a site of interpretation, communication, and potential intervention. Essays included in this section consider the comic persona in a Finnish context for the purposes of affective arrangement, the action of joking as a means for revolution, the work of a specific comic in relation to disability and the idea of being funny for a cause, and how humor engages with and criticizes right-wing conspiracy theorizing in an age of "bullshit" and "post-truth." This section contains compelling and, indeed, politically charged arguments regarding how the arrangement between comics and their audiences can inform and reframe relationships across comedic contexts.Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy is an important collection of essays that engage with the political aspects of comedy in relation to specific cultures, demographics, and identities and are relevant to anyone interested in the situatedness of humor. While most of the contributions show the various ways stand-up fosters the political imagination of different cultures, the quality of the analysis varies across the volume, with lesser-known global, comedic cultures at times being presented without a direct evaluation of the distinctive politics of them. It is clear that politics influences comedy in different regions of the world (and vice versa), but it is not always clear what "punching up" means in these contexts or what it tends or intends to accomplish in connection with the dynamics of hegemony and dominant discourses. Insofar as stand-up comedy is a US American "invention," there is good reason to take pause here and recall the extent to which pan-Africanism, for instance, permeates routines from Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor to Trevor Noah and the extent to which indigeneity figures in comic appeals to both marginality and dominance. The precedent set by American stand-up, however, is one that emphasizes the freedom of comedians to say what they will (even if they face detraction for doing so), a freedom that emerges from a culture that asks what it can mean to protest against oppression, engage in disobedience, and quite simply do the work of political struggle. Accordingly, this collection is exceedingly useful when read alongside other volumes of similar subject matter, such as Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt's edited collection Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change. This volume's major accomplishment, therefore, is the breadth of its presentation and its evaluation of different comedic cultures around the world with an often deliberate political focus that countervails US political culture and its cultural politics. The best essays in it combine a description of lesser-known comedic cultures of the world with an informed critique of cultural histories that demonstrates precisely how stand-up can influence the contexts that surround the art form. As Bhargave and Chilana explain, "The very act of making a joke is to take a subject position that allows for a rendition of reality that might not have been done before" (7). It is precisely in and through this unique and individual subject position that Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy illuminates and explains the truly global reach of comedy and a sense of humor that is at once familiar and strange.