THE FIRST EXAMINATION OF STAND-UP COMEDY THROUGH THE LENS OF FOLKLORE In
A Vulgar Art Ian Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy,
leveraging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal,
artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a
rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to
something they recognize such as literature or theatre, and analyze it
accordingly. A Vulgar Art begins with a more fundamental observation:
someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them
directly, and trying to make them laugh. So this book takes the moment
of performance as its focus and shows that stand-up comedy is a
collaborative act between the comedian and the audience. Although the
form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in
social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it
requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain
larger and larger audiences. How do comedians re-create that atmosphere
of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from
microphones to clothing and LPs to twitter as strategies for bridging
the spatial, temporal, and sociocultural distances between the performer
and the audience. Ian Brodie, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, is associate
professor of folklore at Cape Breton University. He has served as
president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada and is currently
the editor for Contemporary Legend: The Journal of the International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
