Publications

Publication details [#63795]

Aarons, Debra and Marc Mierowsky. 2017. How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedy. The European Journal of Humour Research 5 (4) : 158–168.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies

Annotation

In How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin argued that people employ words to do things in the world, not only to utter a state of affairs. This suggestion proposed speech acts, and basically started the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in daily communication cover persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other deliberate conducts. Austin stressed the idea of speaker aim and hearer’s reply to that aim if successfully transferred. This inquiry regards some of the speech acts employed in the work of chosen standup comedians to assay the way they define the connection of performer and audience. It asserts that there is a reciprocal connection between the allowing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and their success in molding the social lives of the audience. It displays that this connection is at the vanguard of standup comedy’s social ifluence and that it can produce increased awareness of the social and political setting of the time. Finally, it regards the question of whether socially critical standup can have any observable effect on the postures or conduct of both live and digitally moderated audiences.