Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy

A Linguistic Exploration of How Comedians Use Impersonation and Expectation to Create Humour
Describes how comedians employ impersonation and expectation to create humour in stand-up comedy.

This book employs a social semiotic methodology to investigate how comedians use impersonation and expectation to create humour in stand-up comedy.
It advances the linguistic cartography of how meaning-making resources contribute to humour in the genre. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) underpins the book’s approach and is integrated with recent work on multimodality and paralanguage.

The author develops a consolidated analytical framework for identifying and analysing the intermodal semiotic resources that contribute to impersonation and expectation in humour including gesture and voice quality – paralinguistic resources vital but underexplored in humorous texts. The framework is then applied through close discourse analysis of excerpts from three stand-up comedy texts by different comedians: Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard and Michelle Wolf. The findings outline typical and more complex realisations of intermodal impersonation, differentiate categories in how comedians employ impersonation to create humour, and describe how linguistic expectation can be established and subverted for humorous effect. Across these results, a common theme observed is that impersonation and expectation resources afford comedians the ability to specify the context within which their jokes are to be interpreted, which in turn allows them to calibrate the tension among social values so as to elicit humour.

These findings will be of interest to the readers across the disciplines of linguistics, humour studies and multi/intermodality who are interested in the interaction between paralanguage, expectation and the negotiation of values so as to establish and maintain social relationships. The framework outlined in the book can be adapted and applied for analysis of intermodal impersonation and expectation in other genres.

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