MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

According to Averroes, who famously reformulated Aristotelian dramatic theory, comedy is the art of blame. In our age, the art of blame finds its most successful expression in the language of stand-up comedy. Yet, despite being a “huge cultural phenomenon” (Lockyer, 2011), stand-up comedy language has so far received little academic attention, and the available literature consists of analyses that are mostly anecdotal in nature, focused on single performers, or offering comparisons based on arbitrary preferences. To date, there is no systematic scholarship on the aggregate political language of stand-up comedy that examines a large corpus of material in a wide timeframe. The dearth of statistical research in this area is surprising. After all, according to industry polls “25% of Millennials say comedy helps them shape their political beliefs, 53% say comedy makes them think and gives them perspective” (Cook, 2012) and according to reports, stand-up comedy is currently experiencing a “second boom” (Fox, 2015). This paper presents the preliminary findings of a systematic content analysis of the aggregate political language of stand-up comedy produced in the US in the post-Cold War era, 1990-2010. The corpus of material consists of the political content extracted from the albums of the 50 most successful (by market standards) stand-up comedians in the chosen timeframe. The data, plotted along the left-right spectrum, indicate a fundamental congruity between the political language of mainstream stand-up comedy and perspectives belonging to the anarchist tradition of political critique. The congruity is unaccounted for in the scholarly literature and, as such, offers an opportunity to test competing theories of comedy.