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A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy. By Ian Brodie. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Pp. ix + 255, acknowledgements, notes, references, discography, videography, index. $60 hardcover.)
There are few topics that engage the reader as readily as humor, and maybe this is one of the reasons why A Vulgar Art grips the reader from the very first pages. What is more, the tour through the topic that follows is performed with insight and wit.
Author Ian Brodie sets out to study stand-up as the performance of vernacular culture, presenting it as an instance of folkloric exchange. First and foremost, stand-up is seen as a dialogic form, where the comedian steps in front of the people and tries to make them laugh, performing not to the audience but rather with it. Starting from these premises, Ian Brodie uses folkloristic methods to study the performative aspect of stand-up, seeking to answer the question of how the genre manages to reconcile the intimacy of an act of participatory communication with the distance introduced by a setting that involves a power hierarchy between performer and...