Polyphony in Portuguese stand-up comedy: a socio-discursive approach to identity construction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21747/21833958/red10a7Keywords:
Identity, Polyphony, Socio-Discursive Interactionism, Enunciative voices, Stand-up comedyAbstract
This paper focuses on some of the linguistic devices, which contribute to identity construction. Adopting a socio-discursive interactionist approach, the goal is to discover the extent to which polyphony (Bakhtin, 1981) and, more specifically, the distribution of voices by means of personal pronouns in discourse contribute to comedian’s identity construction in the understudied genre of Portuguese stand-up comedy. In a Franco-Swiss perspective (Bronckart, 2012), the term “enunciative voices” stands for mechanisms that contribute to the establishment of pragmatic (or interactive) coherence of the text. This paper demonstrates how a comedian creates different identities in discourse by shifting between the voices of empirical author, social voices, and voices of characters. In particular, the textual analysis shows how pronoun shifts (e.g. between I and we) are used as a strategy not only to produce a humorous effect; it is also used to dynamically display aspects of the comedian’s identity. Comedians may distance and erase their individual identities by identifying with the social voice. Or, by assuming responsibility, they aim at emphasizing their own individual identity as opposed to the social voice, often mocking social principles and orders. The seldom investigated domain of Portuguese stand-up comedy provides a rich ground for the analysis of the comedian’s self and the way it is portrayed in discourse.
Downloads
References
Adam, J.-M. (2011). A Linguística Textual: Introdução à análise textual dos discursos. São Paulo: Cortez.
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic Theories on Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Attardo, S & Pickering, L. (2011). Timing in the performance of jokes. Humor, 24 (2), pp. 233-250.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). Problemas da Poética de Dostoiévski. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevski Poetics. In: Theory and History of Literature Series, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, M, Holquist M, McGee V & Emerson C. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1994). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In: The Bakhtin Reader. Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, ed. by Pam Morris, 88-96. London: Arnold.
Bakhtin, M. (2009). Identity and narration. In: Handbook of narratology, ed. by Huehn P., Pier J., Schmid W. & Schoenert J, pp. 132-143. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Bamberg, M, De Fina, A & Schiffrin, D. (2010). Discursive perspectives on identity construction. In: Handbook of identity theory and research, ed. by Schwartz S., Luyckx K., Vignoles V., pp. 177-199. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag.
Brodie, I. (2014). A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi.
Bronckart, J.-P. (2005). Os géneros de texto e os tipos de discurso como formatos das interacções de desenvolvimento. In: Análise do Discurso, ed. by Fernanda Menéndez, 38-79. Lisboa: CLUNL/Hugin Editores.
Bronckart, J.-P. (2008). Genres de textes, types de discours et “degrés” de langue. Texto ! Textes et cultures, 13 (1), pp. 1-95.
Bronckart, J.-P. (2012). Atividade de linguagem, textos e discurso: por um interacionismo sociodiscursivo. São Paulo: EDUC.
Bucholtz, M & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7 (4-5), pp. 585-614.
Carter, J. (1989). Stand-up Comedy: The Book. New York: Dell Publishing.
Coutinho, M. A. (2005). Para uma linguística dos géneros de texto. Diacrítica, 19 (1), pp. 73-88.
Coutinho, M. A. (2014). Language in Action: Epistemological and Methodological Issues. In: From Language to Discourse, ed. by Correia C.N., Tanto C., Shotropa, L., Cunha L., Jorge N., pp. 224-235. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
De Fina, A. (2006). Group identity, narrative and self-representations. In: Discourse and Identity, ed. by Schiffrin, Deborah & Bamberg, Michael, pp. 351-375. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Fina, A. (2011). Discourse and Identity. In: Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by Teun van Dijk, A., pp. 263-282. London: SAGE.
Double, O. (2014). Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy. London: Bloomsbury.
Du Bois, J.W. (1991). Transcription design principles for spoken discourse research. Pragmatics 1(1), pp. 71-106.
Du Bois, J.W. (2004). Representing Discourse. Santa Barbara: University of California.
Filani, I. (2015). Discourse types in stand-up comedy performances: an example of Nigerian stand-up comedy. The European Journal of Humor Research, 3 (1), pp. 41-60.
Flick, U. (2014). An Introduction to Qualitative Research. London: SAGE Publications.
