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

Stand-up Comedy in Theory; or, Abjection in America. By John Limon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000; 154 pp. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Scant scholarly writing has focused on stand-up comedy. Perhaps this is because the experience of the comedian's performance--existing only at the time of its telling, when the spectators' response completes the joke (which is not funny until the audience laughs)--is so difficult to capture in print. Other performance genres, of course, also rely on the audience-performer dynamic but it seems that no other performers rely as much on audience response as professional comedians. They must continually adjust and adapt their performance on the fly in order to generate the constant, substantial laughter demanded by the audience. In comedian parlance, failure to receive such laughter can result in "death" (of the comedian), while a powerful, laugh-filled turn onstage often means that the comic has "killed" (the spectators).

Yet while stand-up might be the epitome of the performative, few performance theorists have explored its unique intricacies. For the most part, essays on stand-up have been descriptive and/or journalistic and have eschewed the types of critical theories applied to so many other performance genres in recent years. With his book Stand-up Comedy in Theory; or, Abjection in America, John Limon has taken an important step toward filling the void of critical studies of the comedian. In Stand-up Comedy, scholars finally have a book-length work that approaches what Clifford Geertz might call the "deep play" of stand-up comedy.

Stand-up Comedy, comprised of an introduction and six chapters (including three previously published articles), relies heavily on psychoanalytic theory--especially Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva--in its analysis of the stand-up genre and some of its more notable American practitioners, such as Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Richard Pryor. The author also touches upon social aspects of his subject through an often adept incorporation of feminist, queer, and race theories. Limon, an English professor, even utilizes Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to help deliver the volume's central point: "The one-sentence version of the theory of this book," Limon writes in the introduction, "would state the claim that what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection" (4).

In a chapter on David Letterman, Limon focuses on what he considers abject aspects of Letterman's persona while discussing comic abjection in general, which, he shows us, is found not only in Letterman's shtick and everyday life, but also in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1934), and Martin Scorsese's film, The King of Comedy (1983). Limon's various examples of comic abjection--in this and other chapters--often help to support his theory that:

[W]henever abjectness is proudly performed, it is comic. It is comic because it is prone but it is upright. [...] What is comic is that the essence of verticality uncovers itself as the sign of a complete horizontal impotence. [...T]he abject monologue becomes comic when it stands up. (79)

Limon tells us in the introduction that he did not discover that stand-up comedy centers on abjection until after writing the Lenny Bruce essay, the book's first chapter. But this discovery, the volume's main theory--that beneath the cool, upright appearance, or "seeming," of the performer can be found abject, comic truth antithetical to that appearance--is not quite new. Aristotle and Plato, for example, feared comedy because it foregrounded the low or abject. ¹ Limon's study extends the understanding of this basic premise of comedy, however, by utilizing critical theory while focusing on specifically abject elements of contemporary stand-up performers' routines and personae, particularly in chapters four, five, and six, which focus, respectively, on Letterman, Pryor, and Paula Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres.

While the wide-ranging scope of...