Page 117 - The Language of Humour

104 STAND-UP COMEDY
cover’s blown. Women’s tits are not funny and it’s not funny to say
they are. So where do you look? You look around you, inside your
heart and in what you’re doing—that’s where the comedy is. And
inevitably that becomes social—you have to take a line.
(Ben Elton)
There was a traditional club comic got up at the Comedy Store and
was racist and sexist, and anti-gay, and he just stormed. The audience
might like me as well, but they would be quite happy to see Jim
Davidson and Bernard Manning. You get a lot of bigoted and
extremely reactionary people at the Comedy Store—and the abuse that
women attract is quite horrifying. There’s a whole male feeling which
takes over, which I’d only really experienced when I went to see Roy
Chubby Brown and there was a ninety percent male audience
absolutely baying to hear the word ‘cunt’ said repeatedly.
(Jeremy Hardy)

Contemporary stand-up comedy
One of the most popular comedians of the 1990s is Eddie Izzard. He
does not align himself with any particular movement in comedy. As he
said, himself, about the material in his two hour solo shows: ‘I just talk
a load of bollocks about all the incredibly funny things in my brain.’
Then he went on to introduce his first topic: ‘Thimbles—they don’t get
enough press.’

Activity with text

Eddie Izzard rarely uses gags where the humour is based in wordplay;
there is little reference to taboo topics and few obvious butts for his
humour. Read the following transcript. (It would be better to watch a
video to get a sense of his delivery.) What makes the audience laugh so
much? There are aspects of incongruity, as discussed in Unit 3, and a
sort of reversal of the superiority theory of humour (Unit 4), as much of
the pleasure comes from a sense of shared experience between the teller
and the tellee.

(Talking about monsters) They’re big in our psyche. But you never
actually meet any monsters—queuing in the corner shop for a Sherbet
Dab.