Comic

Characters and Surprises in Stand-Up Comedy

A Linguistic Exploration of how Comedians Use Impersonation and Expectation to Create Humour

"This book employs a social semiotic methodology to investigate how comedians use impersonation and expectation to create humour in stand-up comedy. It advances the linguistic cartography of how meaning-making resources contribute to humour in the genre. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) underpins the book's approach and is integrated with recent work on multimodality and paralanguage. The author develops a framework for identifying and analysing the intermodal semiotic resources that contribute to impersonation and expectation in humour, and applies it through discourse analysis of excerpts from texts by Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard and Michelle Wolf"-- Provided by publisher.