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2017

Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists,

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Belanger, Jillian, "Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals
and Activists" (2017). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 610.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/610

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 SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: STAND-UP COMEDIANS

AS SOPHISTS, JESTERS, PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND ACTIVISTS

BY

JILLIAN BELANGER

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

ENGLISH WITH A SPECIALIZATION IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

2017
 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION

OF

JILLIAN BELANGER

APPROVED:

Dissertation Committee:

Major Professor Renee Hobbs

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke

Rachel DiCioccio

Nasser H. Zawia
DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical tool to inform and

persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. In this dissertation, I work

to recover the rhetorical motives of stand-up comedy, just as rhetoric and composition

scholars before me have reread and recovered the legacy of the Sophists. To that end, I

align stand-up comedians first with the historical heritage of Sophists and jesters, and

then with the more contemporary tradition of public intellectuals and social activists.

Using excerpts from stand-up comedy performances, I demonstrate how stand-up

comedians are able to persuade and educate with humor. Moreover, I argue that stand-

up comedians represent a shift in access to messages, away from the prerequisite of

formal education required by many forms of rhetoric and toward a more innately

compelling method of information sharing, available to wide, diverse audiences.

I ask the overarching question: What kinds of messages are stand-up comedians

sharing—about what, to whom, and how? To answer, I’ve used two data sources as

evidence: (1) analysis of stand-up performances, and (2) interviews, both recorded

interviews I’ve studied as well as those I’ve conducted myself. I’ve anchored my

arguments about the important role of stand-up comedians to an evolutionary theory of

humor recently advanced by scholars who believe humor is a computational tool humans

have developed in order to detect and correct errors in their thinking. With that

explanation in mind, the work of stand-up comedians starts looking less like jokes for

joking’s sake and more like an intentional, effective, and enjoyable form of rhetorical

persuasion.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

That writing a dissertation is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done makes me feel

spoiled and aware of my privilege, but it’s the truth. If you saw the movie Akeelah and

the Bee, you might remember the exquisitely amazing Angela Bassett telling the

talented, young Keke Palmer, “You know, Akeelah, you ain't short on people who want

to help you. I bet if you just look around, you got 50,000 coaches. Starting with me.”

And then there’s a heartwarming montage of all the people in their neighborhood

helping Akeelah study for the spelling bee. That’s a long setup to say that I feel like

I’ve had 50,000 coaches and I’m so thankful for every single one of them. While I

probably can’t cover all of them before there’s some grad school version of the music

that plays when your speech is too long at the Grammy’s, I’m going to cram as many

thanks in as I can before I’m led offstage.

To my husband Joe James and our son Giuseppe David James: Nothing in this world

would ever be worth having if I didn’t have you two by my side, and that includes a

Ph.D. For everything from Gus saluting me on his way to bed and saying, “Good luck,

sergeant” to Joe figuring out how to remove the line breaks in my header that were

making me lose my mind, I am grateful. You know that very cheesy Bryan Adams

song, “Everything I do, I do it for you”? That.

My first coaches were my parents, Lisa and David Vieira, and they’ve been my

strongest supporters and my biggest role models my whole life, so it’s safe to say that

even if I wrote an entire dissertation on how much I have to be thankful to them for, it’d

iii
only cover up ‘til like third grade. They have not only told me I could do anything I put

my mind to, but they made me feel that way too, and I’m forever indebted to them for

their endless supply of love, encouragement, and Sunday dinners. While we’re on the

topic of family, my little brother Michael David has cheered me on for as long as he’s

been on this planet, and bro, I got your back too, and Anga’s and Luca’s! Deb, Jim,

Matthew, Aimee, Greg and Crosby, thank you for being there too! My family comes

first in all things for me, including acknowledgement sections.

Dr. Renee Hobbs has come to feel like family to me over the past four years—I still

can’t believe I landed that research assistantship with you when you were but a faraway-

seeming scholar on Twitter; that felt like winning the lottery. You are still my academic

role model, someone who is able to focus all your energy and attention on the task at

hand, but also warmly and effortlessly make those around you feel listened to and

included. Getting to have you as my major professor has felt like hitting the jackpot a

second time. Dr. Jeremiah Dyehouse, when you told me in Swan Hall that I had gotten

into the program… it’s hard for me to explain what an important moment that was for

me, but where should I try if not in the acknowledgements section of my dissertation,

right? You are the first professor I had at URI, and if you hadn’t made the comment

about stand-up comedians being rhetors, I might be writing an entirely different

dissertation, so I cannot thank you enough for your initial idea and continued support!

Dr. Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, you are awesome. In your WRT 647 Research

Methods class, we talked about tacking your research boat to a fleet already in the field

or staking out a course on your own, and while I know exactly nothing about sailing, my

big takeaway was that even if our colleagues might not be talking about stand-up

iv
comedy too much at the moment, that doesn’t mean I can’t steer my ship in that

direction and charter the territory, so thank you for strengthening my resolve to take on a

subject I feel passionately about. And now every time I go to the Mews Tavern, I will

look for the dollar bill you added to the wall for our class. Dr. Rachel DiCioccio, do you

know how amazing it has been for me to have someone at URI who has studied and

written about comedy? Très amazing. Your Humor Communication: Theory, Impact,

and Outcomes was formative and invaluably instrumental to me as I developed my own

identity as a scholar of comedy. And then to top that off, you’re fun and funny to boot?

It’s a dream come true! Dr. Carolyn Betensky, thank you for all that you taught me, for

your generosity of spirit, and for being on my oral comprehensive exams committee. I

am so looking forward to sharing a cup of tea at Coffee Exchange with you once this is

all over! And Dr. Norbert Mundorf, I am incredibly grateful to you for jumping in as

the chair of my defense committee. Thank you for your kindness— and for being

environmentally conscious!

To my classmates, Lindy, Krysten, Jenna, Clarissa, Alyson, Bridget, Karen, Eileen,

and Adrienne: My learning was enhanced by listening to your comments, reading your

work, laughing with you, and figuring it all out together, and I’m very fortunate to have

worked alongside such smart, amazing women. Dotted along the timeline of my

experience in this program are these bright spots—a brunch with Krysten here, a lunch

with Clarissa there, some tea with Lindy, a walk with Karen, a writing boot camp with

Jenna… you kept me going, and I thank you for that. To comedians Dan Martin, Patton

Oswalt, Myq Kaplan, Erin Judge, Will Luera, W. Kamau Bell, John Fugelsang, and

v
Aparna Nancherla: Thank you for your generous time and expert insight as I worked on

this project!

You know how Zuzu Bailey tells her dad in It’s a Wonderful Life that every time a

bell rings, an angel gets his (or her) wings? Well every time I self-indulgently whined

on Twitter about how hard it was to write this dissertation, and Amma or Amanda or

Krystafer or any number of kind souls replied with a pep talk, a paragraph was born.

And as far as acknowledging pep talks, the queen of talking pep to me is without

question the one, the only Katydid Retzleff, who’s been my pen-pal since we were

seven. Our morning chats start my days off right, and our BE FRI, ST ENDS tattoos are

coming soon to a ribcage near you.

I would be remiss not to offer my gratitude to Nutella, green tea, white cheddar

cheez-its, and almonds for being my constant companions and fuel for working.

Likewise, Mariam Makeba, Norah Jones, Frédéric Chopin, and the 3-hour brain waves

video on YouTube all deserve my heartfelt thanks for making up the soundtrack to my

writing days and nights, and Beyoncé for being the soundtrack to my life, obvs. Last as

well as first, and the furthest thing from least, I must return to Joe and Gus, as I always

will, to say thank you and I love you and this diss is for you.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................... iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................... vii
CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................1
The Rhetoric of Stand-up Comedy......................................................................................... 2
Interdisciplinary Literature Review........................................................................................ 4
The Evolutionary and Computational Theory of Humor .....................................................15
Preview of the Argument.....................................................................................................21
A Note on Tone ....................................................................................................................22
CHAPTER 2 .......................................................................................................... 25
Who Were the Sophists? .....................................................................................................26
Sophists Reread ...................................................................................................................29
Similarities Between Sophists and Stand-up Comedians ....................................................33
Argument to Reread the Stand-ups .....................................................................................47
Jesters Speak Truth to Power ..............................................................................................52
Stand-up Comedians as Jesters ...........................................................................................56
Dissecting a Frog: Killing Comedy by Analyzing It................................................................59
Stand-up Comedy as Resistance ..........................................................................................73
CHAPTER 3 .......................................................................................................... 79
Comedians as Public Intellectuals........................................................................................79
Lubricating Conversations ...................................................................................................83
Comedic Use of Social Media ..............................................................................................86
Working Within the Language of the People ......................................................................90
Comedians as Social Activists ..............................................................................................93
Poverty and Racism Are (Not) Funny ...................................................................................96
Funny Formulas for Entertainment Education ..................................................................102
Windows and Mirrors ........................................................................................................106
CHAPTER 4 ........................................................................................................ 110
The Importance of Including Comedians’ Voices in a Study of Stand-Up Comedy as
Rhetoric ....................................................................................................................................110
Interview Sample ...............................................................................................................116
Interviewing Strategy.........................................................................................................121
Preparing for the Interviews ..............................................................................................122
W. Kamau Bell: A Comedy Rhetorician for Emerging and Established Activists ...............123
John Fugelsang: A Comedy Rhetorician Devoted to the Process ......................................129
Aparna Nancherla: A Comedy Rhetorician Growing Into Her Political Identity ................136
Speaking Seriously About the Craft ...................................................................................139
Examining the Human Experience .....................................................................................142
CHAPTER 5 ........................................................................................................ 150

vii
 A Review of the Argument.................................................................................................150
My Identity as a Writer, Researcher, and Comedy Consumer ..........................................154
Implications for Research in Writing and Rhetoric ............................................................156
Kairos and Comedy ............................................................................................................162
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 165

viii
 CHAPTER 1

THE SETUP

Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical tool to inform and

persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. Taking a page from

Kenneth Burke’s book A Rhetoric of Motives, we will be identifying “a rhetorical

motive… present where it is not usually recognized, or thought to belong.” Comedians

are not often recognized as having a rhetorical motive; stand-up comedy is often enjoyed

and appreciated as performance, but seldom analyzed or respected as persuasion. The

following work aims to recover the important rhetorical function of stand-up comedians’

work, aligning them first with the historical heritage of Sophists and jesters, and then

with the more contemporary tradition of public intellectuals and social activists.

Explicitly highlighted throughout will be voices of the comedians themselves, both in

the form of their stand-up performances and their firsthand reflections on their own roles

and agency.

American humorist Mark Twain famously told us, "Against the assault of

laughter, nothing can stand.” American humorist Abe Burrows less famously told us,

“With comedy we make much more serious points than we do with anything... serious."

So why then, is it true that "any scholar who wants to study comedy occasionally

encounters individuals who see only frivolity in their endeavors"? (Quirk). Competing

approaches alternatively suggest that either laughter and comedy represent peak

persuasion or are of little import and count only as frivolity. I am not an American

1
humorist, but I am not-at-all famously telling us that a little levity can go a long way, so

as a scholar who wants to study comedy, if I encounter an individual who sees only

frivolity in my endeavors, I might remind said individual that if frivolity is a

lightheartedness or a lack of seriousness, I’m happy to be light of heart, and seriousness

is not the only way to make a point.

The Rhetoric of Stand-up Comedy

Stand-up comedians present points along the same lines as other persuasive

speakers, generally following the five canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style,

memory, delivery. By employing these classically rhetorical strategies, stand-up

comedians achieve rhetorical authority in their performances (Greenbaum) and spread

knowledge and information to mass audiences in the tradition of what Apel and

Habermas call open communication and embodied, enacted discourse. The comedians

themselves are rarely given credit for this rhetorical work, or at least, the fruits of their

labor come more in the form of laughs from ephemeral audiences in comedy clubs or on

couches at home. If we were to imagine removing the humor from what they do,

however, and picture a group of people who develop arguments, make thoughtful,

stylistic and organizational decisions to optimize effect, memorize those stylized

arguments, and then regularly deliver them to large audiences, we’d probably take that

group pretty seriously as rhetors.

When we throw in the fact that the arguments comedians develop make people

laugh, the significance of those arguments should be increased, because that in and of

itself is no small feat. Humorists will work tirelessly to produce just the right

combination of words to get people to laugh, and their process has been compared with

2
science, as they all develop their own formulas by experimenting bit by bit and gauging

the results (McGraw and Warner). What makes their process even more experimental is

that in the imagined group of people who create and perform material as often as

comedians but not humorously, they can experiment mainly through customary

composition practices of editing, on the written page or computer screen, whereas

comedians mainly do their experimenting onstage with live audiences, in order to gauge

responses and determine whether a phrase needs to be shortened or a word needs to be

louder the next time they try that material out.

The Greek concept of Kairos takes into account timing, setting and context, and

plays a major role in how successful a stand-up comedian’s material will be. In addition

to practicing and editing before a live audience, comedians must be fluid and responsive

to the crowd before them in an interactive way not expected of other speech makers,

which demands that they stay up on their rhetorical toes a little more. A commencement

speaker can typically expect to make it through a fifteen- or twenty-minute speech just

as she’s prepared it, without any major heckling from the audience, but we couldn’t say

the same for comedians, who must be more improvisational in their delivery. Kairos is

much more a factor in their endeavors. Although the basis of their acts are memorized,

“they must be prepared for the exigencies of the moment, which is part of what makes

live comedy so exciting in the first place” (Greenbaum 40). Even the physical act of

standing in a room full of people who are seated facing toward you can be interpreted as

both uniquely powerful and uniquely vulnerable, an embodied act of gaining attention

and social prominence (Meier and Schmitt).

3
 Taken as a whole, a stand-up comedy performance is “a decidedly oratorical

spectacle” and “remains one of the last remnants of the rhetorical tradition in

contemporary culture” (Meier and Schmitt). The experimentation in stand-up comedy

may qualify as science, but overall, the use of the five canons, Kairos, and embodied

authority combine to make stand-up comedy, in Greek terms, a techne, or true art and

discipline. Mike Rose says rhetoric and composition has taken a "public turn" and this

research reveals that stand-up comedians are practicing rhetoricians who have taken a

"public turn" by delivering carefully prepared speeches outside of the academy (Huckin,

et. al. 109).

Interdisciplinary Literature Review

A thorough literature review captures major voices and perspectives from

multiple fields on the topic of how comedy can be and has been wielded as a rhetorical

tool. As historical anchors, I include Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Otto’s Fools Are

Everywhere in order to assist in examining the role of humor in past communities and

conversations. Sanders too offers examples reaching back to the ancient Hebrews of

laughter’s age-old power to subvert authority. Many of the texts, however, are more

contemporary explorations of comedy’s rhetorical power, offered by sociologists,

anthropologists, psychologists, comedians, some rhetoricians, and one juggler. I have

called upon writings from all of these groups in order to review, compare, and analyze

what representatives from each have to contribute to the question of how stand-up

comedians utilize humor to inform and persuade.

An interdisciplinary area of research, humor studies have been conducted and

documented by linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and performers

4
themselves. Rhetoricians are adding their perspective to the pot in recent years, and we

have a lot more to add to a thorough examination of stand-up comedians’ intentional

production of humor in order to inform and persuade. The many intersections of

rhetoric and composition and stand-up comedy are explored preliminarily by Tarez

Samra Graban in a chapter for Victor Raskin’s Primer of Humor Research. Graban

reports, “Humor has invited—no, enticed—a growing number of rhetoric and

composition scholars to consider its bearing on cultural production and inquiry.” What,

though, have all the rhetoric and composition scholars that Graban writes are “invited—

no enticed… to consider [humor’s] bearing on cultural production and inquiry” been

studying, if not stand-up comedy, which seems to me the most clearly and compellingly

connected to rhetoric and composition?

As a broad overview of the connections between comedy studies and rhetoric

and composition, Graban provides a starting point from which we can look for specific

links between stand-up comedy, specifically, and rhetoric. Graban chronicles references

to humor in the field of rhetoric and composition that can be traced back to rhetoric’s

forefathers, along with other key intersections between humor and rhetoric to date.

Cicero, Aristotle, and Quintilian have given considerable thought to humor and its

rhetorical applications. In Book 6 of Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian wrote, “Though

laughter may be regarded as a trivial matter, and an emotion frequently awakened by

buffoons, actors or fools, it has a certain imperious force of its own which it is very hard

to resist” and Cicero wrote, “Humor is a way the speaker can undermine his opposition,

revealing his opposition’s weakness while concealing his own” (Graban). In the

5
examples cited above, Quintilian and Cicero’s treatment of humor demonstrates that

they considered it to be a valuable, serious tool with powerful possibilities.

Aristotle lends his opinion about jests, in a manner befitting the rest of the topics

on which he lends opinions, which is to say, presents as if a fact:

As to jests. These are supposed to be of some service in controversy.

Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents’ earnestness with

jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in which he was right. Jests

have been classified in the Poetics. Some are becoming to a gentleman,

others are not; see that you choose such as become you. Irony better

befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse

himself, the buffoon to amuse other people. (145)

According to Aristotle’s confident claim, then, a stand-up comedian is automatically a

buffoon for seeking to amuse other people. However, given that Aristotle also uttered

the infamous definition of rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the

available means of persuasion” (7) and further elaborated that “[p]ersuasion is clearly a

sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to

have been demonstrated” (5), we should also be able to entertain a more nuanced

opinion of stand-up comedians, whereby their jests are not ungentlemanly buffoonery,

but rather, a demonstration of an especially effective available means of persuasion.

However, this strategic act of persuasion is not as often the subject of humor

studies as the act of consuming humor (Miczo). Researchers and philosophers have

done plenty of thinking and writing about audience members, readers or viewers on the

receiving end of comedy. Much of this writing isn’t broken down into genre-specific

6
comedy. “Humor” and “comedy” are often presented as homogenous categories that

intend to entertain and make people laugh. While psychologists have written

extensively on what makes us laugh and why (which would be classified as receiver-

oriented research), and sociologists and anthropologists have contributed to an

understanding of stand-up comedy as a cultural mediation (Mintz), rhetoricians will be

able to apply a new layer of language analysis as well as an emphasis on situation in

comedic performances.

Mary Douglas observes, “the joke form rarely lies in the utterance alone, but…

can be identified in the total social situation” and describes joking as “public affirmation

of shared cultural beliefs and… reexamination of these beliefs.” Stand-up is an

excellent illustration of how the “total social situation” contributes to the joke form; a

stand-up comedian relies on word construction but also gesture, inflection, volume,

facial expressions, and even the room itself to complete the joke form. Victor Turner’s

work too highlights the “experience of public joking, shared laughter, and celebration of

agreement on what deserves ridicule and affirmation [which] fosters community and

furthers a sense of mutual support for common belief and behavior” (Mintz 73). In

“Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” Mintz declares standup comedy to

be arguably the oldest, most universal, basic, and deeply significant form of humorous

expression, and calls for “thorough studies of joke texts and comedy routines… as well

as more careful analyses of forms and techniques”—which was one of cues for this

research.

When I began this research, an interdisciplinary literature review was at least

partly necessary because of the lack of attention to stand-up comedy in rhetoric and

7
composition journals and books. Very recently, however, in 2016, Matthew R. Meier

and Casey R. Schmitt edited a book entitled Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up

Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change, in which they assembled various professors

of Rhetoric, English, Communication, and Sociology to reflect on and write about the

relationship between stand-up comedy and the rhetoric of social change. It was inspired,

they write in their preface, by “a handful of rhetoricians” who “started a serious

conversation about stand-up comedy.”

Meier and Schmitt are essentially my kindred spirits, urging colleagues to

recognize that “modern stand-up comedy deserves close critical attention as a rhetoric

that tells the truth, but tells it slant,” a nod to Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell the truth

but tell it slant.” They mark the middle of the twentieth century as a point where stand-

up comedy represented a divergence from other comedic actors like joke tellers,

vaudevillians and radio performers, who had operated mainly on rote gags and canned

jokes, toward a “uniquely oratorical form of entertainment that was both captivating and

provocative.” As part of this shift, more attention was paid to invention rather than

delivery, and the stand-up comedians doing the work of that invention became a new

class of public intellectuals, whose work was “rhetoric more than a performance, and as

such, their comedy was not only entertaining, it was also persuasive” (Meier and

Schmitt).

To be transparent, it has been surprising, invigorating and challenging to witness

a surge in scholarship on the topic of stand-up comedians as public intellectuals at the

time of writing this dissertation. On the one hand, it strengthens a sense of justification

in studying this topic, and it provides a richer basis for demonstrating its relevance. On

8
the other hand, it produces a certain anxiety that others are “going public” with these

ideas faster, and that it may be “old news” by the time I read what they’ve written on the

topic and catch up to include that in my own analysis. On either hand, though, the fresh

cropping up of similar arguments around stand-up comedians as rhetors and change

agents does suggest that Graban may be correct in her observation that a growing

number of rhetoric and composition scholars have been enticed to consider humor’s

bearing on cultural production and inquiry.

While some scholars reverently maintain that “the power and authority with

which some comedians hold their audiences' attention and gain agreement seem almost

shamanistic" (Olson), others clearly feel that the decision to focus on comedy must be

defended. Even the titles of books dedicated to the study of comedy can come off as

defensive: Why Stand-up Matters, Laughing Matters, Beyond a Joke, All Joking Aside…

they seem to scream, “I’m not kidding, you guys, I really do think this is important!”

Perhaps this is because “the paradox of writing seriously about humor is that humor

makes a mockery of seriousness" (Lockyer and Pickering), and some scholars don’t

wish to make a mockery of seriousness. Well then, now is as good a time as any to

introduce the idea that in addition to considering and adding to work that has been done

by scholars, we must necessarily look to non-scholarly sources as well. Part of the

argument that rhetoric and composition scholars should take up the study of stand-up

comedy is acknowledging those non-scholars who have thought and written seriously

about stand-up comedy. Therefore, we must be willing to examine words by Aristotle in

one paragraph and excerpts from a documentary mini-series hosted by Billy Crystal in

9
the next. We must expand our thinking to include College English but also The Atlantic

and NPR.

For example, my assertion that stand-up comedians consciously employ rhetorical

agency to articulate opinions and criticisms is strengthened by statements by comedians

themselves, often shared in not-so-scholarly outlets. To wit, comedian Erin Judge,

writing for Boston Globe, declares:

The whole goal for any comedian is to raise awareness about social issues

when people are disarmed by laughter. Because you can have these

awkward encounters in contrived social settings, where people of color

and white people are trying to explain themselves to one another. But

when you have something like stand-up as the framework, it’s incredibly

disarming. Which makes it incredibly powerful. (Judge)

Her stance on comedians’ goals should be acknowledged as relevant to the conversation

about how stand-up comedy functions rhetorically, since she is a comedian and therefore

able to speak to her own goals and experiences. Likewise, Sol Saks may not be part of

the academic community, but he was an American screenwriter and published several

books about comedy writing that offer thoughtful insights into comedy production,

including, “Like a heat-seeking missile, humor finds and attacks hypocrisy." And

comedian Paul Provenza is quoted in a scholarly article as proclaiming, “Anyone who

makes you laugh is always doing more than just that” (Waisanen).

In Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, multiple producer-oriented

takes are offered, including, "Our comedians are mercenaries. We pay them to do the

outrageous things that we can't do," and "We should treasure our comedians much more

10
than we do; they contribute much more to our society than we're aware of." Another

documentary, Just Like Us, presents stand-up as having the “powerful ability to provide

relief, encourage a younger generation, break down barriers and serve as a platform for

cross cultural dialogue” and concludes, “The role of the comedian is to speak truth to

power and point out things that maybe people aren’t talking about.” Similarly, various

stories on NPR champion the rhetorical advantages of comedy, including a description

of how Amy Schumer drops social commentary once we're paying attention (Deggans)

and an assertion that "If you can make someone laugh, you can secretly make them learn

something" (“Drunk History”).

To address a dissenting point of view, let’s consider Ralph Rosen’s “Efficacy

and Meaning in Ancient and Modern Political Satire: Aristophanes, Lenny Bruce, and

Jon Stewart,” in which Rosen comes across as dubious that humor, or satire, specifically,

can contribute to social change. He says, “satirists claim to have something urgent to

say and insist that what they have to say is actually true,” but “there remains deep

suspicion about comedy, the effects of laughter, and the gamesmanship of satire: Where

is there a space for truth-telling and moral seriousness when a satirist always has an eye

on making the audience laugh?” (Rosen 3). The deep suspicion about comedy he

describes is evident in the rest of his work, where he questions whether the satirist

actually accomplishes anything other than making an audience laugh, and sprinkles in a

healthy dose of condescension, including throwaway comments like “or perhaps we

should say schtick” to “correct” himself for calling material by Lenny Bruce a “passage.”

Concluding that no, the satirist does not succeed in actually instigating change or

enlightening anyone, Rosen essentially crosses his arms and ends with a defiant, “So

11
there!” in the form of: “Satirical efficacy ends with laughter rather than persuasion or

education, even if satirists craft their work as if the opposite is the case.”

In response to Rosen’s grumpy defiance of satire contributing to social change in

any way, I would first point out that the category of satire is too broad, just as the

category of stand-up comedy is too broad, to make any clear cut definitive statements

about. Rosen would need to clarify which types of satire he finds unsuccessful at

instigating social change, just as I provide qualifications for the specific stand-up

comedians I’m referring to when I argue that they are successful at shifting mindsets.

Secondly, he is thinking too narrowly if he is only willing to concede that satire

contributes to social change when there is visible, visceral evidence of a mind having

been changed or an an action having been taken. On the contrary, a stand-up

comedian’s influence on listeners can be counted in many other ways, including

reinforcing existing values, pushing against a previously held belief, and helping to

knock down the untouchable prestige of a topic or group by toppling it with mockery.

Rosen would do well to read Oliver Double’s response to the criticism that

stand-up comedians are “preaching to the converted” because the fans who choose to

watch them often already hold the same beliefs. Double argues that the criticism relies

on the assumption that preaching to the converted is a useless activity, but in truth, part

of the purpose of a sermon is to share and celebrate common beliefs and “send the flock

out into the wicked world with a strengthened faith” (290), so an evening spent listening

to someone you already agree with isn’t automatically disqualified from being

purposeful or impactful. Similarly, Rosen could see what Sophie Quirk has to say on

the matter, as she also argues, “the way that stand-up functions as an expression of in-

12
group unity may be seen as one of its most effective political features” (180). Finally,

satire can have some overlap with stand-up comedy on a venn diagram, but since we are

specifically studying stand-up comedy here, we need to take Rosen’s harrumphing about

satire with a grain of salt, knowing that there are important distinctions that make stand-

up stand apart from satire, including the key quality of one person standing on a stage

addressing a crowd through words, inflection, pace, and gesture.

I promised I’d include a juggler in this literature review, and now I want to make

good on that covenant. I should probably add though that Chris Bliss isn’t just a juggler,

but a stand-up comedian as well. One of the foundational purposes for comparing stand-

up comedians with Sophists, jesters, public intellectuals and social activists has been the

notion that comedians are able to employ a particular form of persuasion through their

humor. Bliss’s 2011 TED Talk “Comedy Is Translation” was so much a part of the

bedrock of my thinking on this topic when it was in its nascent stages that I actually

think it deserves one of those longer quotes that goes past four lines and therefore gets

tighter margin:

A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's

going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here.

And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of

laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And

just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at

something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses.

This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of

the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin,

13
 which throws our walls up sky-high. And then comedy comes along,

dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the

strongest— race, religion, politics, sexuality— only by approaching them

through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins, and the alchemy

of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and

unexpected point of view. (Bliss)

It is interesting that Bliss would label a great piece of comedy “a verbal magic trick,” as

it calls to mind a similar statement made by Sharon Crowley in “A Plea for the Revival

of Sophistry” about rhetoric: “Today, the efficacy of public discourse is so well hidden

that America has a nearly silent citizenry. The discipline of rhetoric, as well as the

techniques that inform its practice, remain invisible to all but a few eccentric academics

and a phalanx of highly skilled practitioners who work their verbal wizardry in the

public media” (322). Stand-up comedians, I contend, should be counted among that

phalanx of highly skilled practitioners, for they are working their verbal wizardry in the

form of those verbal magic tricks described by Bliss, and what’s magical about their

work is the way they can leverage humor as a less combative form of persuasion than

other, more traditional forms of rhetoric. It “provides a mechanism by which

incongruous viewpoints, and information which contradicts the hearer’s pre-existing

attitudes, may be presented in a non-threatening manner” (Quirk 164).

Having focused primarily in the literature review thus far on texts that advance

an assessment of the aims and purposes of comedy, we should also acknowledge the

three major theories of humor that have received the most attention, out of over one

hundred documented theories: (1) the relief theory, which posits that the purpose of

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humor is to relieve tension and anxiety, (2) the incongruity theory, which suggests that

we laugh when we recognize a shift in perspective from what we expected, and (3) the

superiority theory, which maintains that the misfortunes of others are humorous because

they cause us to feel superior. As American satirist and social critic H.L. Mencken

reportedly said in 1918, “A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas”

(DiCioccio 4). To add a flea, I will now introduce the evolutionary and computational

theory of humor, presented by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B.

Adams, Jr. in Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.

The Evolutionary and Computational Theory of Humor

A professor who specializes in the study of stand-up comedy is a rare bird, but

one such bird is the aforementioned Sophie Quirk, a lecturer in drama and theater at the

University of Kent in the UK, who asserts, “humour is useful in interpreting the

incongruity in such a way as to provide pleasure rather than discomfort… [and] gives

the persuasive speaker an advantage in that his message may be received warmly when

it could otherwise have triggered negative feelings or reactance” (164). A recent

computational theory of humor by Hurley, Dennet and Adams uses an evolutionary

approach to help us understand why we may experience that pleasure rather than

discomfort, explaining that humans have developed a sense of humor as a reward for

recognizing errors in our systematic thinking. They locate humor in the moments when

an active committed belief clashes with a latent committed belief brought into the same

active mental space. For Hurley and company, the pleasure we feel is a reward that has

evolved to motivate us to constantly spend energy in updating our belief systems,

keeping them flexible and sharp, which can give a competitive advantage in survival and

15
reproduction. In other words, humor is an evolutionary way to reward ourselves for

shifting our thinking. While humor can serve to unify, divide, persuade or disparage, let

us learn more about how it can serve as an error correction mechanism to reward

reframing and revising beliefs with pleasure.

