Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy
A Linguistic Exploration of How Comedians Use Impersonation and Expectation to Create Humour
Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy
A Linguistic Exploration of How Comedians Use Impersonation and Expectation to Create Humour
Description
This book employs a social semiotic methodology to investigate how comedians use impersonation and expectation to create humour in stand-up comedy.
It advances the linguistic cartography of how meaning-making resources contribute to humour in interactive humour genres. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) underpins the book's approach and is integrated with recent work on multimodality and paralanguage as well as humour studies.
The author develops a consolidated analytical framework for identifying and analysing the intermodal semiotic resources that contribute to impersonation and expectation in humour including gesture and voice quality – paralinguistic resources vital but underexplored in humorous texts. The framework is then applied through close discourse analysis of excerpts from three stand-up comedy texts by different comedians: Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard and Michelle Wolf. The findings outline typical and more complex realisations of intermodal impersonation, differentiate categories in how comedians employ impersonation to create humour, and describe how linguistic expectation can be established and subverted for humorous effect. These findings will be of interest to readers across the disciplines of linguistics, humour studies and multi/intermodality who are interested in the interaction between paralanguage, expectation and the negotiation of values so as to establish and maintain social relationships.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. A Social Semiotic Perspective on Stand-Up Comedy
2. The Social Semiotic Model
3. Analysing Intermodal Impersonation
4. Intermodal Impersonation in Stand-Up Comedy
5. Impersonation and Humour
6. Expectation and Humour
7. Conclusion
References
Index
Product details
| Published | 13 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 280 |
| ISBN | 9781350448414 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | Bloomsbury Studies in Systemic Functional Linguistics |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Reviews
ONLINE RESOURCES
Bloomsbury Collections
This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.
Related Titles
