Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy

Patrice Oppliger is Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Boston University, USA. Her most recent book is Tweencoms Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms.Eric Shouse is Associate Professor of Communication at East Carolina University, USA. His work has been published in HUMOR, Comedy Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly.

• I.    Darkness on Stage.- I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die: George Carlin and the Comedy of Disaster (Steven S. Kapica, Ph.D.).- Comedy Is Not Pretty: Steve Martin’s Kitsch as Masochistic Fantasy (Sean Springer, Ph.D.).- Stand-up Comedy as a Form of Therapy (Cait Hogan, Stand-Up Comedian).- II. The Dark Side of Addiction.- Wasted Youth: Temporalities of Addiction and Comic Abjection (Phil Scepanski, Ph.D.).- Food Addiction in the Lives and Works of Stand-up Comedians (Carey Marie Noland, Ph.D.).- III. Are Comedians Really So Dark?.- Autobiography is a Funny Thing (Eddie Naessens, Ph.D.).- Humor Production and Perceptions of Psychological Health (A. Peter McGraw, Ph.D., Erin Percival Carter, Ph.D. Candidate, and Jennifer Harman, Ph.D.).- IV. The Dark Side of the Comedy Business.- How to Legally Determine that a Joke is Prejudicial? The Uneasy Case of Canadian Comedian Mike Ward (Christelle Paré, Ph.D.).- Why the Relentless Pursuit of the Laughter of Strangers? (Sheila Lintott, Ph.D.).- Heckling, Physical Violence, and Realistic Death Threats: The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy (Eric Shouse, Ph.D.)

“The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy reminds us that tragedy can be equally the source, target, inspiration, and frictional underside of our laughter … . The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy provides an important introduction to an obviously germane aspect of the form and is very welcome in the rapidly emerging field of (Stand up) comedy studies.” (Antti Lindfors, The European Journal of Humour Research, Vol. 10 (2), 2022)