Awkward Connections: Stand-Up Comedy as Affective Arrangement

This chapter explores stand-up as an affective arrangement, i.e., as goal-driven phatic labor that rests on forging and manipulating affective relations – connection for short – between performer and audience. Drawing on linguistic/semiotic anthropological work on phaticity as well as feminist work on affect, it attends to the manner in which this affective and connective dynamic is discursively formulated amongst practitioners and naturalized into an array of tropes and metaphors that construe stand-up as a self-regulating autopoetic organism and atmospheric field of energies, pressures, and intensities. Moreover, the chapter unveils the prospective communicative and connective gap of awkwardness as something endemic to the social and political dynamic of stand-up.This chapter explores stand-up as an affective arrangement, i.e., as goal-driven phatic labor that rests on forging and manipulating affective relations – connection for short – between performer and audience. Drawing on linguistic/semiotic anthropological work on phaticity as well as feminist work on affect, it attends to the manner in which this affective and connective dynamic is discursively formulated amongst practitioners and naturalized into an array of tropes and metaphors that construe stand-up as a self-regulating autopoetic organism and atmospheric field of energies, pressures, and intensities. Moreover, the chapter unveils the prospective communicative and connective gap of awkwardness as something endemic to the social and political dynamic of stand-up.Peer reviewe

Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy

This paper addresses the interrelations between poetic parallelism and interactional stance-taking in stand-up comedy by examining commercially edited recordings of stand-up routines performed by two contemporary comics. Methodologically, the article suggests a heuristic distinction between 1) an approach to parallelism as a textual and rhetorical device based on sequential repetition of units of expression, and 2) a more positional or symbolic orientation that conceptualizes parallelism as a higher-order structural and functional principle. It is concluded that both types rely on iconic mappings across co-textual signs. The flexibility of parallelism is simultaneously proposed as affording diversity on the level of discursive presentation.Abstract from website.Antti Lindfors is a Ph.D. candidate of Folkloristics at the University of Turku, Finland. His doctoral dissertation on the poetics and performance of stand-up comedy, addressing stand-up from the perspectives of narration and gestures, satire and ethics, as well as confession