Going back to 1964, Arthur Koestler questioned what the evolutionary purpose

of humor and laughter might be in The Act of Creation: A Study of the Conscious and

Unconscious in Science and Art:

What is the survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction

of fifteen facial muscles associated with certain noises that are

irrepressible? Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no

apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex. Its only

utilitarian function, as far as one can see, is to provide temporary relief

from utilitarian pressures. On the evolutionary level where laughter

arises, an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humorless universe

governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest.

(31)

Hurley, Dennett and Adams do not accept the premise that humor and laughter serve no

biological purpose or utilitarian function beyond temporary relief, and they argue that

understanding the ultimate purpose of humor is a worthwhile endeavor—one that has

been largely ignored as humor researchers instead focus on determining what makes

something funny. This mirrors the call for more research on humor production, in

addition to the abundance of attention to humor consumption and appreciation, in

Nathan Miczo’s earlier mentioned “Humor and Message Production.”

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 To set up how other survival traits evolved in humans as adaptive solutions,

Hurley, et al. provide several examples. First, they consider traits that once served a

purpose but are no longer required, like goose bumps, which were effective for our

hairier hominid ancestors as a way to trap an insulating layer of air, but have stuck

around when we get the chills today, even though they don’t serve the same purpose on

our less hairy bodies. Second, they consider traits that are not actually designed by

evolution at all, but are rather “nondebilitating by-product[s] of another trait that has

enhanced the fitness of the bearer’s progenitors,” like music appreciation. Third, they

consider traits that got hijacked from their original evolutionary purpose, like the

sneezing reflex, which has been exploited by cold viruses to infect new hosts. Fourth,

they consider traits that were designed “to solve a computational problem faced by our

brains that has not heretofore been identified,” and it is in these last two examples that

they locate humor (10-12).

In light of the third example, of traits being hijacked or exploited so as to spread

themselves, humor is considered as a “plausible candidate for fecund cultural replicators

that… fuel their own replication by providing us with a bounty of pleasure” (Hurley,

Dennett and Adams 11). The authors point to Richard Dawkins’ concept of a meme, or

“an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture,”

providing an immediately apparent connection to humor, which is often transmitted via

memes. The notion of jokes as seeds to spread ideas was also put forth by Sophie Quirk,

who said that “jokes have the advantage of being eminently repeatable and thus able to

spread ideas to a much wider audience.” Another Sophie, Sophie Scott, has made

mention of the evolutionary quality of humor as well: “When you laugh with people,

17
you access an ancient, evolutionary system to make and maintain social bonds and

regulate emotion."

Adding to the possibility that humor could potentially fit into this third type of

trait, by virtue of its viral-like quality, Hurley et al. point out that humor may have been

appropriated as an evolutionary marker for fitness-enhancing and mating purposes,

citing an observation that people who have a large store of humor are more popular and

more likely to influence others, as evidence. Here they introduce Geoffrey Miller’s

proposition that “[f]emales use sense of humor (in males) as a hard-to-fake

advertisement of intelligence and power” (Hurley, Dennett and Adams 11). Putting

aside, for a moment, the glaringly heteronormative nature of this hypothesis, we will

look back on Miller’s statements. He first identifies that “[s]ome theories of humor have

proposed that laughter evolved to promote group bonding, discharge nervous tension, or

keep us healthy,” but dismisses these theories as failing to take into account the quality

of jokes or people’s ability to discern which jokes are genuinely funny to them, as

indicated by the fact that people may not feel compelled to laugh at any joke, or at a joke

they may have already heard before (Miller 241). Instead, Miller posits that “[a] good

sense of humor means a discriminating sense of humor” and “[s]uch discrimination is

easy to understand if our sense of humor evolved in the service of sexual choice, to

assess the joke-telling ability of others” (241).

Hurley, Dennett and Adams entertain this evolutionary approach to humor as a

revealer of personality traits by expanding on it beyond the purposes of mating: “Since

humor is hard to fake, both in the creating and in (the suppression of) appreciation, it is

particularly valuable as a litmus test not just for intelligence but for enduring personality

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traits, hidden loyalties, and socially crucial attitudes and beliefs” (12). To illustrate their

point, they offer the following examples:

A young man who cannot abstain from snickering when presented with a

juvenile scatological remark wears his immaturity on his sleeve; people

who cannot chuckle at satire when it is deftly on target may betray their

political loyalties, just as someone who casually makes a racist quip

betrays a cast of mind that might otherwise be concealed. Detecting these

signs, and other such practical uses of humor, may well have become

established in societies without the (full) appreciation of the individuals

who adopt them… For instance, people may not have the slightest idea

why they distrust various others who laugh or don’t laugh at various

moments; these folks just ‘strike them the wrong way,’ while others,

whose laughter is felt to be genuine and which synchronizes with their

own, are sought out and categorized as friends. (Hurley, Dennett and

Adams 12)

Before committing themselves fully to this third type of evolutionary trait, the authors

pull back and add the caveat that cultural evolution must first have a genetically evolved

basis on which to hang its hat, "a proclivity that can be harnessed by these social ends,

wittingly or unwittingly” (Hurley, Dennett and Adams 12). It is there, in the fourth type

of evolutionary trait, that they finally establish their theory.

In a nutshell, they posit that humor indirectly emerges from a design feature in

our genetic endowment that exists to solve a computational problem faced by our brains.

Beliefs and presumptions enter into our mental space at breakneck speed, and the feeling

19
of humor or mirth acts as a powerful reward system to identify which of those beliefs

and presumptions should stick around and which should be tossed. This means that

humor can be a gatekeeper, helping us to check content for truth and identify ideas that

have value. If our brains’ unsupervised generation process is left unexamined, “the

inevitable errors in these vestibules of consciousness would ultimately continue on to

contaminate our world knowledge store,” so we are in need of humor to weed out the

wrong ideas that could contaminate our world knowledge store (13). Cue the comedians.

Hurley, Dennett and Adams’ theory of humor as an evolutionary tool for error

correction is a game changer. It represents a massive elevation to how comedy can be

viewed. If we are wired to find pleasure in the learning or unlearning of ideals and

beliefs, as befits a greater benefit to group co-existence, then wow, stand-up comedy is a

weapon of mass construction. With it, comedians can build societal norms, reveal to us

the error of our thinking, and redirect our values, all to the soundtrack of ringing peals of

laughter as we reward ourselves for discovering and/or affirming which ways of being

and thinking would best benefit humans as a group. With great power comes great

responsibility, and not all stand-up comedians answer that call. As comedian Sam

Kinison once said, “Anyone can go out on stage and start beating people over the head

with rubber chickens. That'll get people's attention. Real comedy doesn't just make

people laugh and think, but makes them laugh and change.”

As with any profession, we cannot paint in broad strokes and proclaim that all stand-

up comedians wield their ability to captivate audiences with words as a tool with which

to reshape group thought. Some just enjoy getting laughs out of strangers, and will

gladly play into popular he-man woman-hating themes to get those laughs (ahem, we’re

20
talking about you, Andrew Dice Clay and Anthony Jeselnik). Others relish in their

wheelhouse of holding up common experiences for our scrutiny, pulling laughs out of

our recognition of ourselves in their fresh but relatable observations (and thank you for

that, Jerry Seinfeld and Demitri Martin). But some stand-up comedians take the stage to

make us laugh and, whether they know it or not, shape our cultural views and beliefs.

They tap into what we will now acknowledge as our evolutionary instinct to know better,

be better and do better.

Preview of the Argument

This research highlights how stand-up comedians are linked to the ancient

rhetorical tradition, and draws on previous work chronicling stand-up comedians

(Nacman, Zoglin, Provenza). In chapter one, I have provided an interdisciplinary

literature review of works that lay the groundwork for our understandings about the

performative, persuasive nature of the work that stand-up comedians do. In chapter two,

I align stand-up comedians with Sophists and jesters. To answer the question of how the

work of a stand-up comedian is similar to that of a Sophist, I first provide an overview

of who the Sophists were and how they were reread and recovered by rhetoric and

composition scholars. Once the background has been provided, I enumerate the ways in

which stand-up comedians function similarly to Sophists and argue for rereading the

stand-up comedians as well. Moving on to jesters, I show how stand-up comedians are

able to speak truth to power in a non-combative way due to their standing as entertainers,

and how this can be traced back to court jesters, as archived by Beatrice K. Otto in Fools

Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Using multiple examples from

21
comedians who consistently demonstrate a strategic intention to address social issues, I

address the subversive, disruptive power of stand-up comedy as a rhetorical motive.

In chapter three, I align stand-up comedians first with public intellectuals,

drawing on definitions by Nathan Crick Edward Said, and then with social activists,

providing multiple examples of performances by stand-up comedians along the way.

Chapter four provides a necessary and important perspective on comedy production: the

comedians’. I include my methodology for interviewing comedians about how they see

themselves as having rhetorical agency, and how they intentional wield that agency, and

look for answers to those questions in already existing interviews with comedians as

well. With chapter five, I reflect on my own identity as a writer, researcher, and comedy

consumer, and conclude by offering major takeaways and implications that have come

out of this work.

A Note on Tone

One last thing before we embark on this journey laid out for you in these chapter

previews: Part of the argument being made here is that the way stand-up comedians

deliver their messages makes those messages more palatable, and therefore draws more

people to listen to them over other, more traditional forms of rhetoric. They take, if you

will, a sort of “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” approach to sharing their

thoughts and arguments with others. In that spirit, you may discover that in writing this

dissertation, I occasionally part ways with what we might expect from traditional, formal

documents like one intended to secure someone some extra letters at the end of their

signature. The intention behind this parting of ways with consistently formal writing

mechanics is to play with the idea that the way something is presented impacts the

22
reader’s engagement with the message. As a social experiment, let’s explore together

whether moving between heavy rhetorical lifting, like quoting and citing and lining up

points, and slightly more whimsically tinted bursts, like… this one… could result in a

more engaged interaction with a text—or, instead, if it might simply result in a reminder

that academic writing and point making are intended to be accomplished in one specific,

agreed upon formal tone, using specific, approved language choices.

Allowing for just one more paragraph’s worth of thought to the tone of delivery

here, I will add, transparently, that even the use of first person in an academic document

can feel like a major misstep or trespass, but a good rhetorician is constantly reflecting

on important things like arrangement and audience, and a really good rhetorician might

even be inspired by scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa, on whom, as I once proclaimed in a

response for our WRT 524 Histories and Theories of Writing Instruction course, I have

an academic crush (Belanger). Anzaldúa writes of her mestiza identity: “Identity can

never be reduced to a ‘bunch of little cubbyholes’… Identity flows between, over

aspects of a person” (252-3). Likewise, my own writing identity is not exclusively

rooted in academic jargon, but is influenced by a decade of teaching creative, free-

spirited, urban high school students, a lifetime of reading books with the indiscriminate

palette of someone who holds Sweet Valley Twins in the same high regard as Jane Eyre,

and the hundreds of hours of stand-up comedy I’ve watched for fun and for research,

and it is from those multiple perspectives and more that this writing will flow,

simulating, at times, the decidedly non-academic tone of stand-up comedians’ own work.

Speaking of the comedians themselves, another thing with which to preface the

remainder of your reading is the disclaimer that because stand-up comedians often

23
utilize informal language, dialect, and cursing in their stand-up shows, and because

some of their material is transcribed here for the purposes of analysis, you will need to

prepare yourself to see words like ain’t, gon’ and motherfucka. And that’s just a single

excerpt from comedian D.L. Hughley.

24
 CHAPTER 2

WHAT DO SOPHISTS, JESTERS, AND STAND-UP COMEDIANS HAVE IN

COMMON?

To whom can we anchor stand-up comedians in history? In the ancient

rhetorical tradition, orators used speech to persuade and inform. Michael Gagarin

reviews recorded purposes of rhetoric at the start of his 2001 article, “Did the Sophists

Aim to Persuade?”, from Aristotle’s “ability, in each [particular] case, to see the

available means of persuasion” to Gorgias’ “power to persuade by speech” in every

gathering, to Socrates’ description of producing persuasion in the minds of the audience

(275-6). Certainly, stand-up comedians perform these actions in their acts, delivered to

live audiences in much the same way that Greek rhetors would deliver their speeches,

but more than that, stand-up comedians can specifically be compared with Sophists,

traveling orators who went city to city, selling speech as their product.

This chapter aims to demonstrate how stand-up comedians do parallel work, in

surface-level ways as well as in deeper ways, to Sophists and jesters. We will start with

an overview of who the Sophists were, then explore the ways in which they have been

re-read by rhetoric and composition scholars, and then we will examine the parallels

between stand-up comedians and the Sophists. I will make the argument that stand-up

comedians too need to be re-read by rhetoric and composition scholars. Moving on to

jesters, I explore the ways in which stand-up comedy is an extension of the work that

court jesters did to inform leaders and audiences in a non-threatening, palatable way that

presents as entertainment.

25
 Who Were the Sophists?

In Greek, Sophos means “wise,” and in the mid-fifth century, traveling teachers

called Sophists flocked to Athens as the first instructors of rhetoric (Conley 4).

According to Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings

from Classical Times to the Present, the Sophists were “a diverse group of early

philosophers who were interested in exploring all branches of knowledge” and who

“wandered from city to city, expounding their views to those who could pay for the

privilege of listening, and also committing their ideas to writing” (22). Speaking well

during this period in Greece was becoming increasingly important once tyranny was

overthrown in Syracuse and law courts and other democratic institutions called for

people to be able to speak for themselves in ways they hadn’t before. Sophists benefited

from this new need by becoming traveling speech makers and demonstrating to the sons

of wealthy families able to pay for their services that they could teach them how to

speak and make arguments as they did.

Traveling from place to place afforded Sophists a unique opportunity to gain

insights into multiple perspectives. Moreover, their “ability to see many sides of an

issue encouraged cultural tolerance, which would be a stabilizing factor in a diverse

society, as Athens increasingly was because of the influx of foreigners seeking to enjoy

Athenian cultural and political advantages or to avoid the ravages of war elsewhere”

(Bizzell and Herzberg 25). In the Sophists’ view, opposing views have to be conducted

through language, which they recognized as fraught with emotional and cultural baggage

and therefore never “objective”; they “sought to call attention to the function of

language in inducing belief, rather than encouraging audiences to give themselves up

26
uncritically to its power to move and persuade” (Bizzell and Herzberg 23). In other

words, they advocated for critical thinking and spurred their students toward rhetorical

greatness, and what can be said against that?

Historian of rhetoric John Poulakos claims that the “playfulness” of Sophists’

techniques undermined one of the main tenets of Sophists’ verbal competitions—the

idea that the stronger and better would prevail (Bizzell and Herzberg 24). According to

him, the Sophists did not take the work of persuasion and critical thinking seriously

enough because they were playful while doing it. The criticism does not stop there,

though. Isocrates did his part in contributing to the negative perceptions of Sophists by

penning “Against the Sophists,” in which he accuses sophists of lacking scruple,

charging too little for their services and having no interest in truth. Of course, it must be

remembered that Isocrates was actually himself educated by Sophists, and sought to

separate himself from that group at least in part for the purposes of luring students to his

own, stationary school, which he saw as superior to the traveling camps of speech-

making and –teaching performed by the Sophists.

One method for understanding who the Sophists were would be to examine what

they produced. Given the less-than-lasting recordkeeping capabilities of mid-fifth

century Greek scholars, we don’t have as full a library of Sophistic literature as we

might like, but one emblematic, anonymously authored text was Dissoi Logoi, a

compilation of lecture notes scholars believe were influenced by Protagoras, Hippias,

Gorgias and Socrates. In it, questions are presented of what can rightly be considered

good or bad, seemly or shameful, just or unjust, and true or false. Since Sophists

traveled from city to city and saw multiple cultural approaches to behavior, dress, and

27
other customs, they became aware of and comfortable with differences in various areas

and had unique opportunities to see that what may be considered shameful in one place

is actually seemly in another. As a result, Sophists took a nuanced, rather than binary,

approach to whether something ought to be considered just or unjust. One example

offered in Dissoi Logoi is a predicament in which one’s parent must take medicine, but

is unwilling to consume it; the author argues that hiding the medicine in the parent’s

food is a just action to take, and therefore deceiving one’s parent is, in that situation, the

better choice. It is precisely this type of nuanced deliberation that Sophists touted and

taught, and it represented a change from a more authoritarian, religiously based system

that represented truth as being wholly good and deceit as being wholly bad.

On a broader level, Thomas M. Conley divides sophistic teaching into

“Protagorean,” or debate-oriented, and “Gorgianic,” or persuasion-oriented, and

summarizes that Protagoras was “accused of teaching his students how to ‘make the

worse case appear the better’ and Gorgias of providing his students with a power

equivalent to ‘putting a knife in the hands of a madman in the crowd’” (6). Having just

now gone over the text Dissoi Logoi, we have a fresh understanding of where the

criticism of Protagoras teaching students how to make the worse case appear the better

came from. Among the accusers were Aristotle and Plato, both of whom sought to set

themselves apart from Sophists by widely sharing their own philosophies about rhetoric.

Perhaps Aristotle shared the opinion that the Sophists’ playfulness undermined the

seriousness required of persuasion, since we know from the previous chapter that he

considered jests to be ungentlemanly buffoonery.

28
 Criticism aside, eloquence in public speaking was a skill that was becoming

increasingly required of citizens; Sophists saw that need and filled it. Bizzell and

Herzberg described the role of Sophists as follows:

[T]he Sophists taught young people that they could improve themselves

via Sophistic teaching. They did not need to defer to the wisdom of their

elders or social betters—self-improvement was open to anyone who

could pay for it, and anyone, no matter what his or her natural

endowments, could make some progress under Sophistic teaching.

Hence the traditional privileges of the aristocracy were undermined. (22)

And of course we know that any time privileges of an aristocracy are undermined and

“elders and social betters” are no longer deferred to, some feathers will be ruffled, and

some haters will kick up dust in an effort to preserve the status quo from which they

benefit. The dust kicked up by Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle and others covered the legacy

of Sophists in a dirty film of discredit and disdain until certain scholars, centuries later,

sought to pick up the Sophists and… dust them off.

Sophists Reread

Sophists were considered less than because their speech and their instruction

were for sale. In the history of rhetoric, they were looked down upon by many until they

were recovered and reread by Eric Havelock, Harold Barrett, Sharon Crowley, Susan C.

Jarratt, Michael Gagarin, Nathan Crick, and others in the field of rhetoric and

composition. This interest occurred at a time when mass communication was obliging

scholars to rethink relationships between audiences and authors, messages and meanings,

and representation and reality. Picking up Havelock’s 1957 thread of thought about

29
Sophists, Barrett wrote The Sophists: Rhetoric, Democracy, and Plato’s Idea of

Sophistry in 1987, actively challenging and correcting the “historical untruth”

perpetrated by Plato and others who sought (successfully, it had seemed) to discredit the

work of the Sophists. In Barrett’s retelling of the sophistic movement, Sophists did not

“put the knife in the hands of the madman in the crowd,” as the people in power at the

time had somewhat hysterically proclaimed, but rather “directed the power of their

writing and teaching toward raising people’s consciousness of their attributes as social

creatures and of their identity as individuals” (36). By teaching citizens to view

themselves as social creatures and infusing in them (for a fee) the ability to advocate for

themselves through persuasion, the Sophists threatened the authority of those in control

and were therefore punished by reputation defamation.

For Crowley, the Sophists offer a model for helping students to understand that

discourse helps us to consider “the existence of competing viewpoints and the

availability of choices among these,” and she posits that “Sophists saw that education

was intimately tied to politics; they thought of language as an instrument of political and

social change, and most importantly, they thought that teachers should be active

participants in bringing change in these arenas” (329). Arguing that the Sophists’

rhetoric amounted to a theory of social change, Crowley asks readers to reconsider the

discursive practice of Sophistic pedagogy, which had earned them Plato’s scorn, as a

positive engagement in political and social issues.

Also arguing that the Sophists’ texts represented an entry into the issues of social

difference and discursive strategies, Jarratt points to writings by Sophists Gorgias and

Protagoras as inviting thought about gender difference and status as a foreigner,

30
respectively. Whereas those who came immediately after the Sophists took great pains

to discredit their work, announcing that Sophists had done something dangerous by

teaching students how to argue either side, and that citizens should instead come study

in their own schools (ahem, Isocrates and Aristotle), Jarratt looks back in time and sees

Sophists as critical in the transition from “instruction in aristocratic behavior and skill in

arms, central to the status of the warrior/aristocrat” to “the new arête essential for

democracy: the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive

speech” (98).

Not only did Sophists inspire a significant shift in what was considered valuable

in the instruction of citizens, but they also redefined who had access to that instruction,

introducing what Jarratt calls “the very first education for empowerment” through their

model of teaching for fees, which allowed anyone (read: any men) with money the

opportunity to engage in the training necessary to speak well and therefore participate in

the assembly, council and courts. Considering the fact that the only previous option was

to get lucky enough to be born into a noble family with connections to intellectuals who

would teach their sons, Jarratt is correct in reading the Sophists’ traveling teaching-for-

fees as a step toward democracy and empowerment. In hindsight, it seems natural and

predictable that those seismic shifts prompted by Sophists would be bucked by members

of the nobility seeking to discredit their efforts; what’s more surprising is that it took so

long for scholars to recover the intent behind the sophistic movement and hold it up for

what it was: a time in history when a group of people traveled around, using words to

investigate injustice and help others unlock how they could do the same. Of Aristotle’s

scornful assessment of the Sophists’ teaching as a deceitful way to “make the worse case

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better,” Jarratt responds that “a reading informed by a democratic political agenda

understands the process of discovering contradictory statements to be grounded in the

sophistic belief that phenomena are characterized by constant change” (104). So there,

Aristotle.

If my notes from WRT 512: Studies in Rhetorical Theory are to be trusted, a

look at the rehabilitation of Sophists in the field of rhetoric and composition would be

incomplete without the inclusion of Nathan Crick’s take on the scene, since I seem to

have recorded him as “the hottest, most current voice on Sophists.” (I’m assuming I do

not need to parenthetically cite my own class notes, but that is a verbatim quote from

them.) In The Sophistical Attitude and the Invention of Rhetoric, Crick adds his hot,

current voice to the growing number of scholars teaming up to knock down arguments

against Sophists and elevate them to their rightful place. In addition to modeling for us

what clear, structured, well arranged writing looks like ("In this essay, I argue that..."),

Crick countered Johnstone's statement that Sophists were anti-foundationalists first,

productive artists and pedagogues second. According to Crick, Sophists are much more

than just that. Kicking off with a nod to John Dewey’s reading of Sophists as “the first

practitioners of experimental method in art and in science,” Crick doubles down on

Dewey’s notion that Sophists marked a distinct change from a time when divination and

pious sacrifice were the “only resources to address crises of instability and change” (25-

6).

Crick’s central claim is that “the core of sophistical methods of invention grew

out of [an] experimental attitude toward knowledge in which theory was a means for

generating novel perspectives and guiding situated practices within kairotic moments”

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(31). In his hot, current take, Sophists did not necessarily start the Greek Enlightenment,

but they were an indisputably indispensable part of it, and their experimentalism was as

much cause to celebrate as their contributions to pedagogy and the shift in audience they

represented. By reinserting the notion of temporal continuity into the cynical stance that

Sophists taught now to turn the weaker argument into the stronger, Crick repositions the

aforementioned dissoi logoi to be “a doctrine of reasoned judgment that occurs through

the dialectical engagement of multiple views that are constantly being tested, rejected,

modified, and embraced through experimental action in a changing environment” (36).

This far more favorable interpretation of Sophists’ intentions behind instructing students

to argue from multiple perspectives provides a much different lens than the traditional

derision with which Sophists had previously been considered. In conclusion, the

successful rereading of Sophists moved them from a place of disgrace—where they had

been previously positioned by Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates and others in Athens who were

threatened by the more equal democracy Sophists invited—to a place of honor, being

credited by scholars like Barrett and Havelock as essentially inventing the idea of

education as an identifiable, conscious process.

Similarities Between Sophists and Stand-up Comedians

Sophists aim “to make people see that what has always been so does not

necessarily have to continue,” and that is just the first of several ways in which stand-up

comedians can be compared to them (Bizzell and Herzberg 24). An argument can be

made (and is being made, right now, actually!) that stand-up comedians fill much the

same role as Sophists, have been maligned in similar ways, and should be reread. The

first and most obvious similarities to point out between Sophists and stand-up comedians

33
are the surface level traits: Both jobs require traveling from city to city to sell speech as

a product. Certainly we could point to many jobs that require these two elements—

traveling and speech making— as components of work, but there are few jobs in today’s

society that are comprised primarily, almost exclusively, of touring around making

speeches to live audiences. To test this claim, let’s examine whose work does include

traveling speechmaking. “Priests!” one audience member shouts. “Motivational

speakers!” another adds. Someone else calls out, “What about politicians, professors,

and people who talk at graduations?” Great examples, imaginary audience members.

Let’s go through them and examine the motives for sharing speeches, the audiences with

which speeches are shared, and the extent to which the speech sharing is central to the

position.

Priests and other faith based leaders do indeed prepare speeches to share with

congregations on a regular basis. However, the content of their talks is necessarily

restricted to religiously related topics, and the moral or outcome of their messages are

tied to already established norms and conditions, whereas the world is a stand-up

comedian’s oyster. Comedians in general are not beholden to any set of beliefs or

expectations by default, and therefore the speech performances that they invent and

deliver can cover a limitless range of topics, tones, opinions and messages. Furthermore,

religious leaders typically deliver their speeches to audiences that are pre-determined by

the location of the church and the membership of the religion. Though there are times

that some religious leaders will travel to preach to a different congregation, it cannot be

argued that they do this on as regular a basis as stand-up comedians do, and it also

cannot be positioned as the feature most central to their work as religious leaders,

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whereas the work of a stand-up comedian is centrally to share prepared speeches with

multiple, varied audiences.

Motivational speakers, if they are motivational speakers by trade and not as a

side endeavor, do make their bread and butter by traveling around sharing prepared

speeches, but those speeches are again singular in nature, intended mostly for the result

of motivating an audience to take a particular action or adopt a certain belief. A

motivational speaker may be driven by the desire to convince teenagers everywhere not

to drink and drive, which is a worthy endeavor, but this target audience will most likely

be placed in front of the speaker by order of a principal or a guidance counselor or some

other well intentioned adult hiring the speaker with the express goal of driving this

message home to listeners through powerful and engaging persuasion. Comedians, on

the other hand, have access to listeners who choose to attend their performances of their

own volition, unless, of course, a principal happens to have hired the comedian to speak

to a group of students on whatever topic the comedian so chooses, which probably

doesn’t happen with incredible frequency.

If many people were to try to think about a prepared speech they’ve listened to

voluntarily in recent memory, a speech made by a politician might come to mind.

Politicians surely do travel around making speeches, and target audiences for any given

speech by a politician may vary more widely than the audience of, say, a religious leader

or a motivational speaker. Putting aside the caveat that, in fact, many politicians enlist

speech writers to actually prepare these speeches, which leaves them only with the

delivery portion and can’t be compared to comedians’ work of preparing and delivering

speeches, we will focus instead on the centrality of speech making to the work of a

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politician. Hopefully, politicians are not primarily concerned with preparing and

delivering speeches.

Though the tradition of sharing messages with the public through the time

honored practice of speaking to live groups of people seems to be sticking around in

politics, despite the now readily available alternatives of pre-recording a talk or simply

writing updates and sharing them electronically with mass audiences, the speeches made

by politicians are intended as touch points to relay their work or positions, and do not in

and of themselves represent the work of the politicians. Conversely, comedians are not

sharing speeches with live audiences in order to relay the other work they’re doing; the

speeches themselves, and the live performance of them, are the work. Along those same

lines, professors may be traveling and sharing prepared speeches or lectures with

audiences in multiple locations in order to promote a book or a cause, but again, they are

sharing those speeches to explain or publicize the larger body of work they are

responsible for; the speeches themselves do not constitute the core of the work, whereas

speech sharing lies at the center of the comedian’s work.

Finally, though commencement speeches are shining examples of the classic

tradition of speech preparation and delivery, the people who deliver them are not career

commencement speakers, so the performances cannot be considered central to a specific

position or career. The content of commencement speeches may cover a wide range of

topics and beliefs, but ultimately they are meant to convey some message or advice

about transitions or rites of passages. Additionally, listeners are, in some ways, held

captive by the context of the situation; whereas audiences for stand-up comedians are,

again, generally present for the occasion by choice, and for the express purpose of

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hearing the comedians, audiences for commencement speeches are primarily there to

celebrate a graduation, when we get right down to it. As with the prevailing practice of

politicians’ speeches, it may be comforting for rhetoric and composition enthusiasts to

know that there is still a time and place reserved for a well designed and powerfully

delivered speech, but we cannot conclude that commencement speeches exceed or

supersede the performances of stand-up comedians in terms of the practice of making

speeches and and traveling around to deliver them.

“Wait!” one member of the imaginary audience shrieks, remembering suddenly

that their task is to name jobs that include traveling and speechmaking. “I forgot about

people giving TED Talks! Do they count?” I’m so glad you’ve brought them up for us

to consider, imaginary audience member, even if you are a little late to the proverbial

game; it makes for a more interesting introduction to TED Talks than the phrases I

usually see in They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, in my

opinion. TED Talks are, of course, examples of speeches and they do tend to attract

audiences in large masses, both in person and online. They also occasionally make use

of humor as a technique for sharing important messages, but another technique more

consistently employed should be examined as a significant departure from the work

done by Sophists and stand-up comedians: the use of images and presentations, pre-

loaded and ready to go, behind the speaker to emphasize the points being made. Here, a

TED Talk presenter has a marked rhetorical advantage over a stand-up comedian, who

must rely exclusively on him- or herself on stage when speaking. Additionally, a TED

Talk presenter is not a TED Talk presenter by trade, but rather is delivering a TED Talk

as an overview or summary of a topic or finding crucial to his or her actual work.

