Everything, and This: Stand-Up Comedy Audio Recordings and the Avant-Garde

Russell, Eleanor

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-r4j2-z946

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Everything, and This: Stand-Up Comedy Audio Recordings and the Avant-Garde

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This dissertation explores mid-twentieth century US stand-up comedy recordings and how they elaborate upon definitions of the avant-garde in theatre and performance studies. Weaving theories of comedy, aesthetics, radical performance, and sound studies, I argue for the reconceptualization of the avant-garde as an intellectual impulse outside of the parameters of the historical theatrical canon. Listening to the trailblazing stand-up recordings of Richard Pryor, Belle Barth, and Jackie “Moms” Mabley, I theorize radical performance, by way of stand- up, in its relationship to sound that mobilizes performance into radicality registered by the act of listening. I listen across the conventions of the mid-twentieth century US recording industry with an ear toward the sonic deployments of mimicry, volume, rhythm, deconstructive language, microphone technique, and other modes. These sonic intellectual impulses are made audible by the aesthetics and performance tactics common to stand-up, avant-garde performance art, and the Black radical tradition. With stand-up comedy and the post-1945 artistic vanguard as my objects of study, I explore how sound, harnessed as a method for radical performativity, troubles the coherence of language as signification in order to mobilize alternative subjectivities beyond the status quo. This is to say: the avant-garde is what happens when the haptic and the word collide, and explode.

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