Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (review)

John Limon offers us this one-sentence version of the theory of his compelling new book, Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America: “what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection” (4). By “abjection” Limon means two things: abasement or groveling prostration and, second, Julia Kristeva’s “psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of” (ibid.). He comes to feel that the first meaning contains the second. In this theoretical study of how standup comedy both avows and disavows abjection, Limon is at pains to explain why America “comedifies.” This does not mean that all of American life and culture suddenly turns comic but rather that stand-up comedy, which was the domain of Jewish, male, presumed heterosexuals, became a multiple habitat, i.e., became a profession where as of the 1960s “all of America is the pool for national stand-up comedy” (3). Since Limon is sure this is not a mere triumph of multiculturalism, his search for an explanation offers the following: it happens because these Jewish comedians stood up at the place where “the body was idealized and materiality abstracted,” i.e., they stood in the place where it also became black, Christianizing, homosexual and female. And he sees this place as located somewhere between New York City (or Chicago) and the suburbs.

Limon then constructs a theoretical line that runs through those stand-up comics that are essential to his story. It begins with the movement of Jews to the suburbs and Lenny Bruce as the urban return of the repressed in the body reviled. In Limon’s structured theoretical “narrative” abjection moves through ever-increasing abstractions. The Brucean “spritz” becomes the denatured body (Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks) and then the desexualized body (Mike Nichols and Elaine May). The idealized/abstract body (David Letterman) becomes general-ized abjection itself (Richard Pryor) and then generalized abstraction itself (Paula Poundstone and Ellen Degeneres) as the body is evacuated from the frontal position where stand-up confronts its own abjection.

The chapter on Lenny Bruce considers the role of audience outrage, or the surprising lack of it, in response to one of Bruce’s most puzzling jokes, “I am going to piss on you.” Limon seeks to explain why American audiences (not British or Australian) understood this joke to be about joking, about the audience’s desire “to share the element of Bruce’s abjection” (16). In following chapters, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner are viewed through Eve Sedgewick to explain how male anxiety keeps reappearing when the homosocial team tries to displace it by triangulating with the audience.

The Kantian sublime is enlisted to explain the oscillation of avowal and disavowal at work in the comedy of Nichols and May, where two figures alternate as parent and child, male and female, pleasure and displeasure. David Letterman is the avatar of form, pure mind as metajoke, “Euclidean form imposed upon debris.” The two final chapters on Richard Pryor and two female comics, Paula Poundstone and Ellen Degeneres, are the most successful in reproducing the experience of how performances materializes the master theme of abjection. The chapter on Pryor is particularly compelling on the democratic potential of his excremental vision.

The book’s success at comprehending such a broad range is also its difficulty: complex ideas are often characterized with such velocity they can be difficult to unpack. Example: “The crossing is what is most lovable in America, though its mode of mechanical abstraction predicts virtual reality” (5). But the pleasure in this is its replication of stand-up performance itself, where truth is quickly perceived, but careful analysis is required to process exactly why and how. In its rigorous, often brilliant theorizing of a popular cultural phenomenon, the book makes an important contribution to humor studies and to American studies as well.