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 Having gone over the ways in which stand-up comedians’ work primarily

consists of traveling to deliver speeches to a greater extent than the examples that the

imaginary audience members shouted out, we can confirm the statement presented in

American: The Bill Hicks Story: “Who do you ever pay to talk? Maybe a preacher,

maybe a lecturer, possibly a politician. Even those, rarely. Comedians are the only ones

that you pay to hear ‘em talk. ‘Talk to me. Make me listen.’” We should also

acknowledge that the job of a comedian extends beyond traveling speech making.

Especially in the social media saturated 21st century environment, many comedians

promote their work in online forums and share some of their material in places like

Twitter and YouTube, which requires neither speech making nor traveling, but

nevertheless, these two features remain the main points of stand-up comedy. So we can

concretely confirm that Sophists and stand-up comedians are similar on the surface level.

Let’s go deeper.

Both Sophists and stand-up comedians represent a shift in audiences and access.

As Susan C. Jarratt pointed out in Rereading the Sophists, “In centuries prior to the fifth,

a young man from the aristocratic class would have been ‘adopted’ in an informal way

and trained in performance of fitting ‘words and deeds’ by an older male friend of the

family… But in the middle of the fifth century, a small number of exceptionally

qualified traveling intellectuals began to gather young men able to pay a fee into small

‘colloquia’ or seminar groups for 3 or 4 years of political education.” The importance of

the shift from nobility to wealth cannot be overstated in terms of moving toward a more

democratic, equitable distribution of power. If the only way to gain access to learning

environments was to be born into a family with the connections to someone who could

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train you in education, then the arrival of the Sophists on the scene, accepting money

from anyone able to offer it, was a big deal. Access to learning was still limited to

people with the means to pay for it, of course, and “the aim of the education movement

led by the sophists was not to educate the people, but to educate the leaders of the people”

(Jaeger, 290).

Stand-up comedians too represent a shift in access to ideas, messages and

learning. Who reads scholarly articles? Scholars. Who gets to listen to lectures by

people who have studied a topic and prepared something to say about it? Students.

Who generally commits leisure time to catching up on think pieces in print and online

publications? Mostly people with some degree of formal education. Ahh, but who

consumes standup comedy? Everyone. Ok, I take it back; that may be a bit too far-

reaching an answer for readers to accept. But if not everyone, certainly more people

than are typically represented by the first three groups referenced—scholars, students

and formally educated people. Formal education isn’t a prerequisite for access to

messages delivered by standup comedians, and moreover, those messages don’t need to

be tied to course credit or some other scholarly carrot in order to motivate people to

consume them; audiences seek out standup comedy of their own volition. Therefore, the

messages shared by a standup comedian are accessible to a bigger, broader population

than the ideas put forth in the hallowed halls of universities and in the prestigious pages

of publications—and there’s no tuition or subscription required either.

Having established that standup comedians are similar to Sophists in that they

travel, deliver speech as a product, and represent a shift in audience and access, let us

turn now to the content of their work. With the aforementioned caveat that we are not

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considering the work of standup comedians as a whole to be the subject of this

comparison, but rather the work of comedians that place an emphasis on social and

political topics and prioritize the goal of enlightening audiences and/or instigating

change, we can move to the concept of these comedians as public intellectuals, another

way in which they echo Sophists. As Jarratt pointed out in Rereading the Sophists, “the

sophists’ ‘practice,’ not confined to the classroom, made them into the pre-eminent

public intellectuals of their era” (95). The same can be said for stand-up comedians,

who are certainly not confined to a classroom, but rather, peddle their words and ideas

around to, as previously mentioned, wide audiences of listeners, from all levels of

education and backgrounds.

The idea of standup comedians as public intellectuals will be further fleshed out

soon, so stay tuned for more on this topic, but for the time being, and for the purposes of

establishing a clear comparison between Sophists and stand-up comedians, suffice it to

say that if Jarratt can claim that Sophists “could be termed the first public intellectuals in

a democracy” because they “engaged in a range of public discourse activities including

teaching, both shaping and advancing a political agenda through their talk” (98), then we

can also use that logic to apply to standup comedians, who might not be the first public

intellectuals in a democratic society, but definitely shape and advance a political agenda.

Similarly, the ways in which Sophists anticipated writing-across-the-curriculum

programs, which, according to Jarratt, “have the potential to provide critical perspective

from outside disciplinary frames of reference” (97), align with the ways in which stand-

up comedians can provide critical perspective, also from outside disciplinary frames of

reference.

40
 For Jarratt, the association of Sophists’ legacy with democracy is more

compelling than any arguments that hold up rational education of individual

consciousness or Sophists as technicians as reasons they should be reconsidered and

restored as positive contributors to a history of speaking and teaching. She considers the

“rhetorical turn” described by Patricia Bizzell to be one in which rhetoric and

composition scholars return to democracy, ethics and the idea that the course of

language usage extends beyond pure functionality of technique to the wider outcome of

transmitting permanent human values. Jarratt sees this “rhetorical turn” as the “current

version of the sophistic counter-response to the Platonic critique” and there is an

emphasis on the type of pedagogy for which Bizzell advocates—one that “takes

seriously its mandate from the democracy enfranchising it—to provide equal

opportunity for all its members and investigate injustice and inequity wherever they

currently operate” (Jarratt 97). Here again we see a bold, straight line between the

motivation for Sophists and the motivation for the type of stand-up comedians we’ve

pinpointed here—the ones for whom “investigating injustice and inequity wherever they

currently operate” is a goal that is accomplished show by show, audience by audience.

As for providing an equal opportunity for members of a democracy to participate in and

bear witness to these investigations of injustice encompassed in comedic material, well,

we’ve already examined how stand-up represents a shift in access to these types of

observations, away from the prerequisite of a formal education and toward the general

public, which has been lured into listening by the dangling carrot of being made to laugh.

Moving over to Crowley’s contributions in the recovery of Sophists that can be

lifted up and transferred to a recovery of stand-up comedians, we will remember how

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Crowley pointed out that teachers, whom she was aligning with Sophists, could not

escape the public aspect of their work, and consider how stand-up comedians, whom I

align with Sophists, are not only not escaping, but embracing the public aspect of their

work. In fact, Crowley alludes to the two ways that Sophists knew to teach the mastery

of any practice— by example or by theorizing— and then shares that “the Greek word

from which theory is derived originally designated a spectator who sat in the furthermost

rows of the theater, literally ‘observing from afar’” (330). Clearly, stand-up comedians

would be working within the first way, by example, since they are far from a spectator in

the furthermost rows of the theater. In Crowley’s interpretation of the two options,

teaching has a “locatedness” that makes example the superior method over theory, and

she even goes so far as to conclude: From a Sophistic point of view, teachers who refuse

to make judgments about which issues are more important than others, which issues

deserve to be studied, and which issues should be ignored abdicate their responsibilities

to the students, and to their communities” (332-3). Applying this condemning

distinction to stand-up comedians, we can surmise that comedians who leverage their

“verbal wizardry” to make judgments about issues they see as needing to be addressed

are fulfilling their responsibilities to their audiences and their communities.

Continuing in the comparison of the content of Sophists’ and stand-up

comedians’ work, and with the idea of both being public intellectuals of sorts, we are

ready to confront the idea of “unsettling pupils” that Crowley introduces in “A Plea for

the Revival of Sophistry”: “Just as doctors use drugs to change unsatisfactory physical

conditions into more comfortable ones, teachers unsettle their pupils in such a way as to

move them away from unsatisfactory positions toward more useful ones. In this way,

42
social and political change come about.” This practice in which teachers engage

students, whereby the former “unsettle” the latter, was a key component to Sophists’

work. Likewise, standup comedians for whom social and political change are central

goals “unsettle” their audiences away from unsatisfactory opinions or beliefs toward

positions the comedians find to be more useful.

For example, in Ellen Degeneres’ 2000 comedy special The Beginning, she

dismantles the argument against same sex marriage—or, as Liz Feldman calls it,

marriage, because she doesn’t “gay park” or “go out to gay lunch” (Harper)— by

addressing a commonly made point that marriage has always been between a man and a

woman, and if it’s changed to two people of the same sex, “what is next? Someone

could marry an animal?” Degeneres goes on to imagine what it would be like to live

together in an apartment with a goat “to see if you’re compatible,” with pictures of “you

and the goat on the beach running, holding hands,” and trying to read the newspaper on

a Sunday morning while the goat is trying to eat it…. She may not be “unsettling” her

listeners away from an unsatisfactory position, but rather, leading them to see the

ridiculousness of it by indulging the idea of marrying an animal and turning it into a

comical situation. This comes after Degeneres’ material about directions on conditioner

bottles, ants carrying around other dead ants, and looking at one’s butt in the mirror, so

she has also made some rhetorical decisions around warming her audience up by making

them laugh about less controversial topics, and then addressing same sex marriage, once

she has established herself as someone with whom they can agree and laugh.

In the example above, Degeneres is using humor to lead listeners toward a

position she holds. In other instances, comedians with the rhetorical adeptness and

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access to audiences necessary to change minds may be using humor to reinforce

misogyny or hegemony. This ability to sway listeners in either direction is another

parallel to Sophists, some of whom subscribed to the notion of dissoi logoi, a rhetorical

exercise based on the premise that at least two contrary sides must be taken into account

(Poulakos). As Plato writes in Apology of Protagoras, “Wise and good orators make

what is beneficial rather than what is harmful appear just to the cities.” Judging which

comedians are “wise and good” is a challenging task, since these are necessarily

subjective determinations, but it can at least be said that a comedian like Degeneres is

attempting to make what she considers to be wise and good appear just to listeners.

With a litany of ways in which Sophists and comedians are similar already under

our belts, what other similarities can we list? Ah yes, what about the in-personness of

gathering people together in the same space? “You had to be there,” someone will often

offer, shaking his or her head, laughing at the memory of something that you had to be

there to find funny. The kairos of comedy, examined in chapter one, involves the need

to be present in a common space and time in order to participate in a stand-up

performance. Not only did Sophists travel around teaching about kairos, among other

things, but the act of traveling teaching itself depends on opportune time and conditions.

Several scholars have addressed the clear tie to physical presence inherent in rhetoric

(Porter, Turner), and some have even extended this thinking to stand-up comedians

(Rutter, Quirk), but there are more opportunities to connect the you-had-to-be-there-ness

of stand-up to conversations around public culture discourse communities.

Just as Jarratt demonstrates that Gorgias, Protagoras and other Sophists forced a

recognition of social differences with their work, using rhetoric and discursive strategies

44
to “identify and negotiate differences among social groups,” stand-up comedians also fill

this role, inviting audiences to consider social differences and recognize biases (92). As

part of a two-man duo called Fear of a Brown Planet, Aamer Rahman performed a bit in

2013 about “reverse racism” that will serve to demonstrate how stand-up comedians can

force recognition of social differences. In it, he muses about how “if you ask some

black and brown people, they’ll tell you flat out there’s no such thing as ‘reverse

racism.’” Rahman counters that there is such a thing as “reverse racism,” but it would

require a time machine. In his description of how he could be a reverse racist if he had a

time machine, Rahman declares, in his deadpan delivery:

I’d go back in time to before Europe colonized the world, right? And I’d

convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South

America to invade and colonize Europe, right? Just occupy them, steal

their land and resources, set up some kind of, like, I don’t know, trans-

Asian slave trade where we exported white people to work on giant rice

plantations in China—just ruin Europe over the course of a couple

centuries so all their descendants would want to migrate out and live in

places where black and brown people come from. But of course, in that

time, I’d make sure I’d set up systems that privilege black and brown

people at every conceivable social, political and economic opportunity

and white people would never have any hope of real self-determination.

Just every couple of decades make up some fake war as an excuse to go

and bomb them back to the Stone Age and say it’s for their own good

because their culture’s inferior. And just for kicks, subject white people

45
 to colored standards of beauty so they end up hating the color of their

own skin, eyes and hair. And if, after hundreds and hundreds and

hundreds of years of that, I got on stage and said, “Hey, what’s the deal

with white people? Why can’t they dance?” That would be reverse racism.

(Rahman)

Surely, if Jarratt can credit Plato’s Protagoras with forcing recognition of ethnic or

national difference by referring to his vulnerable status as a metic, or foreigner in Athens,

we can credit Rahman with forcing recognition in his astute, on-stage imagining of what

it would take to constitute “reverse racism.” His matter-of-fact catalog of all the social

constructs and privileges that would need to be retroactively put in place in order to

make a joke about a white person’s dancing “racist” in an equivalent kind of way to a

joke about a person of color represents a brilliant piece of logic, and also serves as an

excellent explanation of why “punching down” isn’t as purely funny as “punching up.”

Finally, let’s consider the parallel “bad rap” Sophists and standup comedians

alike have been assigned. Just as “rhetoric” in general is used in a negative, pejorative

way (“political rhetoric” is usually a slight), the definition of “sophistry” is “a subtle,

tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning,” and

Sophists are often criticized for not having ethics attached to their teaching of how to

argue. Similarly, how often are comedians written off as substance-less mirth makers

who have little more to contribute to communities than the guy (or girl) who got Class

Clown in your senior yearbook? Pretty often. Why is this, when we consider that, as

Sophie Scott noted in her 2015 talk at URI, “When you laugh with people, you access an

ancient, evolutionary system to make and maintain social bonds and regulate emotion"?

46
 It’s possible that the pleasure that comes with laughter and humor make it easier

to imagine that the messages carried with that laughter are unimportant. Sophists, as

previously mentioned, were thought to have undermined their rhetoric with the

playfulness of their techniques, demonstrating that even centuries ago, playfulness was

seen as a weakening of an argument’s perceived clout. Moreover, the wide range of

material covered by stand-up comedy means that some comedians are largely making

fart jokes and complaining about women in their sets, which makes it even easier to

write off the whole lot of them. Plenty of comedians might embrace this light treatment,

maintaining that they are there to tell jokes and make people laugh, and “it’s not that

serious.” However, there is a danger in letting the bad rap earned by some comedians

cloud our judgment about the medium as a whole, or writing off an entire group of

rhetors and performers because a portion of them make unsavory jokes that educated

people might consider uncivilized and unworthy or further discussion or analysis.

Instead, we should consider how Crick, in borrowed Deweyan terms, reimagined

Sophists as having “discovered a method of bridging the instrumental (or ‘logical’) and

consummatory (or ‘aesthetic’) qualities of language within a single discursive form

capable of generating common action in response to a shared exigence” (41). We

should then ask ourselves: What might be gained by reimagining stand-up comedians as

operating within a single discursive form (stand-up comedy) capable of generating

common action in that unexpected way described earlier by Chris Bliss as an endorphin-

inducing transformation of walls into windows?

Argument to Reread the Stand-ups

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 While Sophists were relegated to the wings of the history of rhetoric until such

time as scholars like Havelock, Barrett, Jaeger, Crowley, Crick and Jarratt saw fit to pull

them onto the main stage and reconsider their contributions, stand-up comedians

continue to be largely written off, and deserve to be pulled onto the main stage and

reconsidered for their contributions to the field of rhetoric, and to the formation of the

public’s thoughts and opinions. Stand-up comedy is often enjoyed and appreciated as

performance, but seldom analyzed or respected as persuasion. Just as Gagarin reframes

the purpose of Sophists beyond simple persuasion and Crick works to recover the

professionalism and experimentalism of Sophists, I seek to reframe the purpose of stand-

up comedy beyond entertainment, and to recover the professionalism and

experimentalism of stand-up comedians.

Scholars have applied thoughtful analysis to humor in multiple ways in the past

few decades, including a number of studies on political comedy by David Letterman,

Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart (Holcomb, Compton and Miller, Waisanen, Hariman,

Goodnow, et. al.), but one main difference between the work of comedians like

Letterman, Colbert and Stewart on television shows supported by writing staff members

and the work of comedians in the stand-up genre is that stand-up comedians

independently produce and deliver their own material. Some comedians may have

writing assistance, but the majority of comedians write their own material, travel alone,

and sell this material as their product, much like the Sophists did, yet comedians are

seldom, if ever, considered rhetors in their own right.

There is a lot to be gained by considering comedians rhetors in their own right,

and if we, as rhetoric and composition scholars, are successful in seeing them for the

48
thoughtful composers and deliverers of important messages that they are, we will be on

our way to rereading comedians in a similar grand-scale fashion to the rereading of the

Sophists. Rereading the Sophists opened up a whole new historical and theoretical

direction for our field, and rereading stand-up comedians will afford a similar opening.

For starters, imagine the freshness and excitement that would come from consuming

stand-up comedy sets critically, appreciating them professionally, and bringing them

into our classrooms as texts to hold up to the light for reading, understanding and

discussing.

If we did agree, as a field, that stand-up comedy sets and the rhetors who create

and perform them are worth continued attention, what might our research look like, and

our findings from that research? What might our classrooms look like? What would our

students gain from the natural enjoyment of encountering humor during learning, and

from the strong messages of power and human behavior and social constructs described

by comedians? Well, our research might look more like what Anne Ruggles Gere

describes as how how “writing development occurs regularly and successfully outside

classroom walls” in "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of

Composition.” Currently, bringing a speech by the first lady at a convention into a

composition classroom for analysis and discussion would not be likely to raise any

eyebrows, but showing a ten-minute excerpt from a Sarah Silverman stand-up special

might. If we agree to reread stand-up comedians and make space for their work in our

classrooms, perhaps neither the speech nor the stand-up set would seem out of place in a

composition classroom, and who is to say that both types of texts wouldn’t be important

to expose students to and ask them to interact with?

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 By acknowledging that comedians might not deserve that bad rap they’ve earned,

and that their identities can be reconstructed as powerful contributors to public thought,

we will be able to see them as public intellectuals in the same way that Jarratt argued

Sophists to be public intellectuals. One interpretation of a public intellectual is

“primarily a philosopher who possesses a secondary talent for attracting public interest

in their ideas” (Crick 26), which is useful in viewing comedians first as people who

philosophize, whereas they are typically defined by that secondary talent, which is

attracting public interest in their ideas. Many other characteristics attributed to Sophists

by Crick can also be applied to comedians: that they are “antifoundationalist[s] first,…

productive artist[s] and pedagogue[s] second” (27), that they “use all the resources of

reflective thought to bring forth productive transformations in a complex and changing

environment” (28), and, perhaps most importantly, that they concern themselves with

“the act of ‘bringing-forth’ (poiēsis) that makes present things previously concealed or

inchoate” (29). Again, not all comedians will warm to this assessment of their work as

making present things that were previously concealed, just as no Sophist would lay

claim to the goal of shaping of the soul (Jarratt 87), whether they were actually doing

that or not. Jaeger sees the central educational task of the sophistic movement as

developing “consciousness” though, and whether or not comedians lay claim to that goal,

their words do in fact develop consciousness.

Comparing the reasons scholars successfully cited for rereading Sophists to the

reasons we should reread stand-up comedians could go on all day, but alas, we have

other connections to draw—namely, to jesters, public intellectuals, and social activists—

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so let us conclude this particular connection by reaching way back to 1957, when Eric

Havelock wrote this about Sophists:

If we intend to use the term sophist of these people, in its modern

derogatory sense, the title is a misnomer, and that, even if we rearrange

our values sufficiently to grant that they grappled seriously with problems

of language, discourse, and communication, we still have not made a

sufficient historical adjustment.... Of course they taught rhetoric as a

technique for the effective formulation of political ideas, but as ancillary

to a bigger thing, a larger view of life and man altogether. If there is one

quality which identifies them, and yet which is wholly incompatible with

their traditional reputation, it is a sense of social and political

responsibility. Beginning with the sociology attributed to Protagoras with

its rationality, its humanity, its historical depth, continuing with the

pragmatism which seeks to understand the common man’s virtues and

failings and to guide his decisions by a flexible calculus of what is good

and useful, and ending with a theory of group discourse as negotiation of

opinion leading to agreed decisions, we are steadily invited to keep our

eye not upon the authoritarian leader, but on the average man. (Havelock

229-30)

Working from this assessment of Sophists, let us look for places where we can easily

substitute “stand-up comedians.” Grappling seriously with problems of language,

discourse and communication? Check. Leveraging rhetoric as a technique for the

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effective formulation of political ideas? Check. Offering us a larger view of life and

man altogether? Check. A sense of social and political responsibility that is wholly

incompatible with their traditional reputation? Check. (Think: fart jokes as “traditional

reputation.”) Seeking to understand the common man’s virtues and failings, and to

guide his decisions by a flexible calculus of what is good and useful? Check.

Demonstrating a theory of group discourse as negotiation of opinion leading to agreed

decisions? Check. Directing our eye on the average man? Check.

In order to make a sufficient historical adjustment in our treatment of stand-up

comedians, we will need to follow in the footsteps of those who created a path for

rereading the Sophists in our efforts to reread the type of stand-up comedians we are

concerned with here as the next iteration of Sophists. Advancing a reinterpretation of

stand-up comedians should get added to the to-do list of the rhet/comp community, so

who out there will be the Crowley to my Havelock? To close with some Jarratt-esque

motivation, I invoke the final line from Rereading the Sophists: “For those composition

teachers who wish to participate in the revitalization of our own democracy, the voice of

sophistic rhetoric speaks out in playful, persuasive, and promising tones” (117). When

we again replace “sophistic” with “stand-up comedians,” we see how their “playful,

persuasive, and promising tones” do indeed speak out as inspiration for the revitalization

of our democracy.

Jesters Speak Truth to Power

If you were sufficiently- or even somewhat- convinced of the comparable nature of

stand-up comedians’ work to Sophists’, dear readers, I think you will find this next

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parallel, between stand-up comedians and jesters, an even easier leap to make with me.

Just as with Sophists, there are multiple surface-level ways in which jesters and stand-up

comedians are similar, but more importantly, there are deeper, more significant ways in

which their roles and functions align. Jesters told jokes—sure, let’s start there.

Certainly there is a clear overlap between jesters, whose purpose was to entertain, and

stand-up comedians, whose purpose is the same. When we tried to think of who, besides

stand-up comedians, made a living off of traveling around, selling speech for profit, we

had a hard time coming up with a better match, right? Now try the same with the

profession of singlehandedly making crowds laugh through wit, wordplay and

wisecracks. It’s the comedians all day again.

Thinking back to the computational theory of humor may help us to understand why

jesters spanned across time and space, cropping up on multiple continents in an age

where one king wasn’t exactly calling another up on the phone to say, “I have this great

system where I let a goofy, unattractive person give me advice and it doesn’t hurt my

delicate feelings because he’s just so funny.” Perhaps the necessity of that error

correction function of humor is what drew all those leaders in all those places to come to

the same conclusion. Quirk alluded to this same concept when she told us, "Comedy

serves an important prosocial function by testing those ideas that we take for granted.”

Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw are both credited with the adage, “If you

want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." Whoever said

it, it accurately and succinctly characterizes how jesters got away with leading leaders

by the elbow toward better, fairer decisions by jovially pointing out the error of their

ways. To better understand jesters in general, and court jesters in particular, we will turn

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to Beatrice K. Otto’s thorough, comprehensive overview of their functionality and

universality in Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Tasked with

the entertainment of leaders, jesters have “existed across the globe and across history, in

most of the major civilizations of the world and many of the minor ones” (Otto xvii).

The fact that jesters appear to have arisen spontaneously and independently in so many

different areas of the world suggests that they “fulfill a deep and widespread social need”

(Otto xvii).

The words fool, clown, trickster, and buffoon are sometimes used

interchangeably with jester, but for consistency’s sake, we’ll stick with jester for this

chapter. For centuries, jesters have advised and instructed kings and other leaders by

sneaking uncomfortable truths into their entertainment diets. Despite their widespread

presence, jesters have been largely ignored by historians who write at great length about

kings without acknowledging their “omnipresent pal[s] and adviser[s],” the jesters (Otto

xx). A jester could use humor to mock and advise a king without causing offense

because of his identity as a harmless simpleton, but was also regarded as a potential

mouthpiece for God or a prophet (Otto 33). The amnesty afforded by adopting the status

of a jester meant that men “with their wits about them” could “speak through the mouths

of their stage fools” and thereby earn the “license to speak truth with impunity” (Otto

37).

Otto’s examination of jesters is extensively researched, with examples spanning

the whole globe. While most histories of jesters that do exist concentrate almost

exclusively on European courts, Otto jumps around the world, providing detailed

accounts of jesters like: Birbal, jester to Akbar the Indian Mogul emperor (xxi, 16);

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Tenali Rama, an Indian “superjester” (xxi); Andrelini, French court poet who inherited

the post of jester from Seigni Johan (13); Babriel la Mena, jester to Don Fadrique

Enríque, admiral of Castille in Spain (17); and multiple jesters from China with telling

names like Upright Fellow Wish (Zhu Hanzhen) (17), Moving Bucket (Shi Dongtong),

jester of Emperor Gaozu (18), Newly Polished Mirror (Jing Xinmo) (18), Full Streamer,

Tang dynasty magician-jester (19), Liu Wenshu, a Mandarin jester renowned for his

rhetoric (19), Subtle Reformer King (Wang Ganhua) (20), and Immortal Revelation (22).

The Hopi Indian tradition of clowns is shown to be in direct correlation with the

jesters in all of the places just listed with a quotation from an unnamed Hopi Indian

describing their clowns:

The clowns represent us in our misdeeds… the clowns show life as it

should not be… the clowns show, mimic the “hidden immoralities” and

bring them into the open so we can see where we have gone wrong….

This is a small village and people gossip…. Only the clowns can get

away with it. They can get away with anything…. When we came here

to live with the Great Spirit, someone hollered and we looked back and

there were the clowns… the clowns show the essence of morality…

clowning is a public confession for humanity. (Otto 42)

Otto holds this up as evidence of the “age-old, deep-rooted human need for clowns” and

follows up with other tribes that reserve places for clowns to do the work described by

the Hopi Indian above, including the Bougouni tribe of Sudan, the Mayo and Yaqui

Indians, and the New Mexico Pueblo Indians (42-43). The consistency with which

different groups across time and space have assigned someone to do this same work of

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serving as the “release valve” and moral guide for a group of people is borderline

baffling, but it may become less mystifying when we consider the theory of humor

suggesting its evolutionary purpose.

Desiderius Erasmus contemplates jesters with In Praise of Folly, maintaining,

“We have all seen how an appropriate and well-timed joke can sometimes influence

even grim tyrants… The most violent tyrants put up with their clowns and fools, though

these often made them the butt of open insults.” Mikhail Bakhtin too defines a clown as

“a rogue who dons the mask of a fool in order to motivate distortions and shufflings of

languages and labels, thus unmasking them by not understanding them” (404-5), and

describes how, in his role as “herald of the truth,” the medieval joker articulated truths

and social commentaries using laughter and jokes that mocked and degraded those in

power. In one of the oldest texts I’ll be referencing in this document, The Ass Race: Or

the Secret History of Archy Armstrong, Fool to King Charles I, by Archibald Armstrong

in 1740, a jester himself remarks that jesters are perceived as being on the side of the

people, “the little man fighting oppression by the powerful… By fooling wisely (‘en

folastrant sagement’), the jester often won favor among the people (‘gaigna de grace

parmy le people’).”

Stand-up Comedians as Jesters

Stephanie Koziski Olson claims, "Stand-up comedians perform an important role

by providing an arena where tension-provoking subjects can be publicly scrutinized [and

can] catalyze new awareness... when humor illuminates new possibilities or puts old

prejudices in a new light." If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what those jesters we

just read about did. More profound than the obvious alignment of bringing mirth to

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crowds, the deep-seated purpose of that mirth is what we ought to be looking at. Jesters,

as Bruce Dessau tells us in The Bluffer’s Guide to Stand-up Comedy, were “society’s

safety valve, a controlled way of expressing discontent” (8). A comedian’s unique

position to speak truth to power comes in part from the “foolishness” often ascribed to

them, as to jesters:

Jesters are also generally of inferior social and political status and are

rarely in a position (and rarely inclined) to pose a power threat. They have

little to gain by caution and little to lose by candor—apart from liberty,

livelihood, and occasionally even life, which hardly seems to have been a

deterrent. They are peripheral to the game of politics, and this can reassure

a king that their words are unlikely to be geared to their own advancement.

(Otto)

It is from this vantage point that comedians perform their rhetorical moves through

humor, and this research seeks to transcribe, describe and analyze those rhetorical moves.

There actually aren’t too many published articles drawing lines between jesters

and stand-up comedians already out there, possibly because the surface-level similarities

appear too obvious to require them. It is the deeper-rooted alignments that we are

interested in for our comparison of the two, however. Lawrence Mintz takes a moment

to note that stand-up comedy follows in the tradition of fools, jesters and clowns in that

aforementioned seminal text that made me declare myself a Mintzian scholar, “Standup

Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” but only in passing (72). Barbara Plester

and Mark Orams provide a nice setup detailing all the ways in which jesters were

important to democracies, some of which are included earlier, but then where do they go

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directly from there? Jokers in the workplace. Specifically, they examine how

employees identified by colleagues as jokers were able to express alternative

possibilities and question authority in the workplace at three New Zealand IT companies.

It’s an interesting study, but makes for sort of an unexpected pivot toward such a narrow

comparison, when a much clearer connection can be drawn between jesters and stand-up

comedians.

Moving again to the reflections of non-academics, Bill Hicks is described in

American: The Bill Hicks Story, as “a patriot [who] questioned the government because

that’s what a true patriot does.” If we assume that jesters were patriots of sorts because

they supported and defended their countries through their own brand of loyalty—poking

fun in service of improving—then the above characterization of Hicks could be

considered an endorsement as a jester. Similarly, Joan Rivers struck up the notion of

exposing truths through comedy when she spoke about fellow comedian Lenny Bruce,

calling him a warrior who fought hypocrisy, and comparing him to “the one who ripped

the clothes off the emperor and said, ‘Look, he's naked’" (Make ‘Em Laugh). In the

cautionary tale of which Rivers speaks, many of us are familiar with the small child who

announces that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, while the rest of the townsfolk

and the emperor himself are too afraid to say they don’t see the suit of clothes two sly

weavers have “made” for the emperor, telling him that it’s woven from a fabric that can

only be seen by the eyes of those of high enough class and intelligence to see it.

