Co-constructing humour and gender identity in live stand-up comedy

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of kairos in female stand-up comedy, looking specifically at the co-construction of humour between performer and audience. Stand-up performers adapt their routines depending on their audiences, trying to draw these into the performance through the use of kairos, understood as the opportune and unpredictable moments of persuasion in which comedians choose to respond to and interact with their audience with the aim of promoting a humorous effect (Greenbaum 1999; Medjesky 2017). In order to verify this claim, the present study is an analysis of the FEMMES-UP corpus (Linares-Bernabéu, 2020), which comprises 15 humorous stand-up comedy performances by 15 female Spanish comedians. The corpus has been transcribed and segmented into 504 sequences, and we focus here on 113 of these, in all of which there is direct dialogue between the comedian and one or more members of the audience. The findings show that humour facilitates friendly interaction and helps comedians to negotiate their identity. In fact, the stand-ups in these data use kairos to adapt their speech in light of how audiences respond. Overall, the research reported here confirms that female stand-up comedy is a type of planned discourse, and that it is used by comedians as a cultural and social tool in terms of confrontation and resistance.