Intimately allegorical : the poetics of self-mediation in stand-up comedy

The dissertation presents stand-up comedy as a genre of embodied verbal art and semiotic interaction. In particular, the study elaborates on how stand-up comics mediate themselves in a public arena and playfully thematize and reappropriate this self-mediation within a performance form founded on the ideals of immediacy, actuality, and self-presence. The dissertation attends to such poetics of self-mediation through the lenses of textuality, reflexivity, and relatability. The perspective of textuality orients the research toward stand-up routines as the foremost texts, or metadiscursive units of expression, through which stand-up comics mediate themselves for their audiences’ consumption. The perspective of reflexivity orients the research toward the metapragmatics of stand-up comedy, including both metacommunication in performance and the ideologies and valuations (of communication) embedded in the practice of stand-up. The perspective of relatability orients the research toward the dynamics of stand-up as an economy of attention and affect that depends on intersubjective capture between participants of interaction. The analysis is methodologically informed by the disciplinary formations of folklore studies, linguistic anthropology, and cultural studies. First, folklore studies provides an approach to analyzing stand-up comedy as a genre of textual production, performance, circulation, and reception. Second, the dissertation adopts methodological tools from linguistic anthropology in its shared fascination with mediation and reflexivity in semiotic interaction. Third, the study draws from cultural studies in its broad interdisciplinary and critical ethos. The analysis is based on a heterogeneous set of source materials. First, stand-up is approached as performance through participant observation in the Finnish comedy scene, primarily in Helsinki. Second, stand-up is approached through metadiscourse, using data primarily accumulated by means of a questionnaire given to Finnish stand-up comics (17 written answers). Third, stand-up is approached as commodity through the analysis of 46 stand-up specials released by Netflix in 2017 and other stand-up recordings available to the author. This data is supplemented by miscellaneous literary and media texts, such as public interviews, articles, literature, and television series on stand-up. The introductory synopsis of the thesis outlines the theoretical and methodological fundamentals for studying stand-up comedy as embodied verbal art and semiotic interaction. In particular, it develops an approach to understanding stand-up performance as an “affective arrangement” and an economy of relatability, and as textual production based on the principle of poetic parallelism. Moreover, the introduction provides a heuristic for analyzing stand-up as a continuum between performance of self and animation of voice. The dissertation is comprised of four original articles published in journals loosely representing the fields of folklore studies, (linguistic) anthropology, and ethnology. The specific articles address the following topics in stand-up comedy: 1) reflexivity and participation; 2) satire as a performance of moral accountability; 3) parallelism and stance; and 4) narration and co-temporal gestures.Allegorisen intiimiä: Itsevälittymisen poetiikka stand up -komiikassa Väitöstutkimus käsittelee stand up -komiikkaa suullis-kehollisen lavataiteen ja semioottisen vuorovaikutuksen lajina. Tutkimus keskittyy erityisesti kysymykseen, miten stand up -koomikot esittävät eli välittävät itseään julkisella areenalla, ja miten tätä itsen välitystä tematisoidaan ja haltuunotetaan esityslajissa, jonka kulmakiviä ovat välittömyyden ja läsnäolon ihanteet. Tutkimus lähestyy tällaista itsevälittymisen poetiikkaa tekstuaalisuuden, refleksiivisyyden ja samastuttavuuden toisiaan täydentävistä näkökulmista. Tekstuaalisuuden käsitteen kautta stand up -rutiineja analysoidaan teksteinä, tai metadiskursiivisina ilmaisullisina yksikköinä, joiden välityksellä stand up -koomikot esittävät itseään yleisöilleen. Refleksiivisyyden käsite suuntaa tutkimusta kohti stand up -komiikan metapragmatiikkaa eli esityksessä ilmenevää metakommunikaatiota ja stand up -komiikan kommunikatiivisia ideologioita. Samastuttavuuden käsitteen kautta stand up -komiikkaa tarkastellaan dynaamisena huomio- ja affektitaloutena, joka perustuu vuorovaikutuksen osapuolten toisteisesti uusinnettuun intersubjektiiviseen yhteyteen. Tutkimus ammentaa metodologisesti folkloristiikan, lingvistisen antropologian ja kulttuurintutkimuksen oppialoista. Ensiksi, stand up -komiikkaa tarkastellaan folkloristisesti tekstien tuotantona, esittämisenä, sosiaalisena kiertona ja vastaanottona. Toiseksi, tutkimus jakaa lingvistinen antropologian kiinnostuksen refleksiivisyyteen kaiken merkkivälitteisen vuorovaikutuksen keskeisenä aspektina. Kolmanneksi, tutkimus sitoutuu kulttuurintutkimuksen tieteidenväliseen ja kriittiseen eetokseen. Tutkimus pohjautuu kolmenlaisille aineistokokonaisuuksille. Ensiksi, stand up -komiikkaa lähestytään performanssina suomalaisessa ja tarkkaan ottaen helsinkiläisessä stand up -skenessä suoritetun osallistuvan havainnoinnin kautta. Toiseksi, stand up -komiikkaa lähestytään metadiskurssina hyödyntäen suomalaisilta stand up -koomikoilta koottua kyselyaineistoa (17 kirjallista vastausta). Kolmanneksi, stand up -komiikkaa tarkastellaan kulutustuotteena hyödyntäen suoratoistopalvelu Netflixin vuonna 2017 julkaisemaa 46 stand up -spesiaalia ja muita stand up -tallenteita. Tätä aineistokokonaisuutta täydennetään sekalaisella stand upia koskevalla kirjallisuudella ja mediateksteillä, kuten julkisilla haastatteluilla, artikkeleilla ja televisiosarjoilla. Väitöskirjan johdanto esittelee työn metodologiset ja teoreettiset lähtökohdat. Johdanto mallintaa stand up -esityksen affektiivisena koosteena ja samastuttavuuden taloutena, esittelee parallelismin sen keskeisenä poeettisena trooppina ja käsitteellistää koko lajin itsen esittämisen ja äänten animoimisen välillä liikkuvana jatkumona. Tutkimus koostuu neljästä vertaisarvioidusta artikkelista, jotka on julkaistu folkloristiikan, (lingvistisen) antropologian ja etnologian lehdissä. Artikkeleissa stand up -komiikkaa analysoidaan 1) refleksiivisyyden ja osallistumisen, 2) satiirin ja moraalisen vastuullistamisen, 3) parallelismin ja asennoitumisen ilmaisun, sekä 4) kerronnan ja samanaikaisten eleiden toisiaan täydentävistä näkökulmista