Otto demonstrated how a physical deformity or abnormality in a jester operated

as a basis for enabling him to jokingly point out imperfections in others, with a lead-in

like, “I know I’m not perfect, but have you looked at yourself recently?” (31). Picture, if

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you will for a moment, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast delivering harsh jabs to a king.

It’s likely that the king would not take too fondly to hearing a strong, strapping, able-

bodied specimen jeering at him, because kings can develop pretty thin skins from being

told how great they are all the time. Now consider Joan Rivers’ observation about

Phyllis Diller, who “was the last of the women that had to look like clowns to be heard”

(Make ‘Em Laugh). The reason why Diller, dressed like a bird with wild hair and a

feather boa, was allowed to be funny was that she essentially disguised herself as a

clown, and “for a female to develop into a clown, joke-teller or story teller, she must

violate the cultural expectation that females should not aggressively dominate mixed-sex

social interaction" (McGhee).

Already belonging to a marginalized group may make it easier to abandon

socially acceptable behavior and become a jester, who was “certainly part of the

counterculture that existed beneath the surface of officialdom” (Birnbaum). Comedians

too have often been considered to be part of a counterculture tradition, defying or simply

ignoring conventions, just as Dessau says clowns have always had the tacit permission

to do in the Middle Ages, when “jesters were able to speak their mind in the monarch’s

court” (Dessau 8).

Dissecting a Frog: Killing Comedy by Analyzing It

Now would be a great time to present some examples of ways in which stand-up

comedians operate under similar circumstances to jesters, but there’s that awful quote by

E.B. White to contend with when undertaking the task of analyzing a comedian’s

material: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the

frog dies of it.” The thing is, though, the argument that analyzing humor is not a

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worthwhile endeavor suggests that we should stick to analyzing unfunny material, when,

in fact, there’s a lot to be gained by analyzing humor. On the flip side, the very notion

that humor is not something to be analyzed may have been what’s allowed jesters and

comedians the freedom to wax philosophical under the guise of harmless, un-analyze-

able humor all this time. In fact, the very phrase “jester’s privilege” invokes the

protection of something “only being a joke,” and therefore essentially harmless.

Jon Stewart, who started out as a stand-up comedian, and then spent sixteen

years as the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, would often hold up his network

as a shield against being taken seriously: “My show is on Comedy Central,” he would

point out. In a 2011 interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Stewart even went

so far as to explicitly state, “I’m not an activist. I’m a comedian.” Refusing to accept

the authority that would come with the title social activist, he could effectively crouch

behind the humor defense wall in order to continue throwing truth snowballs from

behind it. In the same interview, Stewart later tells Wallace that he does push “an anti-

corruption, anti-lack of authenticity, anti-contrivance” agenda. John Oliver often goes

hand in hand with Jon Stewart in people’s minds, so we may as well reference a moment

when Oliver too denied having the power or authority to change minds. Responding to

the question of whether political comedy changes people’s minds with co-author Andy

Zaltzman in a 2005 article for New Statesman, he says there are two answers—“a short

one, and a slightly longer one. The short one is: no, it doesn’t. The slightly longer one

is: no, of course it doesn’t, don’t be ridiculous.”

At the risk of blowing up the spot of comedians everywhere who enjoy the

protection of the humor defense shield, we will move now to dissect some frogs in order

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to explore the many ways in which stand-up comedians align with jesters. We won’t be

the first to embark on analyzing humor, of course, and useful frameworks are provided

by scholars like Don Waisanen, whose “Standing-Up to the Politics of Comedy”

provides clear, careful analysis and a thorough explanation of his methodology.

Waisanen focuses on top-earning comedians, transcribes their material, and examines

their “political-communicative visions” through “methodological language analysis,”

effectively serving as a model for dissecting a frog without killing it.

Neither is Writing and Rhetoric scholar Joshua Compton afraid of dissecting a

few frogs. In “Image Repair in Late Night Comedy: Letterman and the Palin Joke

Controversy,” Compton and establishes a different framework by applying Benoit's

image repair theory to several case studies of comedians being made to apologize for

jokes they made about people in positions of power. Perhaps our best scholarly model

for dissecting stand-up comedy is Sophie Quirk, who demonstrates a masterful treatment

of comedian after comedian’s material, managing to succinctly capture the humor of the

bit she’s referring to in a no-nonsense way and then skillfully sketch out a descriptive

diagram of what the humor accomplishes. For a taste of how she does this, we’ll

examine an analysis she offers of British comedian Mark Thomas’ attack on the Serious

Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) in his 2007 show Serious Organised

Criminal. (You may have noticed earlier that humour was spelled with a U when I used

a quote from Quirk and mentioned that she taught at the University of Kent, in which

case you are not surprised by the spelling of organised with an S.) Part of SOCPA made

it illegal to hold a demonstration in the area around Parliament Square without obtaining

police permission first. In Thomas’s bit, he describes a picnic his friend Sian had on

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Parliament Square that got busted up by the police because she had a Victoria sponge

cake that had “peace” written in icing on it, which made “the police deem her cake to be

a political cake” (Quirk 120).

After transcribing the segment of Thomas’s performance, including pauses and

audience laughter, Quirk sets to work breaking down the delivery and the appeal to logic.

First, she makes note of Thomas’s emphasis of the words picnic and cake, noting that he

is “popping their satisfyingly short and punch syllables out so that the bouncing

hardness of the sounds is juxtaposed with each word’s homely, innocent connotations”

(Quirk 120). Then she comments on the volume and tone of his delivery, portraying it

as increasingly frustrated, reaching a fever pitch when Thomas declares, “And I thought

any law (.) that means we can be arrested (.) for a cake…” but concluding with a

drawing back into “a cheeky expression and wry smile” as he concludes, “we can play

with [laugh]” (Quirk 120). And play with the law he does, once he has “elicit[ed]

consensus by appeal to logic,” which is Quirk’s final assessment of Thomas’s rhetorical

success with that joke.

Social scientists have also found ways to dissect political comedy. At The Center

for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, Professor Robert Lichter and

his team have spent over twenty years cataloging and coding late night TV jokes. Their

brand of comedy analysis differs greatly from the type of analysis we’ve looked at so far.

While Waisanen, Quirk and Pearson take a more qualitative, narrative approach,

describing a part of a comedian’s act and then explaining its impact on listeners, Lichter

and his team are more interested in quantitatively representing the topics and targets of

jokes by comedians like Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert. Both approaches

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are useful and important, and comedy research would benefit from many more examples

of qualitative and quantitative data like that which is put forth by the scholars listed so

far.

Drawing strength from the leadership of Waisanen, Compton, Quirk, and Lichter,

we will put aside E.B. White’s callow claim that humor can’t be analyzed because no

one cares and the joke won’t be funny anymore and turn a critical eye to some specific

examples of stand-up comedians operating as public intellectuals and social activists. In

the United States, our presidents don’t typically keep jesters around the White House to

entertain them with good natured ribbing over domestic and foreign policy decisions,

although comedian John Fugelsang has mused that President Obama would have had

even higher approval ratings if he’d hired Chris Rock to be the staff jester. We do,

however, have an annual tradition of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which

a comedian typically serves as an entertainer and performs some of those same functions

we saw jesters fulfilling all over the world in Otto’s overview. While Don Waisanen has

published some scholarly analyses of White House Correspondents’ Dinners, he’s

actually been focused on the presidents’ jokes, and not the professional comedian

present. Waisanen examines the risks inherent in presidents adopting humor as a

rhetorical strategy in “Comedian-in-Chief: Presidential Jokes as Enthymematic Crisis

Rhetoric” and discusses how jokes made by the president at the White House

Correspondents’ Dinner can provide a strategic distraction from political content in

“Laughing or Learning with the Chief Executive? The Impact of Exposure to Presidents’

Jokes on Message Elaboration.”

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 What we want to look at is the comedians at these events, because their presence

and performance feels awfully familiar after reviewing all that stuff about jesters just

now. They typically take aim at the political leaders in the room, like the president, vice

president, and members of senate and congress, and at representatives from the news

outlets present at the dinner as well. If we were to apply the motives of a jester to these

speeches, we would assume that criticisms launched by the comedians are intended to

redirect and correct the behaviors of their targets. Past performers have included

comedians Richard Pryor, Bob Hope, Jay Leno, Sinbad, Paula Poundstone, Al Franken,

Bill Maher, John Stewart, Ray Romano, Cedric the Entertainer, Stephen Colbert, Wanda

Sykes, Seth Meyers, Cecily Strong, and, most recently, Larry Wilmore. What a list! In

order to do some comparisons across the board, we’ll look at speeches by Seth Meyers,

Cecily Strong, and Larry Wilmore, all of which included jokes about C-SPAN, MSNBC,

President Obama’s hair, and Donald Trump, among other things.

Starting with the most recent, we saw Wilmore start his 2016 speech by referring

to the event as “Negro night” and end it by “keeping it 100” and telling President Obama,

“Yo Barry, you did it, my nigga.” In between those two statements, Wilmore took aim

at Fox News, saying that they would report the evening as “Two Thugs Disrupt Elegant

Dinner in DC”; at MSNBC for now standing for “Missing a Significant Number of

Black Correspondents”; and at C-SPAN for being the number one TV station senior

citizens die while watching. Wilmore also derided Obama for not closing Guantanamo

Bay and golfing every day, and Trump for saying he’s going to be more presidential,

which Wilmore said for him meant that when he boasts about his genitalia in future

debates, he’ll only refer to it as his President Johnson. In what had become a tradition at

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that point, Wilmore included a couple “Obama’s hair so white” jokes: “Your hair is so

white it tried to punch me at a Trump rally. The president’s hair is so white it keeps

saying, ‘all lives matter.’” Like most of the comedians who furnish the speeches at the

White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Wilmore becomes more serious toward the end,

offering a sincere, humble acknowledgement of the historical significance of having a

black president and pointing out that when he was growing up, a black man was thought

to be not good enough to lead a football team, and now a black man can lead a whole

country. The fact that so many of the comics drop the comedy to deliver their praise

reinforces the “jester’s privilege” of needing that humor defense wall to hide behind

when throwing those truth snowballs that really sting.

Working backward, Cecily Strong delivered the 2015 White House

Correspondents’ Dinner speech, and she kicked it off by asking, “It feels right to have a

woman follow President Obama, doesn’t it?”, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s bid for

presidency in 2016. She plays down her authority from the start, telling the audience

that she’s “only a comedian,” so she wouldn’t tell politicians how to do their jobs; that

would be like them telling her what to do with her body. Early on, she brings up the

lack of accountability for police brutality against people of color by following up a joke

against the secret service with the remark, “I don’t want to be too hard on those guys,

because they’re the only law agency in the country that will get in trouble if a black man

gets shot.” Those in the audience made their customary collective “boo” that comes

after a joke hits a little too hard or gets a little too real, and Strong pretended not to

understand, asking if they were saying “boooo” or “truuuue,” a refrain she returned to

for other jokes that elicited a boo as well. She addressed the networks present, saying C-

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SPAN’s viewers are mostly cats, MSNBC lacks diversity of programming, and Fox

News is a channel full of “hot blondes and old dudes.”

Toward the end of her set, Strong rebuked the practice of holding female

politicians up for scrutiny over their looks by making all the journalists raise their right

hands and repeat, “I solemnly swear not to report on Hillary Clinton’s appearance,

because that is not journalism.” Her contribution to the “Obama’s hair so white”

tradition was, “Your hair so white now it can talk back to the police,” again turning the

spotlight onto unequal patterns of behavior by the police. She may have started out by

claiming to be “only a comedian” who wouldn’t tell politicians how to do their jobs, but

in her twenty-three-minute set, she tackled health care, police brutality, gender double

standards—just in the span of jokes we were able to review in the space of two

paragraphs. Just like the jesters directing their rulers by poking fun at their failures,

Strong is wielding humor as a way to highlight the transgressions of her leaders.

Jumping back to Seth Meyers’ speech at the 2011 White House Correspondents’

Dinner, we start to see a pattern in the targets for jokes. He offers the obligatory

wisecracks about the news outlets present, mocking C-SPAN for being boring and

having few viewers, just as we saw Wilmore and Strong doing; after greeting the crowd

before him, he alluded to the “handful of people watching at home on C-SPAN,” calling

it the official network for wide shots of empty chairs and saying that people think

Osama Bin Laden is in hiding but he actually hosts a show on C-SPAN from 4-5 every

day. For the rest of the networks, Meyers pretended to give previews of what their after-

parties would look like: At MSNBC’s party, President Obama makes the kool-aid and

everyone there drinks it; the Breitbart party will be crazy—it won’t be good, but it’ll be

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crazy; and Huffington Post is having a party but they’re asking everyone to go to

another party first to steal food and drink and bring it there. They’re antics, of course,

but they contain criticisms of the stereotypes each is accused of being. Furthermore,

they represent Meyers’ direct critique of the people present in the room, in the grand

tradition of jesters delivering criticism to leaders in the court.

Meyers riffed on Donald Trump for a little under three minutes, who was present

at the dinner; the cameras zoomed in on his face multiple times throughout the barrage

of jokes and he smiled zero times. Among the one-liners was one that people would

later point to as the reason Trump did decide to run for president, although Trump

refutes that: “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a

Republican, which is surprising because I just assumed he was running as a joke.” He

turned his ridicule on the Congress as well, telling members that we are not impressed

that they’re spending an evening sitting next to people they disagree with, because the

rest of us call that Thanksgiving. Continuing on the theme of not being impressed with

Congress, Meyers cuts a little deeper with the second reference, telling members that we

are not impressed then they complain that bills are too long to read, and in fact, he thinks

they don’t read them at all, but instead “vote on bills the same way the rest of us agree to

updated terms and conditions on iTunes.”

Meyers’ rhetorical motive here could be characterized as an attempt at getting a

laugh, but more accurately, he is taking the representatives of congress present at that

dinner that the American people are disappointed in their failure to take their jobs

seriously. By calling into question whether or not they actually read the bills they are

tasked with considering, Meyers calls them on the carpet with a smile. The comparison

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to the impatient, inattentive way in which many people agree to updated terms and

conditions on iTunes is a rhetorical strategy that highlights the irresponsibility of

agreeing without full understanding. As for his “Obama’s hair so white” joke, Meyers

tells Obama that if it gets any whiter, the Tea Party is going to endorse it.

The Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner is another annual tradition,

although less widely viewed than the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is

why Hasan Minhaj kicked off his 2016 speech there by calling it “the Correspondents’

Dinner that nobody cares about it,” adding, “tonight is definitive proof that we all

definitely haven’t made it.” Similar to how Wilmore began his speech by calling the

event “Negro night,” because the comedian and the president were both black, Minhaj

notes that last year’s speaker was Aasif Mandvi, telling the audience, “Thank you so

much, RCTA, for going back to back with your browns. You guys are killin’ it.”

Diving right into the de rigueur C-SPAN jabs we saw in the White House

Correspondents’ Dinner speeches, Minhaj announces that the channel is now available

in HD (High Definition), “which is great, so now you can see all that legislation not

getting passed in 1080p—all the wrinkles and inefficiencies just, ugh, so crisp.” The

other networks get the comedic treatment too, of course, with Minhaj saying CNN is

basically Bravo with plane crashes, Vice will send your local barista to talk to the head

of ISIS, MSNBC is everybody’s annoying vegan friend— “we get it you’re right, I just

don’t want to hear it right now”— and Huffington Post and BuzzFeed have more

journalistic integrity than the lot of them.

The really brave part of Minhaj’s speech comes at the end, after some jokes

about Donald Trump being similar to Biff’s character in Back to the Future II and

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Hillary Clinton dressing like someone who works at PF Chang’s—I guess he didn’t take

Cecily Strong’s oath the year before. Minhaj had taken some shots at the members of

Congress in the room already by responding to accusations by the media that they’re a

do-nothing Congress: “The media's hard on you guys; they say you're a do nothing

congress, but you guys do a lot. You go to fundraisers. You host fundraisers. You have

your staff set up fundraisers for you to host. That’s three things right there!” But he

really went after them in the last five minutes of his speech, when he delivers an

earnestly scathing condemnation of the Congress:

We look to you guys as our leaders. You make almost $200,000 a year to

write rules to make our society better, not tweet, not tell us about your

thoughts and prayers, to write rules to make our society better… Right

now, since 1998, the NRA has given $3.7 million to Congress. There are

294 sitting members of Congress that have accepted contributions from

the NRA, and that doesn't even include the millions of dollars from

outside lobbying. Before I get up here in my liberal bubble and I ask for

gun control and universal background checks and banning assault rifles,

we've got to be able to have the conversation. Right now, specifically,

Congress has blocked legislation for the CDC to study gun-related

violence. We can't even talk about the issue with real statistics and facts. I

don't know if this is like a Kickstarter thing, but if $3.7 million can buy

political influence to take lives, if we raise $4 million, would you guys

take that to save lives? (Minhaj).

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In considering the complex relationship between subversive critique and political

advocacy, we can recognize Minhaj’s rebuke of Congress’ failure to respond

appropriately to growing threats posed by gun violence as both a critique and an act of

advocacy, since his platform and position as a comedian make his comments widely

available to the public for consumption and consideration.

Now, thinking back to Meyers’ accusation that the Congress complains about

how long the bills are to read, we can view these comments in the same light as when

jesters ribbed their kings about their actions or inactions. In both cases, the jesters and

the comedians are making moves that enable critical ideas to be accepted by people

when they are rhetorically structured as comedy. We should attribute the same courage

for doing so, too; the comedians addressing Congress today may not be in danger of

having their heads lopped off and placed on sticks the way some jesters did, but they are

still standing in a room full of people and lobbing critiques at them, and that is an

activity not many would sign up for. And they’re comedians! They’re supposedly joke

tellers, but they’re up there advising members of Congress, pointing out flaws they see

in the President and his staff’s work, and making everyone laugh while they’re doing it.

Plester and Orms posit, “the jester was the one person likely to brave telling the truth,

usually to prevent excessive pride and arrogance in his leader and possibly prevent

foolish behavior. His use of humor prevented unpleasant repercussions, but his position

could be described as ambiguous, although the jester may have been ‘high born’ and

highly educated, he was never appointed to serious court positions” (Plester and Orams

256). I posit that the same can be said of the rhetorical power and bravery our

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comedians show by speaking truth to power, as we’ve seen Minhaj and others do in their

Correspondents’ Dinner speeches to Congress.

Correspondents’ Dinner speeches correlate with court jesters’ performances

because they provide criticisms of leaders enacted before the leaders themselves, thereby

speaking truth to power. While the speeches we’ve examined are delivered by stand-up

comedians, the context and setting differ from stand-up comedy as a genre. If we’re

looking for examples of stand-up comedians speaking truth to power within the context

and setting of traditional stand-up, we’ll need to talk about Richard Pryor, who is often

held up as a Jackie Robinson-type figure who paved the way for public criticism of

whiteness (Stone, Zoglin, Mintz). In the earlier stages of his career, Pryor played it

pretty safe, performing for mainly white audiences with what he later referred to as

“Mickey Mouse material that [he] couldn’t stomach anymore” (Zoglin 48). Initially

resisting efforts to link his comedy to a black political movement, Pryor was influenced

by his wife Shelley Bonus, “a white Jewish hippie from a Brooklyn show business

family who had marched with Dr. King and who encouraged Pryor to do more radical

material” (Zoglin 49). Improv comic Paul Mooney also reports having intentionally

pushed Pryor toward embracing a more socially conscious, politically charged presence,

stating, “Richard was in awe of me because I wasn’t afraid of white people. I added

kerosene to the fire” (Zoglin 49).

Pryor went on to add his own kerosene to the proverbial fire, in the form of raw

retellings of experiences he’d had. In his 1971 special Craps (After Hours), Pryor

describes being hauled into police lineups because “all the ugly white girls that couldn’t

get any said niggers raped ‘em” and rooting for black fighters in boxing matches:

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“please, whip the white folks, I don’t want white folks to win nothin’” (Zoglin 50). In

his 1974 special That Nigger’s Crazy, he acts out how he behaves when confronted by

white cops, opening his eyes wide and saying, slowly, loudly and dramatically, “I AM

REACHING INTO MY POCK-ET FOR MY LI-CENSE.” Zoglin calls his vivid

character vignettes “little masterpieces of autobiographical comedy” and labels Pryor’s

comedy “harsh, but healing” (51, 63). According to Zoglin, the black comics who came

before Pryor had “reached out to white audiences… to foster racial understanding by

stressing how much alike we are” whereas Pryor “rubbed our noses in the differences—

and yet made us feel their universality” (63).

With his blunt, no-holds-barred observations on race relations, Pryor used the

platform of stand-up comedy to force recognition of unequal treatment between races

and became a rock star in the field of stand-up comedy. This trajectory mirrors that of

jesters who gained notoriety and enjoyed favor for their razor-sharp wit, and were

therefore able to publicly raise awareness of inequality and injustices. Other comedians

applauded and imitated Pryor’s style, which Zoglin identifies as having some drawbacks:

“Plenty of comedians, white and black, emulated his rough language and in-your-face

style but missed the empathy and vulnerability that informed it” (63). In Make ‘Em

Laugh: The Funny Business of America, Cheech Marin highlights Pryor’s as a “black

voice not only filled with rage, but with insight,” and it was precisely that combination

of rage and insight, paired with the country’s socio-political climate, that kept Pryor in

the center of the public eye. Fellow comedians weren’t the only ones who could identify

Pryor’s performances as socially significant; multiple academics have written about his

career, making observations like, “Pryor’s humor became a resource for challenging

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dominant cultural assumptions and managing the risk of speaking truth to power”

(Rossing).

The subversive nature of comedy makes it a suitable weapon for launching

criticism; mocking or deriding an established system of power can be a powerful form of

dissent, and stand-up comedians like Pryor are able to lure listeners into accompanying

them on a journey to uncover immoral discriminations and biases. As we saw with the

overview of jesters, renegade comedians can agitate from behind a veil of “all in good

fun,” making them dynamic revolutionaries who can sneakily subvert systems and

institutions of power. Plenty of scholars have addressed the subversive nature of

comedy writ large (Sanders, Radulescu, Stone, Shugart), but to isolate the specific brand

of comedy generated by a stand-up comic in an in-person performance is to take the

power of subversion a step further. Comedy in general buzzes with the potential to

subvert, yes, but stand-up comedians in particular have quite an awe-inspiring task to

tackle alone on stage, under a spotlight, as audience members are ostensibly drinking

beer, holding side conversations, and occasionally heckling them, so the fact that they

are able to contribute to a greater sense of social commentary on top of all that is pretty

impressive.

Stand-up Comedy as Resistance

Having saved the best for last (to use another transition phrase that likely won’t

be found in They Say/I Say: Academic Moves That Matter), let us focus our attention on

the use of stand-up comedy to resist, just as the jesters resisted by cleverly framing their

criticisms of and to the leaders. Resistance implies a struggle, or an attempt to prevent

by action or argument. When stand-up comedians engage in subversive criticism of

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those in power, they are not only personally engaging in resistance as individuals, but

they are making available an example of resistance to others. Audience members who

observe their acts of resistance may experience a sense of resolved strength to engage in

resistance themselves. And what makes their brand of resistance special is that it sneaks

in through the back door of our consciousness, as Bliss suggested. To examine how

stand-up comedians can promote a subversive, less combative sort of resistance, let’s

consider two similar arguments—one made in the more traditional method of persuasion

and one made through comedy.

The recent U.S. Presidential election generated fresh forms of political

communication as public policy advocates expressed their concern about the rise of

Donald Trump during the fall of 2016. Steven Goldstein, Executive Director of the Anne

Frank Center for Mutual Respect, said in a statement on Wednesday, January 25th, 2016:

Donald Trump is retracting the promise of American freedom to an

extent we have not seen from a President since Franklin Roosevelt

forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II.

Today the Statue of Liberty weeps over President Trump’s

discrimination.… His slamming America's doors on the starving, the

wounded and the abused is a grotesque blot on our nation's history of

freedom. The President's actions are an embarrassment to the timeless

vision of America as inscribed by Emma Lazarus to ‘give us your tired,

your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Demonizing

refugees and immigrants, and spending billions of taxpayer dollars to

keep them out of our nation, will go down in American history as one of

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 the most tragic deviations from our national conscience. (Abbey-

Lambertz)

Goldstein’s statement clearly represents a graver, more somber communication style

than stand-up comedy generally embodies. In contrast, let’s look at a similar argument

made by D.L. Hughley in his 2007 stand-up special Unapologetic, in which he, like

Goldstein in the statement above, addresses immigration and the idea of building a wall

along the Mexican border. He sets it up thusly: “Of course the immigration debate is

raging. They wanna build a wall to keep the Mexicans out. I’m like, ‘Who the fuck gon’

build it?’ I know we ain’t, and I cannot imagine white people working in the sun that

long—oh lawd.” Hughley leans back here, exaggerating these last words while the

audience applauds. He continues, imitating a white person building the wall: “How

many more bricks do we have to go? Jesus. José, help me with the wall. As long as

you’re on the other side when we finish, no one will know. Please José.” After leaning

over and holding his forehead for a short pause to demonstrate the imagined wall

builder’s fatigue, Hughley straightens back up to add some history to his narrative:

“Arizona, California, Texas, New Mexico and Nevada was all Mexico until the 1900s.

Them motherfuckas ain’t crossing the border; we moved it.”

The audience laughs, and then Hughley takes a turn for the more serious: “These

are the people who build our homes, watch our children, and grow our food, and we

gonna insult them by building a fucking wall? If we gon’ build a wall, at least put they

names on it and tell them it’s a monument or something.” With that, he brings it back

into the absurd, allowing the audience to laugh as he turns and pretends to point to

something: “This is for you, Lupe. Here’s your name, right here.” Turning again to face

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the audience, he allows the laughter trail off a little before making another serious

statement, “This nation was founded by immigrants,” and punctuating that with another

punchline, “Everybody in this motherfucka took a boat.” People applaud. Hughley adds,

“Some of us willingly…” as a reference to slavery before describing a law that says that

if Cubans arrive, they can stay, and saying that if he were Mexican, he would go to Cuba

and “ride back with them motherfuckas.” He elaborates on this scenario for about a

minute, essentially giving the audience a moment to enjoy some continuous laughter

before returning once again to his main point: “The Statue of Liberty, you go to New

York, it has an inscription at the bottom by Emma Lazarus, that is a tribute—an

invitation to immigrants: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning

to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tossed, to me, and I lift my lamp by the golden door.’

“That shit is beautiful,” he finishes, as the audience again applauds, “but if we

don’t mean it, let’s scratch that shit off. Or at least put, ‘P.S. except for Mexicans. We

reserve the right to refuse service to anybody. She’s holding a lamp, not a leaf blower.’

I don’t understand it, man.” For this last part, he again turns and pretends to be writing,

adding the line to the Statue of Liberty and, with the mention of the leaf blower,

returning to the sentiment he alluded to at the beginning of the bit about Mexicans

working as laborers. Hughley is not an overly physical comedian, like Steve Martin or

Kevin Hart, who regularly use exaggerated gesture, facial expression and movement

throughout their shows, but the parts where he does turn and point or lean over rubbing

his forehead are worth mentioning because they add to the overall experience of

watching stand-up.

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 It’s an almost perfect every-other-line formula of serious statements and funny

gags. If we were to remove the more overtly humorous parts, of pretending to be a

white person out in the sun, struggling to build a wall and imitating a Mexican

pretending to be Cuban, we would be left with a string of sentences in a tone not unlike

that of Goldstein’s statement about paying billions of taxpayer dollars to keep refugees

and immigrants out of the country. Rhetorically, Hughley is masterful at building his

argument: he begins by setting the scene and introducing the topic of immigration;

alludes to the race and class divisions that often separate the type of work done by white,

black and Mexican Americans; provides a little historical and geographical context;

argues against disrespecting a group of people whom he identifies as frequently doing

the important, thankless work of “build[ing] our homes, watch[ing] our children, and

grow[ing] our food”; points out that America is built on immigrants, adding that

enslaved people were not willing immigrants; cites the poetry on the Statue of Liberty;

and condemns discrimination and the idea of going against the spirit of this nation’s

foundational values. He does all this in under three minutes. He does it on stage in front

of hundreds of people. He does it without notes and he does it to great laughter and

applause. It is a bona fide example of invention, arrangement, style, memory and

delivery, and of active resistance to boot.

When we compare Goldstein’s written statement with Hughley’s three minutes

of material, we can agree that they have parallel messages. We can see that they both

address the same topic and cite the same inscription on the Statue of Liberty, but that

they are delivered very differently. Without needing to prioritize one over the other,

hopefully we can also agree that both avenues are important forms of resistance against

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what they characterize as an unjust discrimination against immigrants. Goldstein’s

words are strong, moving and especially significant coming from the Executive Director

of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. Hughley’s words too, from nine years

earlier, are strong and moving, and potentially significant to a different demographic.

His position as stand-up comedian means he has wide access to public audiences, and

his use of casual, conversational language, punctuated with swears, impersonations and

punchlines, make him an authority in a different way than Goldstein is—in the way, say,

that the jester’s absurdity operated.

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 CHAPTER 3

A STAND-UP COMEDIAN, A SOCIAL ACTIVIST, AND A PUBLIC

INTELLECTUAL WALKED INTO A BAR… IT WAS W. KAMAU BELL!

Having explored the ways in which stand-up comedians are similar to Sophists and

jesters, we will now be entering a more consistently contemporary arena as we examine

how stand-up comedians are also aligned with public intellectuals and social activists.

