Comedy and Critique: Stand-up Comedy and the Professional Ethos of Laughter

Stand-up comedy has become a vehicle for social and cultural critique, from the existential to the political. Sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists have suggested that comedy is a form of “magic,” a type of special behavior that provokes a change in the perception of ordinary reality. Those claims are usually backed up with examples from Western history—carnival, court jesters, the Jewish shtetl—or from the anthropological record. In this book, the author maps these claims with a contemporary account, informed by sociocultural transformations, that considers the ideals of stand-up comedians while sustaining and giving nuance to the picture of the comedian as magician.