Qualia of Stress and Bodily Enregisterment in Ice Swimming

Combining an ethnographic account of the Finnish “national past-time” of ice swimming and its remediation through the Wim Hof Method with an analysis of media representations, this article expands linguistic and semiotic anthropological scholarship on enregisterment of bodily and affective qualia by looking at how practitioners of this therapeutic technology elaborate on their corporeal and semiotic selves and transformations after indulging in full-body contact with freezing cold water. Laying particular emphasis on stress as a discursive hub and an intensely circulating qualisign within vernacular and institutionalized health discourses, pedagogical ice swimming exegesis is discussed as participating in enregistering emergent forms of personhood through metasemiotic regimentations of the body that draw from both natural and holistic as well as scientific and technical registers.Combining an ethnographic account of the Finnish national pastime of ice swimming and its remediation through the Wim Hof Method with an analysis of media representations, this article expands linguistic and semiotic anthropological scholarship on the enregisterment of bodily and affective qualia by looking at how practitioners of this therapeutic technology elaborate on their corporeal and semiotic selves and the transformations of those selves after indulging in full-body contact with freezing cold water. Laying particular emphasis on stress as a discursive hub and an intensely circulating qualisign within vernacular and institutionalized health discourses, the article discusses how pedagogical ice swimming exegesis is contributing to the enregisterment of emergent forms of personhood through metasemiotic regimentations of the body that draw from natural and holistic as well as scientific and technical registers.Peer reviewe

Pupils’ performance in managing the holistic craft process

The Finnish National Board of Education assessed learning outcomes in the final 9th grade of basic education in 2010. This assessment included a design task that involved testing the management of the holistic craft process (HCP), a test of theoretical knowledge and an attitude test. This article revisits the national assessment from a new perspective: to what extent do pupils have the competence to manage HCP, theoretical knowledge and what stand do they take towards the crafts subject in their attitudes? The more specific research questions strive to address: to what extent does theoretical knowledge and attitudes determine the managing of HCP? Is the performance in managing this process dependent on gender and earlier craft studies? This research focuses on a central concept: the competence to manage HCP. The assessment data was marked off into tasks that indicated the managing of HCP (n = 661 out of the sample N = 4,792). K-means cluster analysis, linear regression analysis, crosstabs with the Chi-squared test, and Spearman’s rank order correlation coefficient were used as a methodological solution. The central observation is that three different groups of pupils managed HCP, the theoretical knowledge and the attitudes. These groups are: the positive achievers (43 %), the positive underachievers (29 %) and the negative underachievers (28 %). In addition the performance in managing HCP cannot be determined by the theoretical knowledge and the attitudes in crafts at all, but is rather related to gender and earlier craft studies.Peer reviewe

The Sex Thieves : The Anthropology of Rumor. By Julien Bonhomme [Book rewiew]

Book review. Reviewed book: Julien Bonhomme: The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of Rumor. Translated by Dominic Horsfall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.Non peer reviewe

Spatiotemporal Management of Stand-Up Performance: Narration and Gestures

Providing an in-depth reading of an introductory routine by English stand-up comic Josie Long off of her comedy special Trying is Good (2008), this paper is concerned with the interrelations between verbal narration and co-temporal gestures in stand-up comedy as embodied verbal art and semiotic interaction. In particular, the paper outlines a conceptual framework of narrative orientations with which to highlight how gestures and movement participate in juxtaposing and mediating various conceptual spaces and narrative perspectives to precise communicative and artistic effect. In the process, it attends in detail to how perceptions, affects, and evaluations of immediacy and authentic self-presence are semiotically construed in a markedly mediated and reflexive context of stand-up comedy.</p

Zeroing in on Performance 2.0: From Serialization to Performative Enactments

This article explores the notions of performativity and performance in digital environments from the combined perspective of linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. In order to bring these diverging conceptual, methodological, and disciplinary traditions into mutual contact, an intermediary heuristic term of "performative enactments" is introduced. Performative enactments are elaborated as events of communicative sign behavior that foreground and make use of the principle of performativity, although not performances proper in the sense of manifesting a specific "mode of communication" (Bauman 1984).</p