In order to fully appreciate how stand-up comedians function as both public intellectuals

and social activists, and why that should be important to rhetoric and composition

scholars, it is useful to first zoom out and firm up a broader understanding of how and

why humor in general can be utilized to shape opinions and shift mindsets.

Comedians as Public Intellectuals

To first shore up what is meant by the term “public intellectual,” we will return

briefly to Nathan Crick, of sophistical rehabilitation fame from earlier in chapter two. In

his efforts to expand on Jarratt’s claim that “the sophists could be termed the first public

intellectuals in a democracy,” Crick offers several customary understandings of what we

take a “public intellectual” to be. In one interpretation, for instance, “a public

intellectual is primarily a philosopher who possesses a secondary talent for attracting

public interest in their ideas” (26). If we were to sit with that definition for a moment

and ponder how stand-up comedians might fit it, we would ask ourselves if stand-up

comedians are primarily philosophers who happen to be adept at attracting public

interest in their ideas via making them funny. Hmmm, we might think, I suppose some

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stand-up comedians are philosophers who package the meat of their thinking inside a

flaky, pastry shell of humor and serve them up hot and delicious to audiences. But then

we realize we are making ourselves hungry with the beef wellington metaphors, and we

shake our heads to return our thoughts once more to what a “public intellectual” is.

Crick asks us to revise our “dualistic understanding of a public intellectual to

mean something more than an intellectual skeptic with a knack for public speaking” and

instead calls for “a pragmatic approach that defines public intellectuals as those who use

all the resources of reflective thought to bring forth productive transformations in a

complex and changing environment” (27-8). In this understanding of public intellectual,

we see an even clearer alignment with stand-up comedians, who call on an especially

compelling resource of reflective thought—humor—to bring forth productive

transformations in a complex and changing environment.

Alan Lightman, along with his contemporaries Stephen Pinker and Neil deGrasse

Tyson, serves as a public intellectual by sharing science information with the public in

accessible ways. Lightman and Pinker teamed up to deliver remarks at a 1999 MIT

Communications Forum, in which they both shared what being a public intellectual

means to them and why it’s important. According to Lightman, a public intellectual is

someone who decides to write and speak to a larger audience than his or her professional

colleagues. For whatever reason, Lightman decided to restrict this description to those

who are “on the faculty of a college or university,” which would severely limit the pool

of people eligible to be considered public intellectuals, according to his definition. This

is interesting, considering he references Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of an

intellectual as the “world’s eye,” communicating ideas to the world, not just to fellow

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intellectuals. If the only people qualified to serve as the “world’s eye” are those

employed by a college or university, we might have a problem on our hands, since quite

a good deal of formal education is required to achieve those positions, thereby

necessarily restricting who could be counted in this category.

Edward Said’s take on the public intellectual went in the other direction. Instead

of making the status of a public intellectual dependent on belonging to the academic

community, Said advocated for amateurism as a way of maintaining relative intellectual

independence. In a section called “Speaking Truth to Power” in his 1993 Reith Lectures,

“Representations of the Intellectual,” Said elaborates on the amateur status he sees as

beneficial for public intellectuals to preserve. One way in which intellectuals could

accomplish this is by “choosing the risks and uncertain results of the public sphere - a

lecture or a book or an article in wide and unrestricted circulation - over the insider

space controlled by experts and professionals” (87). Another way is to refuse to be

bound by professional training; Said did not rule himself out from matters of public

policy just because he was only certified to teach modern European and American

literature, but spoke and wrote on broader matters because he considered himself to be

spurred on by commitments that went well beyond his narrow professional career (88).

According to Said, an intellectual's job is to question authority and advance

human freedom and knowledge to as wide a public as possible. This often means

standing outside of society and its institutions to actively disturb the status quo “with an

alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak the truth to

power” (97). The goal of speaking the truth, he emphasizes, is to project a better state of

affairs and and “try to induce a change in the moral climate” (100-1). By speaking truth

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to power, Said concludes, public intellectuals intelligently represent ideas where they

can do the most good and cause the right change, even if the intellectual’s voice is

lonely along the way. Stand-up comedians can certainly lead lonely existences,

traveling alone from city to city—comedian Will Ferrell famously described stand-up as

“hard, lonely, and vicious” (Sher 16). They also question authority and speak truth to

power, although, again, not all comedians across the board do this.

To be clear, I am not saying I’m the first person to draw parallels between stand-

up comedians and public intellectuals. Some of the most coherent, evocative writing on

the topic of comedians as public intellectuals has been done by non-scholars, in fact.

Just as we have examined the ways in which a comedian’s access to wide, willing

audiences represents a shift from the pre-requisite of formal education in order to be

exposed to ideas and messages, we should also consider the benefits of publishing an

article about stand-up comedians as public intellectuals in a highly visible space like The

Atlantic. Megan Garber did just that with her May 2015 article in The Atlantic, “How

Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.” In it, Garber offers a qualitative analysis,

focusing first on a specific example of Amy Schumer’s material about Bill Cosby and

then zooming out to characterize Schumer’s work as “in line with the work being done

by her fellow performers: jokes that tend to treat humor not just as an end in itself, but as

a vehicle for making a point.”

One caveat to including Garber’s article in this argument is that some of the

material she is referencing, including Schumer’s Bill Cosby bit, is actually in the form of

sketch comedy. For the most part, in an effort to remain focused on stand-up comedy,

sources that address other forms of comedy— such as sitcoms, improv, late-night talk

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shows, and sketch comedy—have been eschewed. However, some of the material

Garber references, (and at a rapid-fire rate, hyperlinking to videos on YouTube and

Comedy Central left and right) is from stand-up comedians’ acts, and her overall

argument is very much in line with the parallel we are currently concerned with, of

stand-up comedians to public intellectuals.

Garber does identify both stand-up and sketch comedy as targets for her analysis;

she writes that although the comedy of late-night TV used to consist mainly of quippy

monologues and vapid celebrity interviews, and still does, to some extent, “the stuff that

is firmly rooted in traditions of sketch and standup… is taking on subjects like racism

and sexism and inequality and issues including police brutality and trigger warnings and

intersectional feminism and helicopter parenting and the end of men.” She concludes

this train of thought by remarking that jokes double as arguments, and consequently, the

phrase “comedy with a message” is increasingly redundant, since she views the genre of

comedy as becoming more like cultural criticism.

Lubricating Conversations

In an effort to explain what may be encouraging this shift toward comedians

doing the work of cultural criticism, Garber qualifies that predecessors to contemporary

comedians also “used laughter as a lubricant for cultural conversations—to help us to

talk about the things that needed to be talked about,” listing Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers

and George Carlin as examples, and hyperlinking, somewhat haphazardly, to a YouTube

video, a broken page of the Detroit Free Press, and a Wikipedia page, respectively, to

demonstrate how each comedian lubricated with laughter. What she sees as new and

different then is not just a trend toward moral messaging in comedy, but direct, mass

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access made possible by increased uses of YouTube, Facebook, and other social media

platforms. She remarks that the immediate attention offered by the Internet means that a

comedian’s work is no longer confined to time-bound performances in “sweaty clubs,” a

point that I made myself in an article published in Comedy Studies, “Comedy Meets

Media: How Three New Media Features Have Influenced Changes in the Production of

Stand-up Comedy.”

In addition to moral messaging and mass attention, Garber suggests that the

beginning of a more inclusive field of comedians has contributed to an elevation of

comedians to the status of public intellectuals. Reflecting back on popular sources of

comedy in the 1990s, Garber describes how, “[g]radually and then suddenly, the smug

nihilism of Larry David and Adam Sandler and Carrot Top and that guy who smashed

watermelons with comically oversized mallets came to seem not just out of place, but

regressive.” In its place, she sees the popularity of Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, Trevor

Noah, and Key and Peele as meeting a new need for comedy to represent a more

important place in public:

Comedy ceased to be the province of angsty and possibly drug-addled

white guys making jokes about their needy girlfriends and airplane food.

It became (slightly) less exclusionary to women and minorities. It began

to ask, and answer, the questions that newfound diversity will tend to

bring up—questions about power dynamics and privilege and cultural

authority. As comedy began to do a better job of reflecting the world, it

began, as well, to take on the responsibilities associated with that

reflection. (Garber)

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Just as the telling of truths was highlighted as an important task associated with jesters,

Garber identifies truth telling as a responsibility that lifts comedians into the public

intellectual category: “These are bits intended not just to help us escape from the

realities of the world, but also, and more so, to help us understand them. Comedians are

fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and

moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.”

Before moving on from Garber’s overview of how comedians became public

intellectuals, we will take one more look at a piece of evidence she leverages as proof

that this transformation is taking place. Noting that Amartya Sen, Noam Chomsky, and

Mario Vargas Llosa were among those named in a 2009 Foreign Policy list of the

world’s top twenty public intellectuals, Garber explains that “when the magazine gave

the public the opportunity to suggest a write-in addition to the official list, readers didn’t

select an economist or a novelist or a philosopher for the honor. They selected Stephen

Colbert.” Hopping over to Foreign Policy to see how this write-in winner was reported,

we see that his appeal to young people is highlighted by the author: “Colbert so deftly

and hilariously skewers the politically powerful that he has become one of young

America’s go-to sources for genuine news and analysis” (Amburn).

While that particular evidence by itself might not hold up to the research

standards of a peer reviewed journal, we cannot deny that it is a meaningful piece of the

puzzle when seeking to understand how and why stand-up comedians can increasingly

be considered public intellectuals. Erratic hyperlinking aside, Garber’s work here

should be recognized as contributing to an important conversation about the role of

stand-up comedians, and, in a metacognitive sense, it should also be recognized as

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confirmation that, just as stand-up comedians can deliver serious messages to the public,

non-academics can report on it in publications outside the scholarly realm, and in fact,

comedy research benefits greatly from the thinking and sharing by non-scholars as well.

Garber was writing for The Atlantic. Many writers who publish think pieces in high

traffic places have the benefit of many more eyes on their words, but the drawback of

getting far less prestige for the work. Scholars may scoff at the thought of academic

journals inviting prestige, but the truth is, something published in a peer reviewed

journal has to be officially cited by the author’s name whenever it’s referenced, while

someone in the break room can ask, “Did you see that piece in The Atlantic?” without

anyone reminding her to mention the author by name.

Occasionally, scholars writing on the topic of comedy will refer to a non-

academic source, but more often than not, any nods to other thinking on the topic will be

in the direction of scholarly articles and books. Rosen actually acknowledges that “there

has been a flurry of scholarly activity—not to mention countless nonacademic

discussions in blogs and newspapers—trying to assess exactly what, if any, influence

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show has on audiences” (Rosen 2). However, it’s significant that he

uses the phrase not to mention to preface the category, since he does not, in fact, mention

what any of them say. I am intentionally pulling in ideas and analyses put forth by a

variety of sources, including the “countless nonacademic discussions in blogs and

newspapers” (and documentaries, and magazines, and stand-up performances

themselves), so I’ll continue to mention them.

Comedic Use of Social Media

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 Other non-scholars have made connections between stand-up comedians and public

intellectuals without necessarily calling the connection out as clearly as Garber has.

Marisa Kabas wrote about comedian Michael Ian Black as “an unexpected voice of

reason in the debate over gun control” in her 2016 article “Michael Ian Black and the

Golden Age of Idiocy” for The Daily Dot. In his interview with her, Black addresses the

common criticism that comedians should stick to the job of making people laugh and not

engage in political conversations. He asks who, then, should be allowed to talk about

political issues? Only politicians? That notion is offensive to Black, who recalls taking

to Twitter to share his opinions about gun control with his two million followers after

the shooting happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, ten minutes from where

he and his family live. The intentional use of his status as a stand-up comedian to

project his position on gun control marks Black a candidate for the category “public

intellectual,” as long as we’re not going by Lightman’s limiting restriction to those on

the faculty of a college or university.

As we saw with Black’s use of Twitter, social media platforms have created new

ways for comedians to serve the public interest as public intellectuals by using

innovative stunts, hoaxes, and other dangling carrots of entertainment. Twitter and other

social media platforms like it are only about ten years old, so there’s lots of innovation

but little documentation of these practices in the scholarly literature, but we do, once

again, have some non-scholarly texts to look to for this analysis. Lindy West of Jezebel

covered LA comedian Solomon Georgio’s use of Twitter and his comedian status to pull

a uniquely fresh public intellectual stunt in her article, “Comedian Celebrates MLK Day

by Tweeting 'I Love You' at Racists.” For less than two hours, Georgio sought out racist

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tweets about Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and responded with something patient and

kind, always ending by telling the person he loved him or her, before announcing that he

needed to break for ice cream.

Georgio’s act undoubtedly looks different than other acts we may feel comfortable

identifying as public intellectualism. However, his public act of non-violence and

consequent raising of awareness that people were tweeting the things they did (messages

under 140 characters that manage to be so sharply cruel that I cannot include any of

them here, even after the early warning that foul language would be coming), and the

evidence that he could reply with a patient, loving statement created a juxtaposition that

begs the question, “Why wouldn’t this be public intellectualism or social activism?”

Because it is from a comedian? Because it is on Twitter? Georgio himself humbly

deflected any such analogy, telling his followers, “Thank you all for the kind regards,

but sitting in my pajamas typing ‘I love you’ isn’t MLK comparable. Let’s all do more!”

(West). Though he may not give himself credit for MLK-level activism, through his

open communication with his fans and followers, Georgio has effectively capitalized on

his identity as a comedian and called on his relationship to audiences to encourage

action against hate speech and racism.

The rise of the Internet has also helped to create a market for accessible

approaches to the critical analysis of stand-up comedy. Websites like Pop Matters

pioneered the serious examination of popular culture to a mass audience back in 1999

and since then there has been an explosion of popular culture commentaries. Francie

Latour is another critical analyst of humor who isn’t writing from the perch of an

academic journal. In “Wise Guy: Wrapped in Louis C.K.’s Stand-up Material Are

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Powerful Insights on Race,” Latour summarizes a bit by Louis C.K. in which he points

out that as a white man, he would be able to get in a time machine and be safe anywhere.

“And there you have it,” Latour concludes, “one of the most clear-eyed analyses of

white privilege ever to reach mainstream America, wrapped in a three-minute comedy

routine with a Showtime premiere and 7 million-plus hits on YouTube.” While the

article may be hosted on Boston.com, a source likely to make some academic readers

cringe and question credibility, Latour is engaging in the work of identifying a part of a

stand-up act that makes an important social point, summarizing that part and explaining

how and why it does the work of social commentary. She even goes on to compare

C.K.’s work with Peggy McIntosh’s watershed 1988 essay, “White Privilege:

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

To be fair and to avoid misrepresenting Latour as an author, it is important to

note that she does have academic associations, having worked as an adjunct journalism

professor for three years and as coordinator of the Broad Diversity Initiative at MIT and

Harvard, so we can hardly say she’s a layperson. The fact remains, though, that the

critical analysis being presented in “Wise Guy” does not fit within the traditional

borders of academic research and publishing, and the reason it’s worth noting, at the risk

of steering too far off the path of examining how stand-up comedians function as public

intellectuals and social activists, is that people feel compelled, not only to think about

comedy and what it accomplishes, but to write about it as well. If the humor attached to

important critical points about white privilege is the spoonful of sugar that helps the

medicine of a difficult-to-grapple-with concept go down, then perhaps it is worth

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considering what may happen when composition students are asked to apply critical

analysis to self-selected stand-up material and write about their conclusions.

Working Within the Language of the People

Inside the scholarly realm, we see another contribution to the conversation about

the role of stand-up comedians as public intellectuals in David Jenkins’ dissertation,

“Was It Something They Said?: Stand-up Comedy and Progressive Social Change,”

which positions stand-up comedy as a vital part of intellectual, social life and a vehicle

for progressive social change. In a section called “Stand-up Comics as Modern Public

Intellectuals,” Jenkins admirably and concisely asserts that comics function as public

intellectuals by publicly mocking, educating, shaming and praising. As examples of

stand-up comedians who move past their role as entertainers to offer critical insights to

the public, Jenkins offers Sarah Silverman, Louis C.K., and Chris Rock. Stating that our

current culture does not value critical thought at large, Jenkins explains how stand-up

comedians are nevertheless able to instigate us to think critically: “Stand-up comics have

an access to both the public space and the rhetorical tools (not only in their ability to

craft messages, but their ability to do so in the language of the people) that can make us

think critically without the same resistance” (46). This notion of working within “the

language of the people” brings us back to that important shift we looked at when

aligning stand-up comedians with Sophists, whereby the prerequisite of formal

education is removed as a barrier to accessing information and ideas.

Jenkins alludes to both the use of humor to introduce a differing opinion in a

surprise attack/backdoor way— “those moments when comic wit cracks through what

someone thought they knew”—as well as to solidify group agreement, which he adds to

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by pointing out that the listener may have previously lacked the ability to articulate the

idea, again reinforcing the idea that comedians can substantially impact listeners from a

broad range of formal education backgrounds (42). Both scenarios are identified as

“potentially generative of a reckoning or epiphany… hold[ing] us up to a kind of ethical

standard” (42). Furthermore, the thinking and ways of expressing introduced by stand-

up comedians are not limited to the time and space of the performance itself; Jenkins

explains that “witnesses can take it back into daily life and use it as weapon or shield”

(43). To better understand what he mans by this, let’s review an example Jenkins offers

of Eddie Izzard’s response to a popular National Rifle Association (NRA) argument that

“guns don’t kill people; people do.”

“I think the gun helps, you know? I think it helps,” Izzard tells his audience in

the 1998 special Dress to Kill. Calmly, he elaborates: “I just think just standing there

going (sticks finger out miming a gun), ‘BANG!’ That’s not going to kill too many

people, is it?” (Jenkins 41). Now, audience members may or may not have already

agreed with the position that the NRA’s argument is fallible and misleading, so the

experience in Izzard’s show may have been a reckoning for some and an epiphany for

others, but either way, they would now be equipped with a short, clear, pithy, humorous

weapon for any future arguments about gun control in their daily lives. In other words,

Izzard acts as a public intellectual by engaging audiences on a topic, generating their

thinking, and equipping them with ideas to sit with, take home, and maybe use again in

conversations with others, thus planting and spreading the seeds of ideas.

Providing people with methods for navigating and negotiating major social

issues is just one of the functions of a public intellectual. Referring to Lightman’s

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remarks at the 1999 MIT Communications Forum, Jenkins draws particular attention to

the three levels of public intellectualism outlined by Lightman:

Level I: Speaking and writing for the public exclusively about your

discipline.

Level II: Speaking and writing about your discipline and how it relates

to the social, cultural, and political world around it.

Level III: By invitation only. The intellectual has become elevated to a

symbol, a person that stands for something far larger than the discipline

from which he or she originated. A Level III intellectual is asked to

write and speak about a large range of public issues, not necessarily

directly connected to their original field of expertise at all. (Lightman)

Jenkins establishes that a stand-up comedian’s discipline is entertaining, and that most

comedians venture into Level II by virtue of connecting their entertainment to the social,

political, and cultural world. For comics that fit into Level III, he offers Jackie “Moms”

Mabley, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin. To illustrate ways in which stand-up

comedians serve at the third level of Lightman’s public intellectual ladder, Jenkins

explains that in addition to taking up important issues on stage in their acts, comedians

are asked their opinions on world events in interviews. Additionally, “[n]ow they access

Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, and YouTube in ways that not only cut out institutional

structures but also provide an immediacy and ease of access unavailable in the past”

(Jenkins 46). In all of these ways—on stage, in interviews, and on social media, Jenkins

shows that we use comedians as authority figures, and as such, they are our modern

public intellectuals.

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 Comedians as Social Activists

Most dictionary definitions of social activism center around direct, intentional,

vigorous action to support or oppose a cause in an effort to bring about social change.

Based on everything we’ve determined so far about the similarities between stand-up

comedians, Sophists, jesters and public intellectuals, it may seem like an easy leap to

look next to social activism. If it does, that means I’ve done a sufficient job of leading

us down the path so far. If it doesn’t, well then I’d really better nail this next comparison,

hey? Returning briefly to Lightman’s three levels of public intellectuals, a Level III

candidate who is asked to write and speak about a large range of public issues is a good

jumping off point to begin considering at what point stand-up comedians can be seen as

social activists. Oratorical performance in general is, as Meier and Schmitt say,

“uniquely conducive to social engagement and disruption of widely shared social

opinions.” Stand-up comedy in particular, as we’ve noted already, is a form of

oratorical performance that offers the added benefit of joy and release. It is a perfect

concoction of alluring entertainment and far-reaching platform, and, if Hurley, Dennett

and Adams are correct about the evolutionary role of laughter as a mechanism for error

correction, it has enormous potential to bring about social change by revealing truths and

untruths and identifying ideas that have value.

Social change is often naturally driven by oppressed, underrepresented groups,

because therein are the people for whom social change would be a good thing. Those in

power would rarely offer freely to have less power, and therefore social change

wouldn’t be headlining their priority lists. Speaking out with the goal of generating

social change signifies a relative silence or status quo being broken, “as

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underrepresented perspectives are given voice and attention, as topics that went

unspoken due to taboo or hegemonic agenda-setting are loosed for public and social

discussion” (Meier and Schmitt). If there’s one thing a stand-up comedian is good at

(and there are, actually, many things a stand-up comedian is good at), it’s loosing a topic

for public discussion. To those who are comfortable with the balance of power exactly

as it is, a comedian loosing a topic for public discussion is likely to be seen as an

“irritating gadfly,” as Rosen refers to Jon Stewart in his previously mentioned essay.

We already know that stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj recognizes the

opportunity for social activism in stand-up comedy from reviewing his Radio and

Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner performance in chapter three. We now

return to Minhaj to examine a transmedia series and documentary called Stand Up

Planet he hosted to find the best comedians from the developing world and “harness the

universal power of comedy to change the conversation about global poverty.” In

Mumbai, India, Minhaj tells viewers in the documentary that 40% of people live in

slums, and a new generation of stand-up comics there are making their voices heard. He

follows comedians Aditi Mittal and Tanmay Bhat as they perform material on stage

about condoms, toilets and sanitary pads, and then talks with them about the underlying

issues that have motivated them to prepare and share material on these topics. For

instance, Bhat jokes about the absurdity of bleeping the word “condom” out in television

programming when overpopulation is such a serious issue.

In another bit, Bhat explains that 54% of people in India do not have regular

access to plumbing: “This number’s been going up since 1947… Basically the British

left and we started shitting ourselves a lot more, right? I think this is the best defense

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strategy any country can adopt—like, make the country smell so shitty that no one will

want to invade us again.” Minhaj asks him later if, when Bhat was writing the joke, he

really wanted audience members to think about this issue, and Bhat confirms that his

intention is to draw attention to this social issue. Minhaj proceeds to elaborate on the

need for toilets in India, noting that you don’t have to be an observational comic to

notice that there was a problem. He tours public bathroom facilities and talks with city

leaders about the need to install more toilets in order to address health and sanitation

dangers posed by widespread lack of indoor plumbing. Returning to Bhat’s original

joke meant to raise awareness about this issue, Minhaj concludes, “All in all, not bad for

a poop joke.”

In Aditi Mittal’s set, she jokes about a brand of sanitary pads called “Don’t

Worry”: “I like that they’ve stopped attempting to name themselves and just tell you

how to feel.” Minhaj explains to viewers that “it’s not easy for women comedians

anywhere, but until recently, women in India weren’t supposed to say much of anything,

let alone jokes.” In her explanation of why she’s chosen to include material on sanitary

pads in her set, Mittal tells Minhaj that women in India are stigmatized as “untouchables”

during their menstrual cycles and are not supposed to cook or enter temples during that

time. Minhaj asks her how far she’s willing to push on this issue and Mittal

immediately replies, “If it’s truth, then I will defend it until the day I die.” Cut to Mittal

onstage again, discussing the vaginal beautification industry: “They want our vaginas to

be fairer. They want our vaginas to be tighter. I’m like, ‘how ‘bout we do that for our

women’s laws?’” The crowd laughs, Mittal smiles, and Minhaj, in the audience, raises

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his eyebrows and says, “Wow.” Yes, wow. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s your social

activism right there.

Wrapping up his time in Mumbai, Minhaj reflects on the absence of local female

role models for Mittal and narrates, “My trip to India proved one thing for sure: nothing

is funnier than the truth, and the young comics I met were making sure people knew it.”

In a video chat with American comedian James Adomian, he describes the up and

coming comedy scene he’d witnessed and Adomian agrees: “Part of the magic of

comedy is that you can force people who disagree with you or even hate you… to listen.”

This segment of the documentary emphasizes again two recurring themes we’ve visited

thus far: Stand-up comedy is both a vehicle for truth and a mechanism for fresh, non-

combative persuasion.

Poverty and Racism Are (Not) Funny

Moving on to Soweto, South Africa, Minhaj participates in a Freedom Day

celebration and recalls the country’s joy when Nelson Mandela became the first

president after apartheid. Stating that poverty, violence, and a deadly AIDS epidemic

have since gripped South Africa, dampening the dreams inspired by Mandela, Minhaj

asks, “So where’s the comedy in all this?” He finds it in open mic nights, Africa’s first

full-time comedy club, and a satirical news show hosted by Loyiso Gola, all of which

Minhaj identifies as “signs of a comic uprising.” Meeting Gola at a barbershop, Minhaj

asks him how much race shapes his act, and Gola replies, “A lot…. I mean, wherever I

go I talk about race.” Providing background information about how there had been

white comics, but they weren’t talking to black people, Gola says that he does feel a

responsibility as one of the first major black comics in South Africa. An example of

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Gola talking about race in his act comes when he addresses the drastic difference in

likelihood that a white man or black man will be imprisoned: “White people don’t think

of going to jail. Jail is so far away. As a black man, you think of jail at least once a day.

At least once. You wake up, breakfast, jail. Ok sure, sure.”

Kagiso Lediga, Gola’s partner in a comedy sketch show called Pure Monate

Show, describes the general sense in the country in 2003, when the show first aired, as

one in which “people weren’t talking about things—there were many elephants in many

rooms.” Their show, Lediga tells Minhaj, was the first time someone made fun of

apartheid on TV, offering the release of laughter. “By joking about race,” Minhaj

narrates, “Kagiso and Loyiso are helping heal old wounds through the power of

laughter.” Pivoting to the AIDS epidemic, Minhaj wonders if comedy can help solve a

problem that big and asks Lediga if he feels the need to address global poverty issues

beyond race. The segment that follows squarely positions Lediga in the category of a

Level III public intellectual. In it, Lediga has been asked by Shout It Now to do a public

service announcement about male circumcision, and does so by dressing up as a penis

and sharing statistics about HIV prevention. If that is not some Level III public service

right there, I’d be hard pressed to find something that is.

The third comic Minhaj introduces us to in South Africa is Mpho Popps, whom

he describes as having grown up after apartheid. The first material we get to see from

Popps is not a stand-up set, but a rap he recorded about student loans to teach kids how

to save and invest money. Popps explains that because it’s a rap, kids would be singing

the song without realizing they were being educated, which mirrors our concept of

comedy as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Like Lediga, Popps is

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also engaged in the movement to educate young people about HIV prevention through

circumcision and safe sex. He does this through his onstage material but also as part of

his offstage persona, visiting schools and playing soccer with students, then huddling up

to have a serious conversation, punctuated with a joyous, impromptu rap session.

As Minhaj points out, South Africa is lucky to have young, sharp comedians like

the three he’s introduced in the film turning problems into punchlines: “Young gifted

and funny are good natural resources to have.” Back home after his trips Mumbai and

Soweto to sniff out stand-up comedians there promoting social change through their

performances and personas, Minhaj pitches the comedians he wants to bring to the

United States to fellow comedians James Adomian and Michelle Buteau. When he

describes how Mittal is one of the first women in Mumbai to be doing comedy, Buteau

calls her “the Harriet Tubman for other females in Mumbai—she’s paving that path.”

Surely we would not find too many people who wouldn’t agree that Harriet Tubman was

a social activist, so hopefully the comparison between the two women will be a clear

indication that what Mittal and others like her are doing with their stand-up comedy

work is also social activism.

Mittal and Popps are invited to the United States to perform with Minhaj, and the

documentary shows them touring Los Angeles and meeting two of the film’s project

advisors, Norman Lear (All in the Family, Sanford and Son, etc.) and Carl Reiner (The

Dick Van Dyke Show, The Jerk, etc.). In this way, Minhaj and the rest of the film’s team

pay homage to the history and legacy of comedy as a means to move audience’s

opinions. When asked about how to walk the line between going for a laugh and

making an important point, Reiner advises the group, “You can say anything you want,

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but make sure you’re making somebody laugh.” Minhaj tells the two comedy legends

about the work he’s seen the two up and coming comedians do, saying that the best

comedy is comedy that says something, and when he saw the comedians in Mumbai and

South Africa perform, they had a purpose. I argue that that purpose is social activism,

and these comedians as well as others who engage in that type of social change work

should be recognized and analyzed as such.

In the closing of Stand Up Planet, footage of impoverished places in India and

South Africa is shown, featuring the hopeful, smiling faces of young people, as Minhaj’s

voice delivers the following final message:

The last thing a comic wants is to be taken seriously. But I can tell you

this: You hear people say, ‘Oh, there’s so much suffering in the world;

jokes are inappropriate.’ But I say hunger is inappropriate. Poverty is

inappropriate. Lies and hypocrisy from governments, that’s

inappropriate…. All over the world, people are taking up microphones.

It’s a comic spring—an uprising of punchlines. And I’m telling you, man,

the revolution will be hilarious.

Reiner chimes in to assert, “Politics is not going to save this world that requires a lot

of saving. What will save the world is the comics.” Phrases like uprising, revolution,

and save the world may seem boldly dramatic when we’re talking about stand-up

comedians, but when we consider that other individual speech makers in history have

been attributed with those same phrases, and that comedians are traveling from place to

place and leveraging social media and other forms of engagement to share messages

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directly with broad audiences, those terms make perfect sense and contribute to an

overall understanding of stand-up comedians as social activists.

