Strained Expectations: The Production of Emotions in Queer Stand-up Comedy

Application summary

The proposed artistic research explores humour, ambiguity, affect, and labour in the context of stand-up performance. In particular, emotional labour, first defined by Arlie Hochschild, speaks to stand-up comedy as paid emotional work, where comedians are expected to manage the emotions of the audience. However, for many performers this overlaps with their identity. When I speak of being trans onstage, I have to predict my audience’s emotional responses to me and their prejudices so that I can work with their feelings and create laughter. In humour, we frequently say the opposite of what we mean—or listeners think this is the case. The fluidity of meaning is already interesting in stand-up comedy and in humour in general, but I would like to further investigate how this textual or verbal ambiguity interacts with the embodied performer, whose identity may be fluid or fixed in different ways. A minority performer, I would argue, is pressured to joke responsibly and to consider real-world consequences of having their ambiguity taken the "wrong" way. Through interviewing other trans comedians about our specific experiences and strategies, I hope to reveal something interesting about the mechanisms of humour itself. I am also inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of kin and Judith Butler’s more recent work, as they represent calls for co-existence, which I hope can be a redeeming path when so much humour is about our differences. This is artistic-based research comprises live stand-up comedy performance by a transgender artist, as well as reflections, interviews with other transgender professional stand-up comedians, and theoretical written component.