Stand-Up Comedy as an Erotic Art: Reframing Stand-Up Comic Performance Through the Lens of Audre Lorde

ABSTRACT Violent metaphors are common in the description of stand-up comedy. If a comedian is successful, she “kills”—vaudeville slang that hardened in the twentieth century into an aggressive, hierarchical ethos this article refers to as the dominance model that is problematic because it reproduces systems of oppression that disadvantage comedians of marginalized identities, especially women and LGBTQIA+ performers. While pervasive in the stand-up industry, the dominance model is not inherent to the art form itself but is rather a by-product of the white, heteropatriarchal culture in which stand-up was forged. A more inclusive model frames stand-up comedy as an erotic art as defined by Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic.” Lorde argues that erotic knowledge is deeply felt in the body, joyful, and shared, a description that neatly encapsulates the experience of stand-up comedy for both performer and audience and offers a fresh, feminist approach to understanding stand-up comedy performance.