Researchers and public policy analysts have explored the power of comedy to

influence public opinion and concluded that entertainment may be the best way to

deliver messages to audiences who are less likely to be critically analyzing messages

when they are laughing. One interpretation of this finding could be that comedians are

manipulating audiences by disguising persuasion as entertainment and taking advantage

of viewers’ guards being down when they approach comedic material without the

critical lenses they might use with information or advocacy. However, when we

consider Hurley, Dennett and Adams’ theory about how humor essentially functions as

the gatekeeper that helps us to identify which ideas should make it past our guard, we are

able to see comedy as a tool to help uncover and field test authenticity rather than

disguise and muddle it.

Caty Borum Chattoo, executive producer of Stand Up Planet, conducted and

reported an impact evaluation that helps us to see how the film’s comedy operates more

as the gatekeeper than as the guard being let down. Comparing Stand Up Planet to

another hour-long documentary addressing global poverty, The End Game, Borum

Chattoo seeks to answer questions like “Can audiences learn about a tough social issue

through comedy?” and “How does a comedy and entertainment storytelling style

compare with a somber journalistic style in terms of viewers’ knowledge, attitudes and

behaviors related to global poverty after watching?” (7). The term entertainment

storytelling is a broad one meant to encompass multiple forms of media, like radio

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dramas, TV soap operas, and films, but since we are specifically concerned with stand-

up comedy, we will zoom in on that for the purposes of this analysis.

With this focus in mind, it is especially significant that Borum Chattoo

determines that the comedy format of Stand Up Planet made younger viewers, aged 18

to 24, more likely to find the information presented compelling and to share it with

others. In all 1,258 viewers polled, aged 18 to 49, Stand Up Planet scored higher for

awareness, concern, and intended action around global poverty, even though The End

Game scored higher for educational value (34). Concluding that “content that is

accessible and engaging is the key to motivating action” and “entertainment storytelling

may offer a unique opportunity to shift attitudes and change behaviors around social

issues,” Borum Chattoo’s findings add to our growing understanding of comedy as a

means of persuasion (35). More importantly, they center stand-up comedy, specifically,

as leading to the outcome of attitude shifting and behavior changing.

Other scholars have come to similar conclusions about the persuasive power of

presenting information in more entertaining ways. Sheila Murphy, a professor in the

Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is an excellent example of an

academic who publishes in both scholarly and non-scholarly places to share her work in

the Communications field. In “Stories Are Better Than Lectures at Teaching Us About

Health,” published in online academic website The Conversation, she provides a clear,

reader-friendly account of a study she and her team at the University of Southern

California conducted to determine if information presented narratively could convince

more women to learn about and get tested for cervical cancer. Using a randomly

selected pool of 900 women in Los Angeles as a starting point, Murphy and her team

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divided them in half and showed one half a narrative film and the other half a non-

narrative film about cervical cancer prevention, detection, and treatment. Both films

were eleven minutes long and contained the same ten facts.

The narrative film “led to more supportive attitudes toward Pap tests for all three

ethnic groups” (African-American, Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white women)

and motivated a higher percentage of viewers to actually take action and seek out a Pap

test (Murphy). Notably, Murphy determines that “the narrative film proved particularly

useful for those with lower levels of education,” which brings us back to our point from

chapter two about stand-up comedians representing a shift in access away from a pre-

requisite of formal education. In her conclusion, Murphy addresses the caveat that

“writing or creating narratives that immerse or transport viewers may require the help of

professional screenwriters, filmmakers and other entertainment industry professionals,”

and to that last, general bucket of “other entertainment industry professionals,” I would

heartily add, “Like stand-up comedians, for instance!” in the style of the imaginary

audience members who helpfully called out suggestions back in chapter two. Thought

leaders in Soweto had clearly identified comedians Lediga and Popps as having the star

power and the audience engagement tools necessary to help lead the movement for

circumcision and safe sex in Stand Up Planet. If we continue to blow open the potential

for stand-up comedians to contribute to the task of transporting viewers in service of

changing the minds and actions of people, we will find endless opportunities to pursue

social activism in new, invigorating ways, and to have fun doing it.

Funny Formulas for Entertainment Education

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 Comedy is an effective way to introduce the public to new ideas and values.

Borum Chattoo is currently involved with another project and report series, “The

Laughter Effect,” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which examines the

serious role of comedy in social change. She has developed a typology of comedy to

address four major comedy formats that deal with social issues in some way: political

satire, like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; scripted entertainment, like Modern

Family; marketing and advertising; and stand-up and sketch comedy. In a talk intended

to preview the project, Borum Chattoo hits on several of the key points we’ve been

working through in this examination of stand-up comedy, including the intense, lasting

ripple effect of messages relayed comically and the wide potential for viewership that

social media and the internet offer. Stating that one in five Americans report trusting

public officials and one in thirty people report trusting corporate leaders, she says we

seem to be turning to comedians, and she summarizes three major influence highlights

from the project’s attention to how comedy can impact awareness, attitudes and actions.

First, Borum Chattoo addresses comedy’s persuasive muscle, which may have a

“sleeper effect,” causing messages delivered humorously to sit with us a little longer,

even if we had discounted the message as a joke. Secondly, Borum Chattoo warns that

we may be engaging in reductive reasoning when we look to comedy to “make us do

something right away,” but that over time, comedy is actually more useful than many

other genres in encouraging us to learn, feel, share information, and normalize our

feelings about other people and ideas. Referencing two characters in a same sex

marriage from the sitcom Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell, she suggests that a Gallup

poll recording public opinion from 2009, when the show first aired, until 2014 showing

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a historic decline in opposition to same sex marriage can at least partially be attributed

to the show’s representation of these two men and the family they’ve created.

Acknowledging that many other things were going on during this time, Borum Chattoo

maintains that normalizing the two characters through entertainment offered “a safe way

in” and over time fostered tolerance and acceptance.

Finally, she shares that the barrier of entry to complex issues is reduced when we

are first introduced to them through comedy. This finding suggests that serious

journalism and comedy do not need to compete but can instead work together, because if

people are first introduced to an idea through comedy and that lowers their barrier of

entry, they will be more likely to engage in information presented seriously on the same

topic in the future. Again, the spotlight is on comedy in the broader sense,

encompassing the four major comedy formats Borum Chattoo lists at the start of her talk,

whereas we are more interested in recognizing the singular accomplishments of stand-up

comedians, who deliver these lasting messages by themselves, in traditional rhetor

fashion, alone on a stage with a microphone and without the assistance of a team of

writers, a screen of images to point to, or commercial breaks.

Couching all of these conclusions in the warning that comedy is only the way

forward when actual comedians are involved, because contrived humor by non-

comedians can miss the mark, Borum Chattoo leaves us with what she calls a soapbox

moment: “We need to marshal our creativity and our innovation and our courage to try

this, because we are up against some pretty dang high odds on social issues that we care

about.” The comedians themselves are already marshaling those very things, so it

appears as though Borum Chattoo is calling on scholars, researchers, and laypeople to

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recognize what they are doing through comedic work and perhaps be more intentionally

strategic about how to leverage and highlight it.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Comedy

In fact, the comedians themselves are occasionally also stepping into the role of

explaining to us how their work operates as social activism. Aparna Nancherla takes

that on in the article she penned for The Village Voice in December of 2016,

“Comedians in the Age of Trump: Forget Your Stupid Toupee Jokes.” In it, she

mentions a “quasi-contractual obligation as comedians to roast the powerful” alluding to

the “punching up” quality of comedy described earlier. Then President-Elect Trump is

described by Nancherla as “a millionaire who answers to no one — the very definition

of a punch-up comedy target.” However, she qualifies this by noting that Trump’s

rhetoric, “grounded in hate,” positions himself as the victim, painting any insults aimed

at him as punching down.

If you would agree that a definition of social activism could include

“overturn[ing] and shak[ing] and deconstruct[ing] and weigh[ing] every system that

governs life,” then you’ll be able to recognize stand-up comedy as social activism, since

that’s just what Nancherla identifies as the job of a stand-up comedian. The only catch

in the scenario she’s laid out is that to focus on Trump’s hair or tan or habit of

reflexively, brashly sharing his opinions on Twitter would be to normalize him—just as

Borum Chattoo argues Cam and Mitchell normalized same sex marriage through jovial

treatment. Whatever your political leanings, Nancherla’s view of the work that she and

others do is useful in constructing an identity of a stand-up comedian as a social activist:

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“Comedians make sense of the world through sharing, and often skewering, common

perceptions of it. We're certainly not going to topple the power dynamics in this country,

but every voice has power.... It's an idealistic notion, but I am a comedian, and I can

project my voice more widely than many.”

She’s not the only one elaborating on the general idea of comedy as social

activism and projecting a message of a specific type of comedic attack. The Economist

ran a similar piece just the month before, identifying comedy as an important medium

for political resistance, and reminding readers that there’s a reason satire is heavily

suppressed in authoritarian countries like Russia, North Korea and China. Heather

LaMarre of Temple University, like Nancherla, warns that because “satirists’ power to

undermine the system depends on their position as outsiders,” many political comedians

are now part of the liberal urban elite, not the pool of little guys picking on the big guy.

Mainly citing shows like Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,

Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver—which

inarguably do feature stars squarely in celebrity status— the argument again misses the

distinctly unique task of a single rhetor taking on a person or group in power. Here is

where rhetoric and composition scholars could swoop in and rescue those single rhetors

in the manner that Sophists were rescued. We could pull the limelight a little closer to

the stand-up comedian alone, and break off from the larger conversation about how

comedy or satire accomplishes social activism, toward a rhetor-centered exploration of

how stand-up comedians, very specifically, accomplish this work.

Windows and Mirrors

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 Ok. Maybe you’re not quite feeling convinced about stand-up comedians as

social activists. Maybe you were kind of along for the ride as we aligned them with

Sophists, jesters, and even public intellectuals, but I lost you at the “social activists”

juncture. I hear you. Maybe you’ve watched one too many bug-eyed Rodney

Dangerfield performances to be ready to associate stand-up comedians with social

activists. Maybe you've seen footage of social activists being physically assaulted during

a march, like Representative John Lewis, who was beaten by police officers on multiple

occasions, and it's difficult to use the same term to describe someone who can sleep until

the afternoon and then spend a couple hours onstage telling jokes. Let’s downgrade it

one notch then. Do you remember the #weneeddiversebooks movement, where Dr.

Rudine Sims Bishop stated that we need mirrors and windows in our books? Mirrors

reflect our experiences back to us, and windows offer insights into experiences that are

different from our own. Comedians can do that for us too.

When Louis C.K. impersonates parents at a school event watching the action

from behind a sea of recording phones rather than being in the moment, listeners might

see their foibles reflected back and laugh at the recognition of it. But stand-up

comedians can also offer windows. Take Cristela Alonzo. In her 2016 special Lower

Classy, Alonzo describes what it’s like to be a first generation American. Her mother

was an undocumented immigrant and feared anyone in a uniform, which Alonzo works

into a joke about her mother not wanting to answer the door for Girl Scouts selling

cookies. For those in the crowd who have had the experience of living with an

undocumented family member, the joke operates as a mirror, but those who haven’t, it

offers a window into what that was like for her. Similarly, in the aforementioned Stand

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Up Planet, Hasan Minhaj performs a bit on stage about how when he returns to the

village his parents were from, he feels like the rapper who made it and is treated like a

king because he brings Capri Suns, Fruit Roll-ups, Gushers and Oreos. Members of the

audience can be seen doubled over in laughter as Minhaj describes telling villagers, “I’m

not even gonna give you a Samoa. You can’t handle this, son. This green box, it

changes everything. Strap in.” Borum Chattoo argues that entertainment storytelling

may be a superior way to bring social issues into focus than what she says is sometimes

called “poverty porn,” and with this bit, Minhaj introduces audiences to a firsthand

account of a place where food is so scarce that someone arriving to say, “When Hasan’s

here, everybody eats!” can be hailed as a royally celebrated announcement.

If you can concede that a stand-up comedian may provide a window in this way,

even if you can't quite bring yourself to call it social activism, consider what President

Obama said about Ellen Degeneres when awarding her the Presidential Medal of

Freedom. He cited how important it was “for all us to see somebody so full of kindness

and light—somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our

colleague or our sister—challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in

common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice” (Zayra). In this

way, DeGeneres served as a window that allowed people to see and be charmed by her

as a person and therefore correct a potential error of assigning negative characteristics to

her based on her sexual orientation. And since that earned her the country's highest

civilian honor, we can see how it might count as social activism.

To wrap up by harkening back to Hurley, Dennett and Adams’ theory of humor

as a means of supervising input and identifying errors in the ideas introduced to us, let’s

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review a comparison they laid out for us: “we have Chevrolet brains running Maserati

software, and this strain on our cerebral resources led to the evolution of a brilliant

stopgap, a very specific error-elimination capacity that harnessed preexisting ‘emotional’

reward mechanisms and put them to new uses” (12). Is it not an act of public service to

steer that stopgap, shifting listeners’ brains to recognize and correct errors in the content

being introduced to us at breakneck speed? Whether it’s Aamer Rahman craftily

outlining the circumstances under which “reverse racism” could be considered “a thing”

or Louis C.K. providing “one of the most clear-eyed analyses of white privilege ever to

reach mainstream America” (Latour) or Ellen Degeneres demonstrating the flaws in

comparing same sex marriage to bestiality by playing out Sunday mornings with a goat

partner, comedians have the power to introduce the public—in the general sense of “the

public,” without formal education as a prerequisite—to socially sound concepts, and to

steer us away from harmful beliefs, and to make us want to hear what they have to say,

because it’s funny and it makes us laugh.

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 CHAPTER 4

HOW MANY COMEDIANS DOES IT TAKE TO UNDERSTAND THEIR

RHETORICAL MOTIVE?

The Importance of Including Comedians’ Voices in a Study of Stand-Up

Comedy as Rhetoric

No study on stand-up comedians should be considered complete without the

inclusion of stand-up comedians’ perspectives, regardless of how many scholarly or

non-scholarly sources have been cited. This chapter will provide those voices, in the

form of interviews I’ve studied as well as those I’ve conducted myself. Comedian Colin

Quinn wrote, in his foreword to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comedy Writing, "Listen

to other comedians. We are all we've got." It’s appropriate advice, given the premise of

the book, which is intended to teach aspiring comedy writers how to not be complete

idiots anymore. Who better to elevate hopeful writers out of idiot status than someone

who has “optioned more film scripts than you can shake a stick at,” as author James

Mendrinos says of himself in his bio? Just as Quinn makes a great case for following

the guidance of comedy writers themselves, Mendrinos establishes his own credibility as

an author of the book by listing popular comedy clubs he has performed in, establishing

associations to other esteemed comedians he’s shared the stage with, such as Sam

Kinison and Chris Rock, and mentioning, last, that he is “a teacher for Gotham Writer’s

Workshops,” where he has taught comedy writing.

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 As a rhetorician, Mendrinos’ author bio makes for a fascinating case study in ethos,

since he lists his connection to an academic institution last, whereas scholars typically

lead with that. In case there can be any question that the Gotham Writer’s Workshop

“counts” as an academic institution, because those unfamiliar with it may assume it has

something to do with Batman or the comic book world in general, I should add that it is

the “United States’s largest adult-education writing school” and was “founded in New

York City in 1993 by writers Jeff Fligelman and David Grae”, according to the internet.

Just kidding, I know I’m not allowed to cite the internet in a dissertation, but it’s actually

from Wikipedia and that seems frowned upon too—that could lead us to enter into a

discussion about how we access information and whether or not it’s appropriate to get a

quick read on a topic from search results online and then check it against other sources

to confirm, which I did.

At any rate, what interests me about a teacher from the Gotham Writer’s Workshop

authoring a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comedy Writing is that it’s a

beautiful example of respecting the practitioner’s perspective. Gotham Writer’s

Workshop’s website describes its faculty as expert teachers and working writers who

have “been in the trenches, working daily at the craft of writing,” “know the lay of the

land,” and “are equally adept at the fine art of teaching” (Gotham Writers). Moreover, it

boasts “wonderfully diverse students—doctors, lawyers, diplomats, taxi drivers, actors,

homemakers, experienced writers, newbies, anyone with a story to tell” (Gotham

Writers). In other words, it is a place that offers writing instruction outside of the

traditional structure of higher education, to students who can sign up to learn about

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something that interests them without encountering the barriers that can come with

formal schooling.

If the lifting or side-skirting of formal education barriers sounds familiar, it may be

because that’s one of the defining characteristics of stand-up comedians we examined in

chapter two, where we compared comedians’ engagement with the general public, sans

formal education barriers, with the Sophists’ turn from nobility to wealth in mid-fifth

century BC Athens. Just as stand-up comedians have the ability to bring important ideas

and opinions to the forefront of the public’s minds and compel them to focus their

attention on listening to arguments about those ideas for extended periods of time,

Gotham Writer’s Workshop could be seen as bringing writing instruction to the people.

And James Mendrinos, as a teacher there and an experienced stand-up comedian himself,

is bringing comedy writing instruction to the people in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to

Comedy Writing. The Complete Idiot’s Guide series in general has become popular by

offering guidance in an unintimidating how-to guidebook format, bringing an entry on-

ramp into a variety of topics to the people.

This whole “bringing it to the people” sequence brings us, the people, back to Colin

Quinn’s statement in the foreword to Mendrinos’ book, which is so short it really bears

repeating just to return us to our original sentiment: “Listen to other comedians. We are

all we've got.” It succinctly captures the concept that if you want to deeply know and

understand something, you should ask the people closest to it. By listening to what

comedians themselves have to say about the art, rhetoric and intention of their work, I

hope to avoid making assumptions based on observations alone. Hearing straight from

the source about how comedians see their work is a strategy intended to add authenticity

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to an effort to recover the rhetorical, persuasive, and informative nature of stand-up

comedians’ work. To that end, we will now turn our attention to some stand-up

comedians to learn more from them about the themes we’ve explored so far.

Of course, we have already analyzed plenty of work by stand-up comedians: Ellen

Degeneres’ goat-marrying analogy; D.L. Hughley’s commentary about the wall;

Correspondents’ Dinner speeches by Seth Meyers, Cecily Strong, Larry Wilmore, and

Hasan Minhaj; Aamer Rahman’s reverse racism bit; Eddie Izzard’s gun logic; Cristina

Alonzo’s window into poverty; excerpts from Richard Pryor’s performances; and

material from Aditi Mittal, Tanmay Bhat, Loyiso Gola, Kagiso Lediga, and others in

Stand-up Planet. Those were all important primary sources to help provide a broad

understanding about stand-up from the comedians themselves. However, our task now

will be to learn more directly from comedians about comedians’ work, and for that,

interviews with practicing comedians are used to contribute to a whole picture of how

stand-up comedians view their own rhetorical agency.

Since I am specifically interested in how stand-up comedians may or may not see

their work as being aligned with the work of sophists, jesters, public intellectuals and

social activists, I found myself having to actually ask them personally; you may have

already noticed or guessed that there aren’t a ton of resources readily available in which

anyone has already recorded what stand-up comedians think about rhetors from ancient

Greece, or about the five canons of rhetoric, and so on and so forth. There are, however,

plenty of firsthand accounts by comedians about their work in general, in the form of

interviews with others, articles in both scholarly and non-scholarly publications,

documentaries, TV shows, and social media.

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 As we saw from the literature review in chapter one, there is an established and

expanding interest in the study of comedy in general, but much of the research is

receiver-oriented. In order to respond to Miczo’s call for more producer-oriented

approaches to studying comedy, let’s shift our attention from how consuming comedy

about a specific topic can be therapeutic in that it gives a person power to be able to

laugh down an idea toward what producing that comedy might elicit. For example, we

know that Richard Pryor took the stage at a time when black men weren’t generally in

the business of making public mockeries of white people, so from a receiver-oriented

approach, we can imagine that the experience of hearing Pryor exert power over

oppressors by casually but confidently belittling them onstage was therapeutic to many

listeners.

Let’s imagine, then, from a producer-oriented approach to humor, what it may

have offered Pryor himself, or how he viewed that power dynamic. If audiences are

empowered by hearing him say onstage that he’s always rooting for black people

because he doesn’t “want white folks to win nothin’,” then we should think about what

the motivation and payoff for Pryor would have been (Zoglin 50). Thanks to authors

like Richard Zoglin, who dedicates some of his book Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-

up in the 1970s Changed America to chronicling Pryor’s performances and commentary,

we know that Pryor was aware of the need to establish a reputation for himself first and

then introduce his sharp, biting racial commentary into his act.

Zoglin describes Pryor’s early career in this way: “Sometimes he would sneak a

few firecrackers into the box of sweets… But mostly, Pryor, with his lithe body, rubbery

face, and big, worried eyebrows, was cute and eager to please” (45-6). This is a valid,

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interesting analysis of Pryor’s approach, to be sure, but let’s look at how Pryor himself

described his transformation toward a more personal, race-conscious ethos:

It was Mickey Mouse material that I couldn’t stomach anymore. In

Vegas, my audience was mostly white and I had to cater to their tastes. I

did a lot of that in those days. I wanted to do more black material, but I

had people around me telling me I had to wait until I had really made it

and then I could talk to the colored. I knew I had to get away from

people who thought like that and the environment that made them think

like that. (Zoglin 48)

There’s no substitute for Pryor’s own self reflection if we’re looking for insight,

substance and honesty. I wish Pryor were around so we could learn more from him

about how he made decisions about what to include and how to develop his own identity.

I wish we could ask Bill Hicks how it felt to tell audiences that life is just a ride,

and “here’s what we can do to change the world right now to a better ride: take all that

money we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead, spend it feeding,

clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one

human being excluded, and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, in

peace,” and then close his show to thunderous applause (American). Even though

Whoopi Goldberg directed that beautiful documentary Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’

To Tell You, I wish we could ask Moms Mabley herself to tell us about joining the

vaudeville circuit as a teenager and going on to become the first woman to headline

Apollo Theater, adopting a stage persona as a housedress-wearing, younger-man-lusting

older woman in a floppy hat and injecting commentary about racial bigotry into her

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otherwise benign material, all the while living as an out lesbian woman with a chic style

sense offstage (Watkins). George Carlin’s famous 1972 “seven words you can’t say on

TV” bit seems strangely similar to Michel Foucault’s thinking about taboo topics in The

History of Sex, which came out in 1975, and I wish I could ask Carlin for his reflections

about how his message reached a different, wider audience than Foucault, though they

both made similar points at around the same point in time.

Those comedians, as you may already know or have guessed, are no longer alive.

Fortunately for this project and for all of us at large, there are plenty of comedians who

are walking around now, getting on stages and saying things to people. Even more

fortunately for this project, I was able to talk with some of them. In my opinion, a

producer-oriented approach to stand-up comedy and its uses and effects cannot be

complete without the inclusion of the voices of those that produce the stand-up comedy.

Are there some comedians who would not wish to adopt the identity of power that I am

assigning them by outlining the many ways in which they have access to audience’s ears

and minds by sneaking in the back door of endorphins, as Bliss said in his TED Talk?

Well sure, comedians aren’t a monolithic group that can easily be captured by a single

set of values—what group is? Either way, we won’t know unless we ask them, and the

absence of comedians’ voices would put this project in peril of being one non-

comedian’s scholar’s unsubstantiated projections onto comedians. In an effort to

include those voices, I watched and read interviews with comedians to learn more about

how they see their role of rhetorical agency, and conducted three of my own interviews,

based on availability, willingness, and proximity of comedians.

Interview Sample

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 My methodology for this work began with identifying a sample of comedians I

wanted to talk to. Meier and Schmitt notably address this question of qualification

many comedy researchers are tasked with addressing: How did they choose which

comedians to include and which material to analyze? Acknowledging that the subjects

of stand-up comedy run the gamut between issues of grave importance and the utterly

mundane, and that they would be unable to “consider every theme used to wrest laughs

from and change the minds of audiences,” they simply conclude that they “believe that

all of the comics treated by the authors of this collection are worthy of scholarly

consideration,” later adding that the comedians examined mainly reflect the social

challenges of post-World War II American culture (Meier and Schmitt).

Don Waisanen offers a more useful, thorough explanation of his methodology

for selecting specific comedians to include in his article, “Standing-Up to the Politics of

Comedy,” describing his decision to focus on top-earning comedians, transcribe their

material, and examine their political-communicative visions through methodological

language analysis. Setting the criteria for whom I wanted to interview was a little more

complicated because I did not want to focus on something as vague as being “worthy or

scholarly consideration” or as measurable as earnings. Ultimately, due to the nature of

my interests in learning more about how comedians may or may may not see their own

rhetorical motives and their alignments with sophists, jesters, public intellectuals and

social activists, I selected to study contemporary comedians from the past four decades

who have demonstrated a strategic, intentional commitment to addressing social issues

through their material in an effort to enlighten audiences and/or instigate change.

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 This means that comedians who mainly address banal situations or use humor to

reproduce misogyny or hate speech were not considered. In other words, if your

material consists mainly of fart jokes, observations about the airport, or variations on the

“Aren’t women so dumb” theme, you didn’t miss my email; I never sent it. Based on a

review of material by many currently practicing comedians, I found the following

comedians to embody the history of ancient rhetoric, the tradition of court jesters or

fools, and the spirit of social activists and public intellectuals: Hari Kondabolu, W.

Kamau Bell, Patton Oswalt, Chris Rock, Bill Maher, Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman,

Amy Schumer, Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Aamer Rahman, Aparna Nancherla, D.L.

Hughley, Carmen Esposito and Wanda Sykes.

Once I had identified which comedians I wanted to interview, I reviewed their

touring schedules to see when they would be in the Rhode Island area, and contacted

them using social media to ask if I could schedule an interview for a time when they

were in the area. Because of the traveling nature of their careers, the comedians I had

listed were likely to perform in a nearby location over the course of the years that I

worked on the project. The first major comedian I successfully landed with my tweet

requests was W. Kamau Bell, who was performing at Fete in Providence on December 6,

2014. On October 21, 2014, I tweeted at Bell: “Q for @wkamaubell: What are you

doing before your Providence show? Hopeful A: Talking to Jillian for her book on

standup as social activism.” About a half hour later, Bell replied to my tweet,

“@PaperWithPencil Sounds good to me. Contact @WhitesmithEnt & @ksemamajama.”

The talent management company he was referring to, Whitesmith Entertainment Inc.,

was co-founded by Keri Smith and Emily White, two women with whom I exchanged

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many emails in the process of setting up my interview with Bell. Smith and White asked

me to email one week before the show, when they had a better idea of Bell’s schedule,

which I did, but they were ultimately unable to commit to making time for an interview

until one day before Bell’s show. Less than twenty-four hours before the scheduled

show, Smith wrote to let me know that they would leave a backstage wristband for me at

the door, and that I could speak with Bell for fifteen minutes before his show.

Timing is everything, in comedy and in life, and the timing for interviewing John

Fugelsang was pretty ideal. He was coming to URI campus as an invited speaker at the

university’s honors colloquium, The Power of Humor, on October 13, 2015, so on

October 10, I tweeted at him, “@JohnFugelsang Any chance you'll have time to be

interviewed by me while you're at URI for my dissertation on stand-up as social

activism?!” Again, in less than a half hour, I had a response: “@PaperWithPencil Yes,

but I won't be held responsible for what this does to your final grade.” Since he was

scheduled to speak to an honors class during the day before giving his talk in the

evening called “Humor in Politics,” I was able to interview him between these two

engagements, so the pump was primed, so to speak, to talk about comedy with him. At

the talk that followed, I took notes while Fugelsang spoke, trying to mark ideas to come

back to and expand on in my own work. Luckily, the event was taped, so I had not only

my own audio and notes to work from, but a full recording as well.

The third interview came on July 24, 2016, when Aparna Nancherla was

scheduled to perform at Comedy Connection in East Providence, RI. I tweeted at her

that afternoon to say, “@aparnapkin Welcome to our itty bitty city! I'm writing my

dissertation about comedians as social activists... any time for an interview?” and I

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quickly followed it up with “@aparnapkin I interviewed @wkamaubell +

@JohnFugelsang when they were in town and I'd love the chance to talk with you too

before your show!” in an effort to demonstrate that I was credible because I had already

interviewed Bell and Fugelsang. One minute later, Nancherla replied,

“@PaperWithPencil o sure! would after or before the show work? send an email to link

in my bio & we can coordinate :)” After a brief email exchange, we decided on a time

before her show, and I met her at Comedy Connection for the interview.

The lightning fast responses seem like Cinderella stories when I see them all

collected here, but keep in mind these are the successes from my Twitter-hunting for

comedians. I also contacted Hari Kondabolu, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Wanda

Sykes, Patton Oswalt, Lewis Black, and Aamer Rahman requesting interviews when

they had performances in the area, to no avail. Actually, Rahman is an Australia-based

comedian and did agree to do an interview via email or Skype, but in the end, he was

unable to find the time. One of the challenges of interviewing popular comedians is that

they are accustomed to being paid for their time spent talking. Another is that they are

very mobile and transient, and are often within a given geographical zone for only a

short time before moving on to the next stop on their tour, although of course that

feature of their work also doubles as a benefit, since it provides the opportunity to

request interviews them when they are nearby.

Even more practically, an obstacle to conducting interviews with relevant

practitioners for a project like this is the inaccessibility of popular comedians; often,

establishing connections with comedians necessitates going through booking agents and

public relations representatives who are protective of the comedian as a commodity and

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are looking mostly (and sometimes exclusively) to facilitate interactions that result in

monetary profit, something scholars are not necessarily in a position to offer—although

we can frame the interview as an opportunity to be immortalized forever in book form,

which could be appealing to comedians, whose ephemeral art is over once the applause

ends (except for the parts that were added to the YouTube bank). A perceived challenge

might be that comedians are always going for a laugh, so it could be difficult to

convince comedians to drop the proverbial shtick when they’re accustomed to

interviewing for entertainment purposes rather than research (Plester and Orams).

Similarly, a potential challenge to the interview method could be the reported inability

of comedians to think intentionally and report clearly on decisions they make; this is an

unfair assumption though, I would argue. The types of comedians who might be

categorized under social activism or comedy with a conscience are plenty smart enough

to do the kind of metacognitive work that’s required for that. Ultimately, the

affordances offered by interviewing comedians in order to capture their voice and

perspective to describe their own work far outweigh the challenges.

