“Joke’s on You!”: Stand-up Comedy Performance and the Management of Hecklers
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2011
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Stand-up comedy performance provides a space for audiences to experience collective effervescence. The biggest challenge to that effervescence is the heckler, and the ways in which comedians deal with hecklers underscore cultural understandings of what is or is not funny. I explore stand-up comedy shows on various levels to understand different forms of heckling and strategies for managing disruption through Michael Reay’s work on the social origins of humor and Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural pragmatics model. After explicating these theoretical models in relation to stand-up comedy, examples from live performances in Philadelphia and Boston, as well as selections from televised comedy performances, are used to examine heckling incidents and identify the advantages and risks involved in each type of response.