Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Alexander, Jeffrey
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the social and cultural significance of the global standup explosion. An unignorable social fact — viewers of more than ten standup specials jumped 60% just between 2018-19, at least half of Netflix users have watched at least one, comedy clubs are their own pandemic — the live comedy phenomenon offers a novel chance to analyze large-scale cultural attitudes and trends. The analysis explores distinct aspects (scales) of humor in three chapters. Chapter One statistically analyzes specific jokes and their reception, surveying whether they are found funny and offensive by respondents. The study reveals that individual reactions to jokes can reveal salient distinctions between demographic groups, highlighting deep symbolic boundaries. Chapter Two examines the content creators and their inextricable audience, identifying what defines a comic. Defending the comic as a kind of Everyman proxy, the research demonstrates that various factors, including age, gender, and ethnic categories, can operate in the same way as Du Bois' theory of double consciousness. Proposed: a revision of Du Boisian thinking, and a reckoning with the multiplicity of modern identity. Chapter Three focuses on the maintenance of the (now sacred) norm of "authenticity" in standup comedy, identifying how comedians reference themselves, their profession, and their past jokes to maintain authenticity. The study reveals that performers are increasingly “going meta” to guard against the moral accusation of inauthenticity. A theoretical introduction, Chapter Zero, presents a case study of the 2020 Blackout Tuesday movement to develop a theory of "ambivalent action," which involves deliberate intention to communicate two messages at once. Arguing that humor is an archetypal ambivalent action, the dissertation concludes that standup occupies the unique intersection between authenticity, a norm that begs fulfilling, and ambivalence, a means to fulfill it. As a final implication: if ambivalence can reconcile incongruities at much at the level of a pun as at the level of an identity crisis, standup comedy has the potential to address the most irreducible dissonances in modern culture structures. Can something be both meaningful and meaningless? And: is there meaning in meaninglessness?
Recommended Citation
Valen Levinson, Adam, "Meaning and Meaninglessness: The Global Standup Explosion" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 920.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/920
