The Nature of the Course

Course Description

WARNING: This course is suitable for mature audiences only.

What makes us laugh? Who makes us laugh? And why do we pay people to make us laugh?  This course will seek answers to these questions (and others), approaching them from the perspective of rhetoric.  Are stand-up comedians rhetors? And if they are, what exactly is the nature and purpose of their rhetoric? We will begin with a brief introduction to classical rhetoric before moving into epistemic rhetoric and Kenneth Burke’s concepts of dramatism and the “comic frame.”  These notions of rhetoric will serve as a starting point for a critical (and creative) approach to stand-up comedy.  From Lenny Bruce and George Carlin to Bill Hicks and Chris Rock, we will listen to and watch performances by some of the most notable stand-up comedians of the last fifty years. We will ask questions about language, race, gender, class, and the function and nature of comedy and laughter.  Through writing we will produce genealogies of our own senses of humor, as well as perform rhetorical analyses of comedy performances. The course will culminate with an evening of performances by the class: Each student will produce a carefully crafted (if not necessarily funny) “five minute spot.”

Cultural critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke writes, “The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle.” While Burke isn’t talking about stand-up comedy, it seems clear that stand-up comedy—as performance, as art, as rhetoric—serves as an appropriate scene for critical exploration and rhetorical analysis.  This course’s pairing of something familiar, popular, and vulgar (stand-up) with something often denigrated and rarely studied (rhetoric), will produce surprising insight, both in terms of ideology and epistemology.  Class time will be primarily devoted to discussion of assigned materials.  We will engage rhetorical methodologies, analyzing comedic works as we would political speeches or works of literature.  In addition to performing rhetorical analysis, we will also engage in critical/personal reflection and participate in group dialogue and projects.