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Working to Laugh

Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues
  • ISBN-13: 9780739189559
  • Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS
    Imprint: LEXINGTON BOOKS
  • By James M. Thomas
  • Price: AUD $218.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 16/03/2015
  • Format: Hardback 182 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Cultural studies [JFC]
Description
Table of
Contents
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For decades, stand-up comedy has been central to the imbrication of popular culture and political discourse, reshaping the margins of political critique, and often within the contexts of urban nightlife entertainment. In Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, James M. Thomas (JT) provides an ethnographic analysis of urban nightlife sites where this popular form of entertainment occurs. Examining the relationship between the performance, the venue, and the social actors who participate in these scenes, JT demonstrates how stand-up venues function as both enablers and constrainers of social difference, including race, class, gender, and heteronormativity, within the larger urban nightlife environment. JT's analysis of a professional comedy club and a sub-cultural bar that hosts a weekly comedy show illuminates the full range of stand-up comedy in the American cultural milieu, from the highly organized, routinized, and predictable format of the professional venue, to the more unpredictable, and in some cases, cutting edge format of the amateur show.
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Into the Field: The Comedy Kitchen and Helter Skelter Chapter 3: Affective Labor and The Comedy Kitchen Chapter 4: Affective Labor and Helter Skelter Chapter 5: Assembling Order in Stand-Up Comedy Chapter 6: Stand-Up Comedy, Urban Nightlife, and Affective-Cultural Assemblages Chapter 7: Coda - Soleil Chapter 8: Conclusion Appendix A: Methodology Bibliography
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