Overview of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Stand-up Comedy

This paper dwells on the interdisciplinarity of stand-up comedy by discussing several authors who have made a great contribution to its understanding as a phenomenon. Though the main vehicle of delivery of the humorous in stand-up comedy is speech, historically and culturally, it involves a lot more. From the era a joke is spawned and told through the pauses between utterances to the topic the joke broaches, everything plays part in evoking an audience’s laughter. In order to more successfully grapple stand-up comedy, a wider approach that involves fields such as sociolinguistics, theatre studies, anthropological linguistics must be considered.