Humour and the Appearance of Authenticity in Live Comedy

Comedians often ironically present morally bad ideas solely for comedic effect – views they do not genuinely hold. They also lean into providing a sense of authenticity in their work; essentially an appearance of being themselves onstage. While many people know that comedians are performing an exaggerated, or even fictional, version of themselves, many people remain unaware of this. It is possible, then, for an audience member with genuinely held morally bad beliefs to misinterpret those jokes as an assertion of the comedian’s authentic beliefs. This unfortunate state of affairs is worsened if the audience member further misinterpreted the jokes as an endorsement of their own morally bad behaviour. This thesis provides a framework for avoiding audience misinterpretation of jokes as authentically held beliefs of the comedian in stand-up comedy.

To provide a solution to this problem, I answer two questions: i) what is comedy? and ii) what does authenticity mean for comedians? Answering these questions takes into account both that aesthetic rules of humour must be observed, and that philosophical notions of authenticity need to be navigated. To focus only on the humour risks misinterpretation; to focus only on authenticity risks losing the funny. In the first chapter I critically assess the three primary philosophical theories of humour (relief, incongruity, and superiority). I then argue that the benign violation theory – a more detailed version of incongruity theory – provides comedians with the parameters they need to write and perform successful, i.e. funny, jokes. In the second chapter, I draw on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Martin Buber, and their different versions of authenticity (based around the individual, the group, and one-on-one relationships, respectively). I argue that these notions can inform different stages of joke creation, shedding light on how to ethically navigate the appearance of authenticity in stand-up comedy during the joke drafting, editing, and finalisation process. Together, these chapters form a framework for navigating the appearance of authenticity in live comedy by avoiding misinterpretation, without reducing joke funniness or the range of joke topics.