Fl0ttum, K. (2010). EU discourse: Polyphony and unclearness. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (4), pp. 990-999.
Glick, D. (2007). Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization. Language & Communication 27, pp. 291-306.
Greenbaum, Andrea. 1999. Stand-up comedy as rhetorical argument: an investigation of comic culture. Humor 12 (1), pp. 33-46.
Günthner, S. (1999). Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogues: An analysis of the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 31 (5), pp. 685-708.
Hall, S. (2011). A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A.
Hassaine, N. (2014). Linguistic Analysis of Verbal Humor in Algerian Stand-up Comedy. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies, 2 (2), pp. 90-98.
Ige, B. (2010). Identity and language choice: ‘We equals I’. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (11), pp. 30473054.
Katayama, H. (2009). A cross-cultural analysis of humor in stand-up comedy in the United States and Japan. JoLIE 2, pp. 125-142.
Limon, J. (2000). Stand-up comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America. Durham: Duke University Press.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mintz, L. (1985). Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation. American Quarterly 37 (1):, pp. 71-80.
Moita Lopes, L. (2006). On being white, heterosexual and male in a Brazilian school: multiple positionings in oral narrative. In: Discourse and Identity, ed. by De Fina A., Bamberg M., Schiffrin D., pp. 288-313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morozova, M. A. (2015). O papel do conhecimento partilhado no funcionamento do humor. Revista Portuguesa de Humanidades, V. 19, 1, pp. 191-212. Universidade Católica de Braga, Faculdade de Filosofia: Axioma.
Morozova, M. A. (2016). A representação discursiva das classes desfavorecidas da Margem Sul no género stand-up comedy. In: Cadernos WGT - Representação, ed. by Brocardo, Maria Teresa, pp. 13-16. Lisboa: CLUNL.
Morozova, M. A. (2017). Discourse markers of enunciative responsibility in Portuguese stand-up comedy. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto, Vol. 12, pp. 127-153.
Morozova, M. A. (2018). Designing transcription system for spoken discourse: a case of stand-up comedy. In: Grammar and Text: Selected papers from the 10th and 11th Forums for Linguistic Sharing, ed. by Coutinho M.A., Guilherme A., Teixeira J., Carvalho B., pp. 72-88. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Norrick, N.R. (2001). On the conversational performance of narrative jokes: Toward an account of timing. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 14 (3), pp. 255-274.
Norrick, N.R. (2003). Issues in Conversational Joking. Journal of Pragmatics, 35 (9), pp. 1333-1359.
Nunes, N. (2016). Com o Humor não Se Brinca: O que os melhores humoristas portugueses têm a dizer sobre a comédia. 20|20 Editora: Amadora.
Palmieri, G. (2018). Self-translation and orality: the case of bilingual stand-up comedy. Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 26 (3), pp. 422-434.
Ruiz-Gurillo, L. (2012). La lingüística del humor en espanol. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
Saussure, F. de. (2006). Writings in General Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rutter, J. (1997). Stand-up as Interaction: Performance and Audience in Comedy Venues. PhD Thesis, Salford: University of Salford.
Rutter, J. (2000). The Introductions of Stand-up Performers: Comparing Comedy Comperes. Journal of Pragmatics 32, pp. 463-483.
Scarpetta, F & Spagnolli A. (2009). The Interactional Context of Humor in Stand-Up Comedy.
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42 (3), pp. 210-230.
Schwarz, J. (2010). Linguistic Aspects of Verbal Humor in Stand-up Comedy. PhD thesis. Saarland: University of Saarland.
Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolfers, S, File, K & Schnurr, S. (2017). “Just because he’s black”: Identity construction and racial humour in a German U-19 football team. Journal of Pragmatics 112 (11), pp. 83-96.
Yus, F. (2016). Humor and Relevance. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam/ Philadelphia.
Zimmerman, D.H. (1998). Identity, Context and Interaction. In: Identities in Talk, ed. by Antaki, Charles and Widdicombe, Sue, pp. 87-106. London: SAGE.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Redis: Revista de Estudos do discurso
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The authors give to REDIS. Revista de Estudos do Discurso the exclusive right to publish its texts, in any medium, including their reproduction and sale in paper or digital format, as well as their availability in a free access regime in databases.
