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With contributions by leading scholars, writers and comedians in the USA, the UK and Canada, The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences focuses on the dynamics of audience behavior. Performers, writers, historians, producers, and theorists explore the practice and reception of live comedy performance, including cultural and historical variations in comedy audience conduct, the reception of “low” versus “high” comedy, and the differences between televised and live jokes. Contributors reflect on the subjectivity of audience members and the spread of affect, as well as the two-way relationship between joker and listener. They investigate race, sexuality and gender in humor, and contemplate the comedy club as a distinct spatial and emotional environment. The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences includes excerpts and scripts from Michael Frayne’s Audience and Andrea Fraser’s Inaugural Speech. Judy Batalion interviews noted comic writers, performers, and theater designers, including Iain Mackintosh, Shazia Mirza, Julia Chamberlain, Scott Jacobson, and Andrea Fraser. Sarah Boyes contributes a short photographic essay on comedy clubbers. Essay contributors include Alice Rayner, Matthew Daube, Lesley Harbidge, Gavin Butt, Diana Solomon, Rebecca Krefting, Kevin McCarron, Nile Seguin, Elizabeth Klaver, Frances Gray, AL Kennedy, Kélina Gotman, and Samuel Godin. The comedy duo of Sable & Batalion share their conclusions about audience responses to hip-hop theater.

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Humor

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Publié par	Parlor Press, LLC
Date de parution	15 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781602352452
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Laughing Stalk
Live Comedy and Its Audiences
Edited by Judy Batalion
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2012 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The laughing stalk : live comedy and its audiences / edited by Judy Batalion.
p. cm. -- (Aesthetic critical inquiry)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60235-242-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-243-8 (hardcover : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-244-5 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-245-2 (epub)
1. Stand-up comedy. 2. Performance--Psychological aspects. I. Batalion, Judy.
PN1969.C65L37 2012
792.7’6--dc23
2011044537
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover Image: Juan Muñoz, Towards the Corner , 1998. © Tate, London, 2011. Used by permission.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email editor@parlorpress.com.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Difference at Work: The Live Comedy Audience
Judy Batalion
1 Creating the Audience: It’s All in the Timing
Alice Rayner
2 Room for Comedy
Iain Mackintosh
3 The Stand-up as Stand-in: Performer-Audience Intimacy and the Emergence of the Stand-Up Comic in the United States since the 1950s
Matthew Daube
4 A Comedic Tour de Monde
Shazia Mirza
5 Audienceship and (Non)Laughter in the Stand-up Comedy of Steve Martin
Lesley Harbidge
6 Hoyle’s Humility
Gavin Butt
7 George Lillo’s The London Merchant and the Laughing Audience
Diana Solomon
8 Laughter in the Final Instance: The Cultural Economy of Humor (Or why women aren’t perceived to be as funny as men)
Rebecca Krefting
9 Rhyme or Reason: Trying to Draw Some Conclusions about Comedy Audiences
Sable & Batalion
10 Choosing Comedy
Julia Chamberlain
11 Seven Steps to the Stage: The Audience as Co-creator of the Stand-up Comedy Night
Kevin McCarron
12 Hecklers: A Taxonomy
Nile Seguin
13 The Comedy Clubbers: Photographs
Sarah Boyes
14 Audience
Michael Frayn
15 Ugly Betty and the (Live) Comedy Audience
Elizabeth Klaver
16 Watching Me, Watching You: Sitcom and Surveillance
Frances Gray
17 Obscene or Absent: Literary versus Comedy Audiences
AL Kennedy
18 The Daily Show’s Studio Audience
Scott Jacobson
19 It’s My Show, Or, Shut Up and Laugh: Spheres of Intimacy in the Comic Arena and How New Technologies Play Their Part in the “Live” Act
Kélina Gotman and Samuel Godin
20 High Time for Humor
Andrea Fraser
21 Inaugural Speech
Andrea Fraser
About the Editor

Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Pierre-August Renoir, At the Theatre.
Figure 2.1 Audience Seating Plan, Olivier, Royal National Theatre, London.
Figure 2.2 Olivier, Royal National Theatre, London.
Figure 2.3 Tony Blair at a Party Conference.
Figure 2.4 George Michael at Wembley Stadium.
Figure 7.1 William Hogarth, The Laughing Audience.
Figure 9.1 Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion.
Figures 13.1 to 13.4 Sarah Boyes, The Comedy Clubbers: Photographs.
Figure 14.1 Plan 1 and Plan 2 for Michael Frayn, Audience.
Figures 21.1, 21.2, 21.3 Andrea Fraser, Inaugural Speech, video stills.

