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This book focuses on the "dark side" of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers' troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians' onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.
List of contents
I. Darkness on Stage.- I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die: George Carlin and the Comedy of Disaster (Steven S. Kapica, Ph.D.).- Comedy Is Not Pretty: Steve Martin's Kitsch as Masochistic Fantasy (Sean Springer, Ph.D.).- Stand-up Comedy as a Form of Therapy (Cait Hogan, Stand-Up Comedian).- II. The Dark Side of Addiction.- Wasted Youth: Temporalities of Addiction and Comic Abjection (Phil Scepanski, Ph.D.).- Food Addiction in the Lives and Works of Stand-up Comedians (Carey Marie Noland, Ph.D.).- III. Are Comedians Really So Dark?.- Autobiography is a Funny Thing (Eddie Naessens, Ph.D.).- Humor Production and Perceptions of Psychological Health (A. Peter McGraw, Ph.D., Erin Percival Carter, Ph.D. Candidate, and Jennifer Harman, Ph.D.).- IV. The Dark Side of the Comedy Business.- How to Legally Determine that a Joke is Prejudicial? The Uneasy Case of Canadian Comedian Mike Ward (Christelle Paré, Ph.D.).- Why the Relentless Pursuit of the Laughter of Strangers? (Sheila Lintott, Ph.D.).- Heckling, Physical Violence, and Realistic Death Threats: The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy (Eric Shouse, Ph.D.)
About the author
Patrice Oppliger is Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Boston University, USA. Her most recent book is
Tweencoms Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms.
Eric Shouse is Associate Professor of Communication at East Carolina University, USA. His work has been published in
HUMOR,
Comedy Studies, and
Text and Performance Quarterly.
Report
"The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy reminds us that tragedy can be equally the source, target, inspiration, and frictional underside of our laughter ... . The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy provides an important introduction to an obviously germane aspect of the form and is very welcome in the rapidly emerging field of (Stand up) comedy studies." (Antti Lindfors, The European Journal of Humour Research, Vol. 10 (2), 2022)
