Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy

This essay is located at the triple intersection between: 1) linguistic anthropological studies on poetic or tropic language use (for example, Silverstein 2004; Agha 1997); 2) performance theoretical folkloristics (for example, Briggs 1988; Bauman and Briggs 1990); and 3) humor studies dealing with the phenomena of analogy and irony (for a broad overview, see Attardo 1994). As I hope to demonstrate, parallelism, "repetition with patterned variation" (Brown 1999:224), is a concept that penetrates all three of these areas. Regarding the first field, Roman Jakobson (1960) expounded parallelism as manifesting the poetic function of language, as the poetic use of language par excellence. A staple feature of various genres of verbal art and folklore (see Frog 2014a; Fox 1977), parallelism is also a basic structural principle in conversational and co-constructed discourse (for example, Silverstein 1985; Glick 2012). Regarding the second area, the natural habitat of parallel forms and structures is the communicative and cultural context of (ritualized) performance and social interaction, which regularly foreground enactment of the poetic function (Bauman 1984; Reyes 2002). Finally, regarding analogy and irony in humor studies, the focus here is on uses of parallelism in comic routines, and a relationship between analogical parallelism and a specific type of ironic effect.

The generic context and materials for my analysis are drawn from stand-up comedy routines. Stand-up comedy is a genre of oral performance that has emerged internationally from the twin traditions of American vaudeville and European music hall during the mid-1900s (Nesteroff 2015; Double 2014 [2005]). Founded on the emulation of spontaneous conversation in an artificial performance setting, stand-up comedy revolves around what Colleary (2015, Chapter 2) has designated as comic stylization of individual persona. Individual comic persona, arguably the most important tool for a stand-up comic, is produced and stylized to a high degree through various stances and viewpoints, illustrating the combative, manifestly confrontational nature of the genre.

Routines are formally and thematically delimited comic "numbers" or units of complete stand-up performances (see Lindfors 2016; Brodie 2008:160–69). As texts, stand-up routines are highly variable in their internal structure as well as their pragmatic placing in performances. According to the conventions of stand-up, routines are stylized and presented as a (unilateral) dialogue between the comic and the audience, conventionally underscoring the contextualized situatedness and momentariness of the performance (see Brodie 2014). Not atypically, stand-up routines manifest a rich intertwining of sociolinguistic phenomena, poetically juxtaposed social positions, gestural enactments, layers of embedded reported speech, and incorporated sequences of the comic performer assuming the voice and gestures of various persona. Recalling the Anglo-American narratological distinction between showing and telling (Booth 1969), stand-up could be construed as a mixture of mimetic, dramatic comedy constituted by play-acted enactments, and narrative, oratorical comedy (a distinction that echoes the Platonic dichotomy between mimesis and diegesis).

In what follows, I examine two routines by two contemporary comics, the British Stewart Lee and the American Hari Kondabolu. Both performances illustrate the significance of parallelism as a stock-in-trade poetic technique of verbal comedy, but each does so in different ways. On the one hand, the prominently stylized routine performed by Lee verges on the oratorical: the analogical parallelisms of his performance emerge across formally delineated and sequentially positioned discursive segments. By contrast, Kondabolu's routine highlights parallelism as a higher-order configuration that is closely aligned with the dialogic acts of stance-taking and positioning. Indeed, I advocate for an eclectic approach to the topic of parallelism as a flexible analytic tool. In this regard, a heuristic distinction is made between 1) an approach to parallelism as a textual and rhetorical device based on sequential repetition (alongside alliteration, rhyme, and so on), and 2) a more "positional" or symbolic orientation toward parallelism as a higher-order structural and functional principle.

The concept of "stance" is invoked in both analyses. Stance-taking, which can be marked verbally as well as by body posture, facial expression, and gesture (Matoesian 2005:168), is elemental in how we (that is to say, speakers of a common language) assign value to...