Acknowledgments
While I had known that a stand-up set could be four minutes, I had not realized that a book about stand-up sets could take the better part of a decade to complete (and it’s a good thing I hadn’t!). Myriad people were involved in making this collection, from brainstorming to polishing stages, and they all deserve acknowledgment. Sadly, most won’t get it.
Enormous thanks to Andrea Feeser, the series editor, who offered me the chance to propose a book, helped me develop the idea at every stage, offered answers to my endless questions, and read countless drafts of each essay. Thanks to all the contributors for their dedication, hard work and extreme patience; thanks to their agents and representatives; and thanks to the comedy writers whose inspiring work did not, for whatever reason, end up in the collection. Thanks to David Blakesely at Parlor Press for his persistence and advice, and Terra Williams for her editorial eye. Thanks to Dominic Johnson, Robbie Praw, and Xavier Ribas for suggesting potential contributors. Thanks to the Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum for awarding me a post-doctoral fellowship during which time I completed the bulk of my editorial work. Thank you to every audience that I’ve been part of, as well as those that I interacted with as a performer, even the ones–especially the ones–who loathed me, thereby making me work to understand them. And thanks, of course, to Jon Lightman, my most brutal and most constant audience, for being crazy enough to share his life with a performer/academic/writer.

Introduction
Difference at Work: The Live Comedy Audience
Judy Batalion
Life is a comedy for those who think . . . and a tragedy for those who feel.
—Horace Walpole
Life Is a Comedy for Those Who Think
This collection of writing explores live comedy audiences, considering the meaning and composition of an audience in today’s global world, and the ways live audiences represent a magnified series of intimate relations and emotional expressions including love and hate. This is a book about the stage and the seats, the sorts who are in/on them, and how difference plays itself out between them. Informed by my work in academia and stand up—my dual experience as a cultural critic and performer—this project offers observations and analysis based in two very different discourses that hopefully help flesh one another out. I begin this multi-dimensional exploration with two anecdotes.
During the summer of 2006, I was at the Edinburgh Festival, one of the world’s largest performing arts and comedy congregations, where I saw the one-man show The Naked Racist , by Canadian comic Phil Nichol, who had just won the UK’s premiere comedy prize. Nichol proved to be a performance powerhouse, beginning his spectacle with a rock-star-styled guitar solo, and throughout, dazzling the audience with high-octane anecdotes about his personal confrontations with prejudice, expressing his disdain for the ploys of world leaders, as well as for those who are uncritical and blindly follow these leaders and promote war. Nichol’s philosophic means of protesting violence—and in particular the American public’s support of George Bush—was via nudity, and through the hour, he progressively stripped down to reveal his all. Moreover, he charmingly encouraged the three-hundred-member audience to join in the action! Lo-and-behold, all around me gaggles of comedy fans, rapt by Nichol’s energy, began to remove shirts, shoes and hats. With Nichol in the lead, they stood up, throwing their extraneous clothing to the wind, like hippies tossing flowers. Indeed, Nichol ended the show by inviting a slew of naked comedians—not known for their stunning physiques—to bear floral headdresses and dance in the aisles.
Amongst this spectacle and frenzy, however, I remained seated, in a smug, knowing sort of way, even aware that my resistance might be ruining the joy for my neighbor (who, admittedly, didn’t seem to notice me as he rolled off dirty socks and swigged four pints of beer). I patiently waited for the brilliant moment I was sure would come—the moment when Nichol would self-consciously announce his own tactic, and reveal to the audience how, despite his noble plea for peace, he had still managed to rile them, to use his charisma to influence crowd behavior, just as he accused politicians of doing. Surely, the irony of the situation was not lost on him, and I figured he won this major arts award because he would so cleverly reflect back to us what he was critiquing—he would show his audience that they too were implicated, that one protest just leads to another, how herd dynamics are unrelated to political wing. But, to my genuine surprise, Nichol said nothing. The curtains went down, but the frenzy oozed beyond the show and into the bar, and I left the comedy venue feeling nervous. I was amazed at how quickly an emotion can spread, and at the intensity with which mood and ideas can be socially experienced. How was this show different from a political rally, except that it didn’t announce itself as such? I was frightened by the crowd mentality, the political statement that had been taken uncritically and unselfconsciously and turned into a vibe for all-night partying and, likely, drunken sex.
The next powerful—but perhaps opposite—comedy audience experience occurred in October 2008. Sarah Silverman performed her long-awaited London debut show at the Hammersmith Apollo, a three thousand-seat theater. Silverman had become famous in the US for her brand of non-PC humor, which uses racial stereotypes and crass sexual description to, her audience believes, ironically display their inherent unfoundedness. (This type of post-PC humor c