Interviewing Strategy

With that goal in mind, I created questioning strategies through an iterative

process that I first practiced with local comedians, like Dan Martin. I studied interviews

with comedians that have already been published in book form (Fry & Allen, Provenza,

Sacks, Radulescu and Wilde) and documentary form (I Am Comic, Comedian). Shaped

by the interview process presented in these examples, I formulated my questions to get

at the crux of comedians’ communication choices through language, informed by the

research design descriptions by John W. Creswell, Cindy Johanek, and Thomas R.

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Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor. These questions included framing some scholarly

concepts for comedians and asking them to share their reactions and ideas based on that.

For example, I shared a brief, encapsulated overview of some of Otto’s findings

about the tradition of fools and jesters having an ability to expose truths to leaders

because they were coming from a place of “buffoonery” and therefore appeared to stand

no personal gain, and then asked how they see that related or not related to the work that

they do as comedians. I included questions about how they describe their process of

determining which rhetorical moves to enact in order to influence audience’s opinions

and/or instigate change, and questions designed to elicit descriptions of how they may or

may not see their stand-up as an authentic form of social activism.

My rationale for choosing this interviewing strategy was based on the rhetorical

prowess of my subjects. In order to learn from them about how they saw themselves as

rhetors and agents of social change, I wanted to set ideas up for them to react to rather

than ask narrow, direct questions. An affordance of this approach was that the

comedians I spoke with were all linguistically and intellectually nimble enough to

expound on the ideas I presented without requiring strict parameters, allowing me to

elicit full, rich responses from them on the topics at hand. A limitation ended up being

that, in the relatively short amount of time I had for each interview, I was attempting to

cover a lot of ground by asking them to speak to so many comparisons. As a result,

some interviewees just naturally spoke more about one alignment than the others, which

was fine with me.

Preparing for the Interviews

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 In order to have specific examples prepared to talk about with each comedian, I

watched, transcribed, and coded multiple performances by them prior to the interview,

organizing parts of their performances by the social topics being addressed and the

rhetorical strategies being used. This served the purpose of helping me to make clear,

direct connections to their personal work when asking about the comparisons I was

interested in understanding more about. It also, frankly, did not hurt in the ego stroking

department, since comedians are, after all, entertainers, and seemed encouraged by the

mention of their own material. In all interviews, I asked for written permission to audio

record our talk, and when given, I used those recordings to transcribe and code the

interviews for the purposes of pulling quotes. The recordings were stored in a digitally

safe, password protected place.

Learning how stand-up comedians themselves view the comparisons between

their work and the work of Sophists, jesters, public intellectuals and social activists

contributed to my own thinking about the major topics covered in my dissertation. It

was incredibly instructive to get input from practicing comedians and use that to direct

my work. Unsurprisingly, the comedians I interviewed had a lot of insightful takes on

the alignments I was drawing; the opinions, experiences and information they shared

with me served as a springboard for my writing. Additionally, they were able to offer

astute assessments of their own styles of creating and workshopping their material.

W. Kamau Bell: A Comedy Rhetorician for Emerging and Established Activists

W. Kamau Bell shared his thinking on his own work as a stand-up comedian

regularly addressing social issues through hismaterial. At the start of his CNN show

United Shades of America, Bell says, "My name is W Kamau Bell. As a comedian, I've

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made a living finding humor in the parts of America I don't understand. And now I'm

challenging myself to dig deeper. I'm on a mission to reach out and experience all the

cultures and beliefs that add color to this crazy country.” The show did not begin until

after my December 2014 interview with Bell, but that intro nicely encapsulates his stated

mission as a comedian, as does his Twitter bio, “I tell jokes, but I'm not kidding,” which

we discussed during our conversation together. When I mentioned the statement in his

Twitter bio, Bell nodded vigorously and confirmed, “To me, that’s what I’m doing.” I

also asked about the significance behind some of his tour titles that suggest an activist

bent, namely “The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour” and “The

Kamau Mau Uprising.” Although Bell tried to downplay the implications of those titles

by merely offering, “Yeah, that was just the name of the tour, I just thought that was a

funny title,” the rest of our interview clearly indicated that he puts more thought into his

work and his representation than that.

We reviewed the five canons of rhetoric together, and Bell agreed that comedians

“do all those things” but did not have a great deal to add to the alignment of comedians

with Sophists, other than commenting about Kairos, “Yeah, it’s better when you’re there.

It can be good if you watch it, but it’s never better at home than it is in the place.” On

the ability of jesters to speak truth to power, Bell told me he thinks comedy is really a

populist art form and every comic chooses which people they are trying to win the favor

of. “Some comics choose to speak truth to power, which is never the way to make the

most money,” he joked, “Certainly there’s comedy I hate, but I’m not saying just

because you don’t speak truth to power you’re a bad comedian; there’s a lot of

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comedians who don’t speak truth to power necessarily—that’s not their thing—that are

hilarious.”

To follow up on the idea of different comedians choosing their which type of

people to win the favor of, Bell made this statement:

I just think that sometimes when we talk about comedy, people talk

about comedy in a monolithic way that you don’t talk about music. Like

you don’t say “music speaks truth to power,” you would say “punk rock

speaks truth to power,” or “reggae speaks truth to power.” Or rap. Or

even certain types of rap. I always feel like nobody’s cared enough to

break comedy into categories. Some people have but it hasn’t taken off at

a mass level, so people say things like, “I like stand-up comedy” in a way

that you wouldn’t say “I like music.”

It was a concept I had confronted myself, along the way of attempting to define whom I

would be studying and why, and while outlining full fledged categories or subgenres

within stand-up comedy is a fascinating task I’d love to undertake, it will have to come

at another point in my career as I continue to focus herein on stand-up comedians’

rhetorical agency.

As for Bell’s decision about how to categorize his own material, he reported,

“When people ask me to describe it, I say socio-political… I’m not talking about

Washington for most of my act, but I think that there’s a lot of identity politics, and I

also care a lot about cultural movements and some of those are political and some aren’t

but they are also about society.” He described the importance of having different types

of laughter in one comedy show to avoid becoming “predictable and didactic,” and also

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said that sometimes people come up to him and Hari Kondabolu, whom he has toured

with in the past, and say that they didn’t agree with something they said on stage, and

“we’re like, ‘yeah, that’s ok’… to me, the messiness is a part of it.” About his process

for writing and embracing the messiness, Bell said, “I think Seinfeld said any time you

get angry, there’s a joke there. I would extend that out to say any time you have an

intense human emotion, there’s a joke there somewhere. So a lot of my stuff comes

from frustration or anger, when the outside world doesn’t equal what I think it should.”

Now we were really getting somewhere. I wanted to learn more about how Bell

developed comedic material out of moments when the world did not equal what he

thought it should—essentially, he was finding the humor in the parts of America he

didn’t understand, as he would later announce at the start of United Shades of America.

He elaborated, “All of comedy is communication. For me, a lot of it’s like, if I can

figure out a way to explain to people why I’m frustrated about this, then that’s the

beginning of a joke.” In an effort to explain his frustration to people, he said he uses

analogies, metaphors and allusions, and remarked that he feels successful when someone

says, “Oh I didn’t see that as being like this, but now that you said that, I see those

connections.” He did not, however, believe that laughter automatically implied

agreement, and instead maintained that laughter just means “the comedian’s a good

comedian.”

Bell also reflected on how technology and social media have impacted his work

as a stand-up comedian. Commenting about a time when someone in the audience

recorded his whole set at a show in Houston and then posted it on YouTube and

Facebook, he remarked that technology is making it harder for comedians to “hide their

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material until they’re ready to show it to the world.” He talked about other comedians

who have great material that they would not want to be recorded and shared, even in

their own specials, like his friend and comic Bill Burr, who performed a bit onstage once

about his dad: “I told him it was really funny and he goes, ‘yeah, but I can never do it on

the special,’ and I go, ‘why’ and he said, ‘Cuz I don’t want it to live forever, like I don’t

want my dad to see that!’” In a more general sense, Bell insisted on the importance of

comedians deciding for themselves when to make material public because “comedians

need to be able to fuck up on stage— and not even fuck up, just experiment, and finalize,

and then decide.” When I told him I had recently written an article for Comedy Studies

about technology and media changing the landscape of stand-up comedy, but that I

obviously did not know as much about as he did because I’m not a stand-up comedian

myself, Bell surprised me by saying, “Yeah but the people who study the thing often

know more about it than the people in the thing,” which struck me as humorously

counterintuitive to the reason I was interviewing him in the first place, which was the

belief that comedians themselves would know more about their strategic commitment to

instigating change than I could abstractly philosophize about.

Of all my questions and all the topics I was able to discuss with Bell—in an

interview that did end up being thirty minutes long, despite what Smith and White from

Whitesmith Entertainment Inc. had said—social activism ended up being the richest,

which would have been my prediction based on what I knew of Bell going into the

interview. He seemed reluctant to cast himself in the role of a social activist, saying,

“people have said that before and I totally accept it from the outside but it’s kind of like

you can’t give yourself a black belt, somebody else has to—like, you get a black belt.”

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When I tried to give him a black belt by suggesting that his comedy posse “Laughter

Against the Machine,” which he was in with fellow comics Hari Kondabolu, Nato Green

and Janine Brito, was a way in which he used comedy as a tool for social activism, Bell

shook his head and said, “I just don’t ever want a person who’s at a protest right now to

feel like I’m somehow trying to surf off their activism with my jokes.” My

understanding of what he meant by this is that, like Georgio, who deflected sentiments

that his MLK Day tweets were worthy of praise, Bell does not want to accept credit

where he isn’t convinced credit is due.

In fact, Bell said he and the other comics started Laughter Against the Machine

as a sort of “campfire for the revolution,” for the people who were “doing the work” to

sit down at the end of the day and not necessarily disconnect, but laugh and share stories;

“we were like that campfire and we were like, ‘sit down, now that you’ve done all that

hard work,’ and that’s important, but it doesn’t take the place of the work.” He added

that he sometimes feels guilt for being credited with social activism when he has

“activist friends who actually get up in the morning and are like, ‘let’s go flyer, let’s go

protest.’” Specifically, he said, “I feel guilt right now that I haven’t been to an Eric

Garner Ferguson protest because I’ve been on the road, and when I go home I have two

kids… so I was just like, I can’t, but I feel good that there’s probably activists at this

club, like people who come to the show who just want to hear somebody talk about the

things in a new way.”

In addition to resisting the credit for being a social activist, Bell maintained that

he wanted to be a comedian before he wanted to be “this type of comedian”:

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 I think because I am this type of comedian, people assume, and I think

I’ve led them this way, “Oh do you have a degree in political science?

You know, were you somebody who was like, ‘How do I get the message

to the people? I will use comedy!’” and it’s like no, no, no, no, no, I was

a little boy who watched comedy on TV and saw Eddy Murphy and Bill

Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld and Janeane Garofalo, and all those people and

was like, “I wanna do that.”

Despite downplaying the extent to which he can be considered a social activist, Bell

consistently demonstrates with his material that he is interested in influencing the

opinions of his viewers, and, as his colleague from Laughter Against the Machine Nato

Green stated in a 2012 interview on a San Francisco morning show, CBS’s Bay Sunday,

“It’s comedy about ideas; it’s comedy for a thinking audience that wants to be

challenged and provoked as well as entertained.”

John Fugelsang: A Comedy Rhetorician Devoted to the Process

John Fugelsang is another comedian who challenges and provokes audiences,

and when I interviewed him on October 12, 2015, we decided to dedicate the interview

to a similar comedian, Dick Gregory, since it was the day after his birthday and

Fugelsang had just recently done a cable special with him. Actually, Fugelsang had

worked with many of the comedians we discussed—he’d even lived with one of them,

Trayvon Free, a writer for The Daily Show. After reading the aforementioned list of

comedians who have demonstrated a strategic, intentional commitment to addressing

social issues through their material in an effort to enlighten audiences and/or instigate

change, I asked Fugelsang if there were any glaring omissions, and he said I had “a good

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list right there,” adding that it sounded like I was interested in “political comics.” This

prompted a useful discussion around honing the stated criteria for comedians researched

and picked up the thread from my earlier conversation with Bell around subgenres of

stand-up comedy. Fugelsang even made a similar comparison to music genres, citing

hip hop and folk as examples.

After reviewing the five canons of rhetoric, Fugelsang said that he “absolutely”

saw an alignment between them and his work, and after going over the role of the

Sophists, he said stand-up comedians “certainly carry on that tradition.” When we

arrived at the topic of jesters, he again said he saw a strong parallel, but this time with an

important caveat: “The jester worked under the grace of the king… Now the jester is on

his own mocking the king and the rulers ignore the jester at their own peril.” In his

assessment, although it may have seemed like jesters from days of yore had been brave

in daring to criticize the king, today’s stand-up comedians are essentially taking on an

even more daunting task, because while they are performing the same function, of using

humor to point out critical flaws in leadership, it is no longer encouraged or invited, so

the comedians do not enjoy the same protection to perform their criticism as the jesters

did.

In Fugelsang’s own words, “even when the jester was the only person in court

who could take on the ruler directly, it was always as a means of advising the ruler to

make wiser decisions and the jester was often the only representative of the under

classes so it was incumbent upon the king to, you know, maintain the favor of the

people.” In that sense, he concluded, “the jester was an invaluable member of the court”

whereas stand-up comedians aren’t afforded the same status. It seemed clear that

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Fugelsang had already given some thought to the connections between jesters and

comedians, and wasn’t confronting the parallel for the first time based on my question.

He even added that he’d been planning to include a bit in his talk that evening “about

how if Barack Obama had a cabinet position for Chris Rock, his poll numbers would be

even higher.” Indeed, Fugelsang did include that line in his “Humor in Politics” talk

that evening, along with so much more on the topic of jesters:

We need political comedians. Ok, so the character of the jester is one of

the most common and widely recognized character types found in culture

and mythology throughout the history of the world. Jesters were fools

and entertainers, social and political critics, agents of change, for cultural

and religious mores for their audiences. The jester was one of the few

characters in court who could feely speak his conscience without causing

offense. And they weren’t just in Europe; they had jesters in Africa,

India and China, and they all had the ability to speak their minds, through

jokes, to question authority while others had to hold their tongue. And

while the jester could tweak or mock the king, it was always in service of

the king. Criticizing a policy in a joke was still supporting the ruler,

trying to get him on the right track, and help right his judgement and

protect his legacy. Today’s comics are remote, freelance jesters. They

no longer work directly for the rulers, but they use ridicule in ways to

advise and guide, and the rulers are free to ignore them at their peril. I

still wish we had the old dynamic; if Barack Obama had Chris Rock in

his cabinet, he’d be doing a lot better in the polls.

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Cut to me, sitting in the audience at the Edwards Auditorium with my mouth hanging

open, because Fugelsang had essentially demonstrated to an entire crowd that he could

have written chapter three of my dissertation by himself, no problem. He had nailed the

function of the jester, made a clear connection to stand-up comedians, and formulated an

argument for the benefits of rulers acknowledging the usefulness of comic criticism.

It was clear to me from listening to Fugelsang’s clear, confident talk about the

importance of comedy in politics that he could have easily been a scholar and/or

professor, sharing his well formulated ideas in a different arena than on his Sirius show

“Tell Me Everything,” even though he had modestly opened by claiming that having

him to speak at a university was like asking Willie Nelson for tax advice. During our

interview though, Fugelsang had explained, “Making it funny is how you reach a wider

audience. I mean, making it entertainment is the way I wanted to go rather than

academia or politics. I think you get a lot further with the truth in a dick joke than just

the truth.” Well that’s one way to put it! Another way he put it, both in our interview

and in his talk that evening, was, “Comedy is the lube that makes the gears of truth run.”

I was fascinated by Fugelsang’s waxing philosophical about comedy as truth, as

criticism, and as social commentary, because it so closely matched my own thinking on

stand-up comedy, and it felt powerful to me that an actual practitioner, out there doing

the work of stand-up comedy, could confirm what I saw as a major function of truth

telling, idea sharing, mind changing and social activism.

Like Bell, Fugelsang seemed hesitant to fully ascribe social activism to his own

work, saying that he tries to follow a formula: “Entertain first, inform second, preaching

last, so if you make activism your goal, chances are you’re going to be propaganda more

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than entertainment… I just think that preachiness is one of the enemies of funny, so one

has to be very careful about that.” In addition to sharing his formula for crafting his sets,

Fugelsang also provided a more general overview of how he creates and workshops

material, telling me that his “devotion is to the process” and that “it’s only in the

repetition that you discover what works.” His insights made me reflect again on how

much comedians could contribute to composition studies. While outlining and drafting

tend to be typical components of a composition classroom, Fugelsang addressed

alternate ways of brainstorming and editing, namely by practicing material out loud and

in front of others:

For me, I’m no good at writing. I have to talk it out… you can be seduced

by your own sense of self importance on the printed page. When you’re

saying it out loud, you instinctively know when something doesn’t land.

And this is what comics know all the time; you learn from your

audiences… That’s the wonderful thing about it—it’s a beautiful chaos

that requires a lot of trial and error.

After having learned from him that learning from his audience helped him to hone his

material, I took particular notice during his evening talk when he would briefly jot

something down, potentially about an audience’s reaction or about another way he

wanted to try making a similar point the next time he addressed it; in that way,

comedians are constantly editing and reworking ideas and language.

In addition to his well formed argument about former jesters working directly for

rulers and current comedians performing a similar role but as freelance critics,

Fugelsang had a lot to say on the theme of comedy as a sort of sneak attack, non-

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combative form of persuasion. Reminding me of the Chris Bliss TED Talk quoted

earlier about ideas sneaking in through the back door with comedy, Fugelsang declared:

“The best political comedians disrupt the status quo by creating just enough discomfort

to highlight issues others won’t or can’t discuss because they cushion the bluntness of

the blow with laughter.” He called on a quote from George Carlin’s book Last Words to

make his point: “No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their

defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open,

completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's

when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance

to grow.”

On the theme of stand-up comedy as a form of expression well suited for sharing

truths, Fugelsang said:

Political comedy, when it’s done right, is a delivery system for truth. The

best political comics—the ones I admire—are our most effective cultural

anthropologists and social critics. They document areas of knowledge,

and bring ideas—big notions, and often unarticulated but commonly felt

feelings— to the conscious awareness of their particular audiences.

Comedy can awaken us to critical thought patterns in a way people don’t

find threatening. Taking something many may already think or vaguely

suppose, articulating it into words, and making it entertaining, helps a

culture understand itself, and provides a context for others to understand

that culture’s humor.

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 Here he brought in a scholarly source: “As Stephanie Kozinski wrote in ‘The Stand-

up Comedian as Anthropologist’ in the Journal of Popular Culture, this is why we don’t

really find comedy of a previous generation, or a century ago, or foreign comedy, very

funny, although that still doesn’t explain why French people like Jerry Lewis.”

Sticking with the term “political comedians” that he’d used frequently in our

interview, Fugelsang made several strong statements about the important function

performed by stand-up comedians, again starting off with the caveat that he was talking

about when it was “done right.” Here he addressed humor as resistance and as social

corrective, making me wish we had discussed Hurley, Dennett and Adams’ theory of

humor as an evolutionary error correction system:

When done right, humor, especially political humor, is entertainment

that’s also resistance to power and a way of confronting and

deconstructing authority. In terms of social justice, humor is in many

ways a social corrective. You’ll see this in African American comedy,

LGBT comedy, Latino comedy, religious humor, feminist humor… it

validates shared experiences and it gets us to think more flexibly and

reframes situations in this shared experience we call life. There’s really

an ancient human tradition of comedians critiquing the dominant powers

of society, subverting authority, and exposing hypocrisy through wit

instead of propaganda.

So there you have it. Fugelsang hit on multiple points I prioritized in my alignment

of stand-up comedians with Sophists, jesters, public intellectuals, and social activists.

He even highlighted their contributions to democratic societies to boot: “Political

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comedians in America are more important to democracy and the human spirit than ever.

Laughter is essential to life and it’s essential to politics. Humor, as you all know, helps

us handle confusing and difficult life experiences.” Overall, my conversation with

Fugelsang validated and strengthened the connections I was seeking to make, and the

talk he gave that evening was the frosting on the cake.

Aparna Nancherla: A Comedy Rhetorician Growing Into Her Political Identity

My interview with Aparna Nancherla on July 24, 2016 was very interesting

because at the time, she did not classify herself as among the group of what she called

“overtly political comedians.” When we discussed the five canons of rhetoric,

Nancherla nodded and said she felt like there were parallels between the canons and the

“kind of comedy” she does, noting that her material is pre-arranged and not necessarily

memorized, but that she generally uses the same wording and punchlines. When we

went over the role of jesters though, she said, “I feel like maybe some more overtly

political comedians addressing race or things that can be dicey-er and not everyone’s on

that side of the issue” would be similar to jesters, but that she did not cover “fringe or

minority” issues as much in her own act. Later in the interview she did end up

characterizing her material by saying, “Issues I end up talking about most are probably

feminism and maybe being a woman of color.” She also mused that stand-up comedy

provided an interesting “platform where you’re able to challenge anything you want to

when you’re on stage.”

When asked about comedy’s ability to subvert and resist, Nancherla actually

pointed to Hasan Minhaj’s speech at the 2015 Radio and Television Correspondents'

Dinner as an example of a comedian doing the work of a jester, which was validating,

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since I had already tagged that performance to include in the chapter about jesters (as

you saw earlier). She did say that she addresses imperialism in her own material, but

laughed about how that wasn’t exactly a “current tension” to explore. I had seen a part

of her act before where she says that she has white friends and whenever they say

they’re sorry to her, she just assumes they’re apologizing for imperialism, so I knew the

material she was referring to. She explained that there are parts of the country where

“people aren’t jumping on the bandwagon right away” when she jokes about

imperialism, but that Brooklyn was an example of a place where audiences tended to be

on board right away.

In keeping with my questions for Bell and Fugelsang around process, I asked

Nancherla if she could speak to her methods and techniques for coming up with and

workshopping material. She described always writing down things she observes on a

daily basis and then later sitting down to flesh them out into fuller ideas. For her editing

process, she said she will workshop her ideas with friends or sometimes before

audiences, and that it helps to run something by another comic. One challenge she

identified was being her own goal setter without anyone looking over her shoulder; she

described setting a goal of coming up with five minutes of material for a late show and

working until she accomplished that. Like Bell and Fugelsang, Nancherla did not label

herself a social activist, but it was only five short months after our interview that she

penned the aforementioned article, “Comedians in the Age of Trump: Forget Your

Stupid Toupee Jokes,” for The Village Voice, in which she argues, “As comedians, it is

up to us to overturn and shake and deconstruct and weigh every system that governs life.

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This work, my work, feels more active now, more important. I feel driven to express my

strong opinions and to challenge people's thinking, even when it's scary or inconvenient.”

It would appear as though Nancherla’s identity was growing toward one that

might be included in the group of “overtly political comedians” that she initially did not

align herself with when we spoke. Two months after her essay was published in The

Village Voice, Nancherla did another interview, in which she said, “I think it’s gotten

sort of increasingly surreal since the election and now that the presidency is official, the

stuff that’s happening with our government — it feels pretty unprecedented for my

generation and probably for younger people, too” (Ciesielski). As a result, Nancherla

said, “it’s definitely new ground for artists in terms of what they want to talk about and

how they want to capture it, and also just like what freedom of speech even is right now

how much longer it’ll be around. It just feels like a more dark time than it has been at

least in my lifetime” (Ciesielski). It’s possible to surmise from this timeline of events

that while Nancherla may not have considered herself an “overtly political comedian” at

one point, she has felt moved by current events to take advantage of her platform as a

comedian to become socially active. This would make her similar to Bell, who noted

that he had wanted to be a stand-up comedian first, and fallen into a more socially active

role second. Interestingly, one of Nancherla’s first jobs in comedy was actually as a

writer on the FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, so it’s a small world!

One area in which Nancherla did seem confident to speak about in our interview

was gender. A compelling comment she made during our interview was that “male

comedians discuss male issues and everyone in the audience is supposed to be on board,

but women’s issues are ‘niche.’” She said she didn’t know why this was the case, but

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that it’s gratifying when material does resonate with people in the audience, because it

seems like “they’re glad you talked about that.” Generally speaking, Nancherla did not

seem to be giving herself enough credit for the work that she does as a stand-up

comedian, but that was in keeping with comments from Bell and Fugelsang as well,

which made me wonder if another challenge to interviewing comedians might be their

natural inclinations to downplay the importance of the work that they do. Despite their

humility though, all three comedians offered excellent insights during our conversations,

and I was grateful to have their firsthand accounts to consider in my writing on the topic

of stand-up comedy. Since it would be impractical to interview every comedian I

consider to be doing strategic, intentional, thoughtful work through the rhetoric of their

stand-up material, for the reasons listed earlier in the methodology section as challenges

as well as for the reason of time restrictions, I’m also grateful for the wealth of primary

sources available, including others’ interviews with comedians in video, article and book

form.

Speaking Seriously About the Craft

Interviews with comedians conducted by journalists and first-person

autobiographical or narrative accounts provide additional support to the claim that

comedians operate with a rhetorical motive in mind. Contrary to the perceived

challenge of comedians being unwilling to speak seriously about their craft, there are

actually many excellent instances of comedians sharing nuanced reflections about their

use of comedy to advance messages. In order to include the voices of stand-up

comedians that I have already identified as crucial to understanding stand-up comedy

from a producer-oriented approach, I will share multiple snapshots of comedians

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describing how they see their work. On the theme of comedy getting at essential truths

through non-combative rhetoric, many examples of stand-up comedians have weighed in

with their takes. Patton Oswalt, who majored in English in college and therefore is

secretly one of us, said in an interview with Salon, “There has to be way less outrage,

more fun and mocking and irreverence. It just feels like being outraged puts you in a

position of not being powerful. You’re so much more powerful when you’re laughing

and being forgiving and taking pity on someone” (Daley). In the same interview, he

spoke to the idea of comedians extending who has access to ideas beyond the barrier of

formal education when he said, “Comedians have always been the best conduit to the

forgotten, to the outsiders, to the inarticulate. We speak for the underdogs, for the most

part. That’s what most comedians do” (Daley).

Comedians are well aware of their unique approach to truth-telling. In Make ‘Em

Laugh: The Funny Business of America, Billy Crystal addresses comedy as truth when

he says, “Getting a laugh and getting at the truth are the same. We need comics to tell us

when we're screwing up." This also harkens back to the computational theory of

comedy as an evolutionary error correction tool. At his already-very-well-covered

“Humor in Politics” talk, John Fugelsang addressed comedy as truth when he said, "We

need comedians more than ever, not just to break the tension with laughter, but to tell the

truth." Joan Rivers sees herself as filling that role when she announces, "If something

outrages you, you must speak out about it, and comedy is the way to do it.... I think I'm a

truth teller" (Make ‘Em Laugh). In an episode of Louis CK’s show Louie, Rivers offers

yet another description of stand-up comedians’ work when she tells C.K.’s character,

“What we do is a calling, my dear. We make people happy."

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 Yet another comedian who touched on the idea of truth and honesty was Lenny

Bruce, a comedian famous for his controversial social satire, who said, “The only honest

art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it" (Rosen). Certainly we are beginning to

see a pattern emerge of multiple comedians expressing the idea that what they do is

connected to sharing truths. If we keep digging around, we’ll also find examples of

comedians commenting about the rhetorical, persuasive nature of their work. In one of

his stand-up shows, Bill Hicks told his audience, “This is called logic, it won’t hurt you,

it’ll set you free” (American), getting a laugh from the crowd while simultaneously

letting them know that, like Bell, he was telling jokes, but he wasn’t kidding. Michael

Ian Black tweeted, "The best comedy is funny but also makes a serious point," once

again reaffirming the notion that there’s more to comedy than some chuckleheads

tickling your funny bone.

Comedians recognize their work provide a release or relief from the pressures of

everyday life. In 2011, HBO aired a one-hour special called Talking Funny, featuring

Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais in an unscripted conversation

about what it means to be a stand-up comedian. It’s a great source for hearing about the

work of stand-up comedy straight from the horses’ mouths, and four of the most

successful horses, at that. One notable quote from the discussion came when C.K.

offered, “I think a great thing about comedy is taking people to places where they have

fear and foreboding and making them laugh in that place; I think you help them.” Jim

Norton made a similar statement when he was a guest on Totally Biased with W. Kamau

Bell, in a conversation about whether or not joking about rape was ever acceptable: "The

relief of comedy is it takes things that aren't funny and it allows us to laugh about them."

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Certainly, scholars from several fields have theorized about the relief theory of humor,

but for me, hearing C.K. and Norton describe how they see their work packs a more

impactful punch.

Tina Fey describes her own experiences working in the comedy world in The

New Yorker’s “Lessons from Late Night.” Responding to the idea that male and female

comedic writers might be different, she argues that they are different, because “the men

urinate in cups” and leave them around their offices. On the topic of comedy providing

relief for the producer, Fey says, "Maybe we women gravitate toward comedy because

it's a socially acceptable way to break rules and a relief from our daily lives." The Green

Room with Paul Provenza, a talk show on Showtime featuring panel discussions by

comedians on a variety of topics, is another excellent source for firsthand reflections by

comedians. In one episode, Bo Burnham expands on the idea of comedy as a means of

relief for the humor producer when he says, “The absolute 'comedy comes from pain'

limits what comedy is, because I think comedy comes from love, it comes from fear, it

comes from hate.”

