Membership categories as interactional resources: cross-performance study in a stand-up comedy routine

This study investigates the use of membership categories (MCs) as interactional resources in stand-up comedy. Adopting a conversation analytical approach, we demonstrate that MCs are frequently employed to gauge receptivity and build up audience responsiveness in the opening stages of stand-up comedy routines. Analysing one comedian’s use of MCs across ten performances of the same routine in a single comedy club setting, we examine how MCs can trigger interactional patterns that ultimately stretch out the delivery of scripted material. Detailed micro-analyses reveal the combined role of syntactic, prosodic, and embodied resources, such as gestures, gaze direction and position shifts, in eliciting and managing audience responses. We find that successful affiliation with MCs depends on a joint orientation between comedian and audience. The findings also suggest that individual reactions to MCs, such as whooping or isolated laughter, generate more complex sequences of interaction, contributing the most to a routine’s elasticity in performance.