Examining the Human Experience

Yet another place to look for comedians offering their experienced perspective

would be documentaries about stand-up comedy. In one such documentary, Why We

Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy, Chris Rock calls his job "examining the

human experience." And you thought it was telling jokes! In the same documentary,

Sommore says, "If you want to know what's going on in our community, watch our

comedy," suggesting that stand-up comedians shape and reflect the thinking and

behavior of social groups. Again, researchers like Mintz and Kozinski have staked

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similar claims, but it is significant to hear it from a comedian herself, in an earnest,

informal tone. Likewise, it is significant to hear from comedians themselves about their

processes and experiences. Bell, Fugelsang and Nancherla were kind enough to share

some of their strategies and approaches with me, and their input caused me to reflect on

how there is no one way to accomplish the invention, arrangement, style, memory, and

delivery required of a comedian. In other words, as comedian Myq Kaplan once said,

"Here’s the thing… The comedian's job is to talk, to say things, to get across ideas, to be

funny. It’s not required to look a certain way."

According to Jerry Seinfeld though, it might sound a certain way. In an

interview for The Guardian, Seinfeld is described as “a scientist of comedy,

painstakingly calibrating his equipment [whose] extreme professionalism crosses over

into a kind of absurdist Zen” (Burkeman). Seinfeld tells Burkeman, "The timbre of it,

the shape of it, the length of it – there's so much information in a laugh. A lot of times,

you could play me just the laughs from my set and I could tell you, from the laugh, what

the joke was. Because they match." Chris Rock shares his feedback involving audience

and process in an interview with New York Magazine: "The thing about comedians is

that you’re the only ones who practice in front of a crowd." This matches what Chris

Bliss says in his aforementioned TED Talk, “Comedy as Translation”: "Feedback is

instant and intimate," because in both cases, the audience’s reactions to material

provides the comedians with real-time, genuine evaluation.

Thinking back to Aamer Rahman’s reverse racism bit covered in chapter two,

we’ll have a context for when he tells interviewer Brian Logan that what makes it funny

is how the long list of things that would have to happen, with the assistance of a time

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machine, in order for reverse racism to be a possibility, conveys the exhaustion of

having to explain to anyone that the concept of racism involves an unequal standing of

two groups, and therefore joking about white people not being able to dance cannot be

considered to be on par with a joke targeting a person of color. It is essentially a more

detailed explanation of why the unwritten rules of comedy require comics to punch up

toward those in power rather than tear down the already-vulnerable. Both Rahman’s

explanation and the punching up concept reinforce the evolutionary and computational

error correction theory of humor that suggests we are drawn to consume comedy in

service of identifying which ideas we encounter are rationally or ethically flawed.

Comedy sheds insight on human nature and human foibles in a way that can have

transformative impact. Rahman reports, "The number-one feedback I get from the clip

is, 'I've been trying to explain this to my friend, or a colleague, for years – and now I just

send them your video.' And I get emails from university professors who play it in their

classes. They say, 'I didn't have to write a lecture; I just played this and the kids argued

about it for the next 60 minutes.'" (Logan). Rahman’s experience is a literal

representation of stand-up comedy’s shift toward the general public without the barrier

of formal education; according to their professors, students were better able to access an

important idea about race through Rahman’s three-minute stand-up performance than

through a lecture by their professor—and not only were they able to access and

understand it, but they were compelled to spend an hour engaged with the idea,

discussing it with each other in class.

Working Out Life Crises Through Comedy

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 Continuing with our effort to include multiple voices from the field, we will now

move on to Amy Schumer, one of the most popular comedians in contemporary culture.

Since her work straddles multiple genres, it’s worth noting that Schumer, like Stewart

and others, started out as a stand-up comedian before crossing over into television and

movies. She now has her own show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer,

which follows a structure similar to The Dave Chappelle Show in that it includes both

sketch comedy and stand-up comedy. Schumer has also worked in film, starring in

movies like Trainwreck and Snatched. This presents the same challenge we’ve

confronted all along here, which is that we will first have to untangle her stand-up

comedian persona from other types of comedy and zero in on that. Helpfully, Schumer

has consistently toured and performed as a stand-up comedian, throughout her forays

into television and film. In an interview with Molly Young from New York Magazine in

2013, Schumer gave us an insight into her process when she said her “writing routine is

to work backward from an uncomfortable premise” and then try to make it both funny

and palatable.

Another comedian who has worked backward from uncomfortable premise by

creating and performing comedic material about a painful personal experience is and

personally painful premises to arrive at comedy is Sasheer Zamata, who described her

motivations and processes for stand-up comedy when she guested on NPR’s This

American Life. You may recognize Zamata’s name from Saturday Night Live. Actually,

if you watch that show, you could try a quick thought exercise where you ask yourself if

you heard her name in the SNL announcer’s voice when you read it, and then you could

reflect a little on the auditory connections a voice like that creates for a viewer. Either

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way, the important thing to note is that Zamata is a stand-up comedian too, although she

may be more well known for her role on SNL, and in the segment she did for This

American Life, Zamata was describing an incident that happened to her on the streets of

Florida that she has turned into material for her stand-up act over the years. She was

walking with a friend, who was another black woman. Host Ira Glass, I should add at

this point, cautioned listeners that Zamata was going to be using a racial slur in her story,

so perhaps I should similarly add that here. And look at that, I have.

Anyway, Zamata and her friend were walking down the street when a large truck

bearing a confederate flag vanity plate approached them. A red-faced man (which was

as “politically correct” as she could be in describing him, Zamata told us) leaned out the

window and yelled, "y'all niggas need to take yo' black asses back to Africa." Zamata

says she did something she doesn’t often do when she’s upset; she called her mom. She

goes on to provide a background and context for her mother’s relationship with white

people: when her mother was school-aged in the 1960s, she was sent to an integrated

school in Forrest City, Arkansas. Zamata says that her mother had never shared any of

this information with her when she was growing up; the most she would get out of her

mom could be defined by an incident where her mother was driving and had stopped to

let an older white couple walk across the street. Her mother let out this “this deep sigh

like, ehh, white people,” and Zamata said, “I was like, ‘Uhh, they're not even talking to

us right now. What's the issue?’” And her mother just said, “memories.”

It wasn’t until after Zamata had the experience with the slur-yelling truck driver

that she thought to really ask her mother about her experiences with white people

growing up. At that point, Zamata’s mother Ivory actually joined to tell the story with

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her daughter. Ivory described going to the integrated school because her mother had

chosen to send her children there when the option of racial integration became available,

saying that she wanted her children to interact with white people so they didn’t grow up

afraid of them. Ivory and her six siblings would ride the bus to school—in the front,

where their mother had told them to sit so that if a problem arose, the bus driver could

witness it. The bus driver did witness the problems that arose—other children on the

bus hurled slurs at Ivory and the other black children on the bus, but he said nothing to

protect them. The school principal witnessed white children pelting rocks and bananas

at Ivory and did nothing.

These two stories—of getting hate speech yelled at Zamata and of her mother

getting rocks and bananas thrown at her—don’t seem that funny, do they? But Zamata

says that she worked through the experience with the truck driver on stage, through the

development of her material for stand-up performances. She says she’s been talking

about it for a few years now in her act; she describes the man and his truck to audiences

as a caricature of racism, as if the man had walked into a store and said, “I need to look

as racist as I feel!” She says this last part in a deep voice with a southern accent, and I

can picture her on stage, holding the microphone and gesticulating with her hand and

making her eyes bigger when she says it, staring up over the top of the audience for this

quick impersonation as part of her bit.

I haven’t actually seen Zamata do this bit, so she may or may not hold her arm

the way I imagined it when she’s on stage, or look where I imagine her looking. But I

have watched enough stand-up comedy to have made some observations about the way

comedians hold their bodies and use their voices and their gaze to elicit laughter out of

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audience members. You have too probably, if you think about it. Or maybe you haven’t;

I don’t know you so you might be someone who settles in for a nice documentary about

the food industry or the failing education system on a Friday night, but chances are

you’ve seen some standup comedy routines. Regardless of how much stand-up you’ve

consumed, consider this: creating and performing comedic material about a painful

experience helped Zamata work through complicated feelings about racism so she could

arrive at a place where she has wrestled that experience into something that she has

power over. And she’s not the only one who has done this.

In this chapter, I have intentionally and comprehensively called upon stand-up

comedians’ own words in order to uncover a rhetorical motive in their work, where one

is often not recognized. When Louis C.K., Jim Norton, Bo Burnham, W. Kamau Bell,

Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, Joan Rivers, Aamer Rahman, Billy Crystal, Amy

Schumer, and Sasheer Zamata all make similar statements about either the healing

power comedy has on audiences or the spotlight it can shine on injustices or the

validation of working through a painful personal experience by working it into stand-up

material, we should listen to them, because they’re the ones up there with the

microphones doing the job.

Comedian Dan Martin describes his performances as boxing matches—he cuts

audiences with a less offensive joke here so he can follow up with a power punch there

that addresses something serious, then he gives them some water with a one-liner or a

side comment. He says he’s the coach and the opponent. If this section was like a water

break because it included interesting-to-read statements from comedians themselves, put

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your mouth guard back in, because we need to enter into the final round of this match,

the aptly titled “punchline” chapter.

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 CHAPTER 5

THE PUNCHLINE

A Review of the Argument

In this dissertation, I began with an overview of the five canons of rhetoric and how

they are represented in a stand-up comedian’s work. Next, we reviewed what some

academic and non-academic writers in different fields have had to say about humor in

general and stand-up comedy in particular to date, noting that there is an opportunity for

rhetoric and composition scholars to contribute meaningfully to this topic. In particular,

ties to early thinkers and concepts in rhetoric, like Aristophanes and kairos, are useful in

setting up our field’s clear connection to stand-up comedy. To set the scene for how and

why humor is used to shape opinions and shift mindsets, I shared the evolutionary and

computational theory of humor presented by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and

Reginald B. Adams, Jr. in Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.

According to those three, we are wired to derive pleasure from the act of recognizing

errors in our systematic thinking—hence our sense of humor.

Before moving on from that first chapter, I included a brief disclaimer about the

intentional decision to incorporate a less formal approach to word choice and writing

style, and explained the connection between one of the ideas we’d be exploring—that

comedians are able to reach larger audiences in part because of the way their casual tone

lowers the barrier of entry into ideas—and how the ideas are expressed. I also gave a

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heads up that due to the nature of the material we’d be encountering, you might come

across some less savory language, and I think I made good on that caution, don’t you?

In the second chapter, we dug into a deep comparison between Sophists and

stand-up comedians, starting with a summary what we know to be true of the Sophists

and how they’ve been reread and revived by rhetoric and composition scholars like

Crowley, Jarratt, Crick, and Jaeger. I outlined the similarities between Sophists and

stand-up comedians, beginning with the baseline congruence of their roles centering on

traveling and selling speech. We saw how Sophists represented a shift from nobility to

wealth, and stand-up comedians, in turn, represent a shift away from the prerequisite of

formal education. Using an example from Ellen Degeneres’ 2000 comedy special The

Beginning, in which she dismantles an argument against same sex marriage by

imagining life married to a goat, we drew a parallels to how Crowley characterizes

Sophists as “unsettling pupils” away from unsatisfactory positions toward more useful

ones. Just as the Sophists used their speeches and interactions with listeners to help

them “identify and negotiate differences among social groups,” we examined how

Aamer Rahman forced recognition of social differences in his act when he outlined what

would have to take place in order for “reverse racism” to be real. And last but not least,

we considered the similar “bad raps” assigned to both Sophists and stand-up comedians,

and ultimately I argued that we should reread stand-up comedians just as we’ve reread

Sophists.

In the second part of chapter two, we tackled another important comparison, this

time between jesters and stand-up comedians. Looping back to the notion that comedy

is a delivery system for truth, as Fugelsang says, we looked at how jesters were able to

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speak truth to power by delivering damning criticism to rulers in the form of funny barbs,

leveraging a perceived buffoonery and an earnest absence of having anything to gain

politically by pointing out imperfections in the leader. In order to see how stand-up

comedians today accomplish the feat of speaking truth to power, and to the general

public, we delved into the concepts of subversion and resistance, assisted by the work of

scholars like Domnica Radulescu, Barry Sanders, Helene Shugart and Joseph Boskin

and comedians like Richard Pryor, Margaret Cho, and D.L. Hughley.

Having aligned stand-up comedians with Sophists and jesters, we moved on to

comparisons with public intellectuals and social activists next in chapter three. After

considering definitions of public intellectuals offered by Nathan Crick, Alan Lightman,

and Edward Said, I looked for ways in which stand-up comedians fit that bill. Reminder:

There were many. And plenty of non-academic publications had furnished us with some

thoughts on that comparison from writers like Megan Garber, Marisa Kabas, and Francie

Latour, who analyzed comedy by Amy Schumer, Michael Ian Black, and Louis C.K.,

respectively, to draw comparisons between stand-up comedians and public intellectuals.

The documentary Stand-up Planet was instrumental in understanding why one might

call a stand-up comedian a social activist, as it shows Hasan Minhaj traveling to

Mumbai, India and Sowetto, South Africa to meet comedians there who are harnessing

the power of comedy to change the conversation around pressing local issues like

poverty, sanitation, and AIDS epidemics. Minhaj ultimately concludes that the

revolution will be hilarious, and an impact evaluation by Caty Borum Chattoo reveals

that viewers were more moved to higher rates of awareness, concern and intended action

by Stand-up Planet than by a similar-length documentary about global poverty presented

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in a more traditional, less humorous way, suggesting that stand-up comedy can be an

effective tool for social activism.

That brings us to chapter four, in which I emphasized the importance of

including comedians’ perspectives and voices and laid out my methodology for securing

and conducting interviews with comedians W. Kamau Bell, John Fugelsang, and Aparna

Nancherla. From my transcripts of those three interviews, I shared the comedians’

thinking on their use of the five canons of rhetoric, the alignment of stand-up comedians

to Sophists, jesters, public intellectuals, and comedians, and their process for crafting

and delivering material. Determined to incorporate as many sound bytes by stand-up

comedians reflecting on their own work as possible, I covered a broad landscape of

comedians’ statements from written and recorded interviews and discussions across

multiple platforms and publications. It turned out, when we listened to comedians, they

had a lot to say. From Patton Oswalt’s characterization of comedians as “the best

conduit to the forgotten, to the outsiders, to the inarticulate” to Aamer Rahman’s

recounting of professors telling him that showing his reverse racism bit worked better

than delivering a lecture to get their students engaged with complicated concepts of race

and quality to Sommore’s assertion that comedy reflects what’s going on in a

community, their statements and observations about the work of being stand-up

comedians contributed colorfully and meaningfully to our consideration of comics.

Last but not least, as part of our rehashing of what’s been covered thus far, let’s

take a look back at a few social experiments I included in there like an Easter egg hunt.

For starters, I asked you, dear readers, to consider the tone of the writing in this

document and reflect on whether the high interval training method of heavy critical

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thinking lifting interspersed with bursts of leg-stretching whimsy running impacted the

understanding of the material—did it keep you engaged? Did it offer intermittent

reprieval? Did it distract from an overall credibility factor that comes with consistently

formal, scholarly writing? Secondly, I asked you to consider watching Stand-up Planet

and reflecting on whether, as Caty Borum Chattoo surmised in her impact evaluation,

the humorous presentation of material does, as she suggests, make for a higher

likelihood of engaging the public in concepts of poverty and social inequity. For extra

credit, you could extend that reflection to consider other ways in which engagement and

impact may be strengthened by humorous presentations of material. I also suggested

that you imagine the name Sasheer Zamata being announced by the SNL voiceover guy

and picture Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as a jester. Dissertations don’t usually

come with homework for the reader, but in an effort to emulate the interactive quality of

stand-up comedy, in all its Kairos and you-had-to-be-there-ness, sprinkling in a handful

of social experiments seems apropos.

My Identity as a Writer, Researcher, and Comedy Consumer

A good researcher will make transparent her identity as it relates to the work she

presents. At the start of this dissertation, I referenced Gloria Anzaldúa’s statement about

how identity can’t be reduced to a “bunch of little cubbyholes,” and listed some of the

aspects of myself that my identity flows between and over, like my experience as a high

school teacher and my consumption of stand-up comedy. As the saying goes, when

you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and perhaps it is my training in the field

of rhetoric and composition through this doctoral program that originally caused me to

see stand-up comedy so decidedly as an important topic for rhetoricians to handle, but

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the more I poked and prodded at the many overlaps, the more convinced I became that

rhetoricians’ understandings and frameworks should be brought to bear on stand-up

comedy.

As for my appreciation of comedy, a potential critique of my work could be that

I am a tourist in this area, as a non-comedian myself. In an effort to “get into character,”

so to speak, for the writing and researching of this project, I have very minorly dabbled

in the practice of stand-up comedy, including—and also limited to, really—a comedy

workshop in 2013 facilitated by Spark Arts Entertainment, a Last Ram Standing

competition, also in 2013, and an improv workshop as part of a humor symposium in

2014. It’s worth mentioning that I actually organized all three of these events as part of

a yearlong initiative at URI to investigate comedy and social change, and the reason it’s

worth mentioning is that it helps to paint a picture of my identity as an appreciator of

comedy, but not a passive enjoyer.

Inevitably, a person who does not regularly engage in stand-up comedy

production yet writes about stand-up comedy and, specifically, argues for a producer-

oriented approach to studying stand-up might be administered some side-eye with a

“Where do you get off making this type of claim” look, which is why I’ve elected to

point out the ways in which I have actively sought the firsthand experience of creating

and presenting stand-up comedy material. My participation in this activity, however

limited, has contributed to a more well rounded perspective of stand-up comedy as an art,

science, and techne. Feeling the blood pound in my ears, and knowing that all eyes and

ears were on me up on stage—and that nobody else could save me from having to

perform for those eyes and ears and hopefully not mess up but also make the whole

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thing look effortless, like a good comedian does—gave me a taste of the pressures and

the exhilaration that come with being a stand-up comedian.

To imagine that on top of figuring out how to present themselves as nonchalantly

cool story sharers in front of large groups on a regular basis, stand-up comedians might

also be doing the important work of error detection through message delivery to wide

audiences without the barriers of formal education… Let’s just say that I developed a

great respect for the work that stand-up comedians do, but I made a conscious effort not

to let that fangirl identity cloud my judgments about how they were performing their

roles. As someone who would rather go out to a stand-up show than a to a concert or

movie, I recognized that my personal enthusiasm for comedy could influence my

research interests, but should not dictate my scholarly investigations. I should also

mention that I did win second place in the competition, if for no other reason than to

brag.

Implications for Research in Writing and Rhetoric

Implications, implications, where to start. It’s always a good idea to wrap up a

dissertation with a few well formed, well worded, well meaning recommendations for

what to do with this new research or this new take on something or this new tiny blip in

the outside of the circle of human knowledge that the somewhat self-important video,

“An Animated Guide to a Ph.D.,” suggests doctoral work concludes in. Accordingly, I

have a few.

Academics must take popular culture seriously. If the academic world and the

comedy world can be brought closer together by this work, a new, enjoyable genre

worthy of study will open up to researchers and students. An aim of mine has been to

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examine how messages are shared by comedians and draw some conclusions about what

other groups can learn from them about making information palatable and entertaining

without sacrificing content and integrity. Rhetoric and composition scholars shouldn’t

continue to ignore “entertainment.” Instead, we could be capitalizing on the energy,

enthusiasm, and rhetorical strength that comedic writing and its wide swath of subgenres

can bring to our field. If a handful of educators were to ever, in some universe, get a

hold of this dissertation and decide to take five minutes of class time to show a clip of

stand-up comedy as an introduction into a lesson or assign students to select from five

pre-determined segments on the same topic, including one or more stand-up excerpts,

and ask them to write about the similarities and differences of learning about the same

topic through different modes, or involve stand-up comedy in some other way of their

choosing, I would smile and put a check mark next to this particular implication, which

we’ll affectionately call: More stand-up comedy in the classroom, please.

There is much of value outside the scholarly literature and rhetoric and

composition researchers should look carefully at this growing body of work. The non-

academic articles we’ve surveyed in this dissertation show us that non-academics can

feel compelled to write intelligently about comedy. Let’s use that in our classes and ask

our students to write intelligently about comedy. It may be just the hook that some of

them need to turn on their critical thinking. The obvious benefit of pulling stand-up

comedy into our classrooms would be engagement. Beyond the mere interest factor

though, stand-up comedy could be especially invaluable in light of Hurley, Dennett and

Adams’ computational and evolutionary theory of humor. By putting students in contact

with stand-up comedy material, we are not only keeping them interested, but potentially

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providing opportunities for them to confront or confirm latent committed beliefs through

the reward of laughter.

It’s possible that in the future, we will feel as foolish for overlooking the

importance of stand-up comedians as rhetors as everyone in the field has been made to

feel about selling the Sophists short. I’ve made clear my stance that stand-up comedians

need to be recovered, rewritten, re-watched, and restored, which brings me to my second

implication: Let’s pay more attention to the ways in which stand-up comedians fit the

history of Sophists, the tradition of jesters, and the function of speaking truth to power

through rhetorical agency, thereby recovering the rhetorical place of importance that

stand-up comedians should have. A vast landscape of possibilities stretches before us of

all the different ways rhetoric and composition scholars could contribute to the study of

stand-up comedy, but first we need to acknowledge all the different that stand-up

comedians intersect with other figures of stature and social change, now and in the past.

One of the reasons I pulled non-scholarly texts into my work here is, as I

indicated, people without higher education institutional attachments to their names can

still offer clear-headed, contemplation-worthy investigations and explanations about

stand-up comedy. Another reason though is the relatively slim pickings in the academic

arena on which I could rely. Meier and Schmitt’s very recent book Standing Up,

Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change is certainly a

promising signal that the topic could be picking up steam out here, and they even make a

similar call for paying more attention to stand-up in the academic community:

“Although we are not suggesting that stand-up should be regarded as a panacea, its

ability to speak truth to power, speak the unspeakable, and consider the world not as it is

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but as it should be cannot be ignored as a potentially powerful rhetorical resource for

social change.”

Comedy makes a difference in the world by having real impact. Winston

Churchill told us, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to

get its pants on,” and a cleverly crafted, memorably delivered stand-up comedian bit can

circulate much more widely than a drily delivered, if carefully written, scholarly article.

We might then surmise that thinking more about sharing information in humorous ways

could go a long way in disseminating messages of our own, and that would result in a

third implication: Let’s learn from stand-up comedians’ successes in getting large

audiences to listen to what they have to say. In academia, we sometimes talk of the

“impact factor” of a journal, as measured by the number of citations of articles in it. In

one disappointing analysis, it was revealed that “some 90% of papers that have been

published in academic journals are never cited” and “as many as 50% of papers are

never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors” (Lokman).

Yikes. Even if we were to generously assume that these figures are way off, and

immediately assign graduate students across the country to quadruple the number of

articles they’re reading, we’d still have a pretty dismal outlook on the majority of papers

published in academic journals. This is sad, to put it simply, which you may have

noticed I’m in favor of doing, because academics put a lot of blood, sweat and tears, or

at the very least, a lot of time and energy into the things they publish. That’s why I’ve

been fascinated by the impact factor of stand-up comedians, who climb up on stage and

regularly address sizable crowds, sharing opinions and ideas that they haven’t run

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through the editing mill of an academic journal, but nevertheless can often be strikingly

sharp, insightful, and artfully delivered.

Academic scholarship cannot afford to be insular. Beatrice Otto asks if

“scholarship [has] become too obsessed with growing prize onions in the garden plot

while ignoring the beckoning fecundity of fields beyond the fence,” and I worry that the

answer might be yes (Otto xvii). Of course, I have seen some examples of academics

publicly reflecting on their professional connections to stand-up comedy, though not

many. Dr. Kelli Marshall of DePaul University shared a post about how live comedy

shows have contributed to her professional, scholarly work. First she lists the

comedians she’s seen live, and then she reflects on how seeing those live performances

has impacted her professional life, from book chapters and journal articles she’s

published about comedians to college courses she’s designed around comedians and

their work, like “Stand-up Comedy on TV” and “Stand-up Comedy Documented.” As

Marshall acknowledges, there are larger social implications of stand-up comedians’

work that are important enough to warrant discussion and exploration and the sharing of

ideas.

Perhaps comedy can help academics to be better public intellectuals. There are

even examples of academics taking on the persona of stand-up comedians in order to

share their research, which is not necessarily what I’m suggesting we should try on for

size, but it’s interesting nonetheless. A movement called “Bright Club” in London

brings professors into pubs and night clubs to present their research in a series of

comedy nights. It was inspired by Steve Cross, “a former geneticist who is completely

serious in his crusade to find new ways for academics to interact with the public”

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(Guttenplan). At the 2015 International Society for Humor Studies conference, I

actually encountered several professors who regularly participate in Bright Night in

London, and Sophie Scott, who spoke at URI’s 2015 Honors Colloquium, has

participated as well. The tagline for Bright Club is “researchers become comedians for

just one night,” and again, I am not suggesting that this is the way academics can learn

from stand-up comedians’ rhetorical strategies and engagement techniques (although I

I’m not not suggesting we have one at URI), but it does at least represent a recognition

that we can learn something important from comedians about how to hook an audience.

Critical analysis of standup comedy may engage and motivate learners. In K-12

education and higher ed, we have occasionally recognized that humor is a powerful

rhetorical tool capable of transmitting ideas and engaging students in them, as the

professors professed to Rahman when the said that his stand-up comedy routine worked

better than their lectures. Haphazardly, inconsistently, and without a great deal of (or

any?) prompting from the powers that be in state and federal departments of education,

in the case of K-12, or from department chairs or deans, in the case of higher ed,

educators have pulled comedy into their classrooms at varying levels, dependent entirely

on their own personal interest in and commitment to doing so. Why wouldn’t more of

us feel motivated to pull mirth and laughter into our classrooms? Moreover, why would

we want to stamp it out of students with standardized curriculum and assessment?

I wouldn’t want to suggest a wholesale standardization or requirement of

incorporating comedy into classrooms across the board, because, while I don’t think E.B.

White was right about analyzing humor being like dissecting a dead frog, I do think

establishing “mandatory comedy incorporation” would almost always stamp out any joy

161
that might come with its inclusion. Furthermore, it would be way too broadly

impossible to posit that humor should infiltrate education. However, on a much tinier,

more explicit level, I do posit that stand-up comedy, specifically, should be pulled into

the fold of rhetoric and composition, both as a form to study and analyze for discourse

and as a prompt for students to engage with ideas, ethics, and opinions. Tarez Samra

Graban points to key intersections between the field and humor studies in “Beyond ‘Wit

and Persuasion’: Rhetoric, composition and humor studies,” but most are rooted in the

theory of rhetoric and cultural production, and few intersections between comedy and

composition as a practice, and as a course, are found.

Kairos and Comedy

Comedians are beings in time. Tragedies, love stories, and other great works of

literature that generally receive academic respect and attention easily, without having to

clamor for it, speak to feelings, which can be universal across time and space, and that

makes sense when we consider how important it is to feel connected to others through

recognizing similar feelings in them. Comedy, however, is harder to canonize in the

same way as great literature, and lends itself less easily to long-term studying and debate,

because it can be so time- and audience- bound. Coming back to that concept of Kairos,

a well thought out, designed and delivered stand-up performance may not be as easy to

capture and repeat and mull over as a play about love, because so much of the thinking

involved in finding the stand-up performance satisfying is not the same for the second or

third or thousandth retelling. We can count on feelings to stay pretty universal over time

and across space, but we cannot say the same for matters of the mind, and if jokes or

humorous utterances or artfully crafted and captivatingly performed stand-up sets can be

162
said to appeal to the mind (and we’ve seen that they can be said to do just that), then it’s

no wonder we don’t have the same general agreement that we should commit to

consuming them critically, appreciating them professionally, and bringing them into our

classrooms as texts to hold up to the light for reading, understanding and discussing.

If we did agree, as a field, that stand-up comedy sets and the rhetors who create

and perform them are worth continued attention, what might our research look like, and

our findings from that research? What might our classrooms look like? What would our

students gain from the natural enjoyment of encountering humor during learning, and

from the strong messages of power and human behavior and social constructs conveyed

by the comedians? One thing they might benefit from is the creativity, flexible thinking,

and problem solving that stand-up comedy inspires. One study indicated that when

challenged with two tasks generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity, people

who watched a short comedy video were 3.75 times more likely to demonstrate

improved performance (Isen, Daubman and Nowicki).

The truth is, if I am spending the amount of time writing and thinking that I am,

in fact, spending at this time on this particular work of scholarship, it would feel

uncomfortable and even irresponsible to not at least connect to current events in some

way. Otherwise, I would worry that I was writing in a vacuum, and a vacuum is not

where I wish to be. It’s a natural fit, given the overall goals of this dissertation, to

emphasize the function of stand-up comedy as resistance for our final implication. If, as

Sophie Quirk tells us in Why Stand-up Matters, “jokes have the advantage of being

eminently repeatable and thus able to spread ideas to a much wider audience,” then

163
stand-up comedy is a very appropriate medium through which to resist, because it can

carry important ideas to the multitudes.

Understanding, as we do, that humor can accomplish what Chris Bliss calls a

“verbal magic trick,” by seducing us into a different way of thinking when the

endorphins bring down our defenses, now is an especially important time for us to pay

attention to the power of stand-up comedians. Dissertations, by nature, are not

particularly political, but paying attention to context just as we’ve explicitly paid

attention to arrangement and audience, it is worth mentioning that at the time that parts

of this dissertation were written, Donald Trump had just become the 45th president of the

United States. (For other parts, Barack Obama was president and that, this writer opines

against the rules of dissertation writing, was a better time.)

In a time of anti-intellectualism—as some may argue we are now in, given the

disdain the current president has shown for academic “elites”— stand-up comedians are

well positioned to act as heroes, delivering information and ideas to people from outside

what is traditionally thought of as intellectualism. Edward Said addressed the

associations of “ivory tower” and “sneer” with the word “intellectual,” stating that the

public role of the intellectual is actually “as outsider, ‘amateur,’ and disturber of the

status quo” (Said x). Stand-up comedians certainly qualify as “outsiders” to the ivory

tower, and from their outside vantage point, they are better able to disturb the status quo

without invoking the dismissiveness sometimes ascribed to academic elites. Since

audiences are more open to hearing their message, stand-up comedians can take on the

role of resisters and truth tellers—while not giving up their positions as merry makers.

164
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