36.3657, Books: Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy: Logi (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3657. Wed Nov 26 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3657, Books: Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy: Logi (2025)

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Date: 25-Nov-2025
From: Lucy Trotter [lucy.trotter at bloomsbury.com]
Subject: Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy: Logi (2025)


Title: Characters and Surprises in Stand-up Comedy
Subtitle: A Linguistic Exploration of How Comedians Use Impersonation
and Expectation to Create Humour
Series Title: Bloomsbury Studies in Systemic Functional Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/characters-and-surprises-in-standup-comedy-9781350448391/

Author(s): Lorenzo Logi

Hardback, ISBN: 9781350448391, Price: £95.00

Abstract:

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 interactive humour genres. Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL) underpins the book's approach and is integrated with
recent work on multimodality and paralanguage as well as humour
studies.
The author develops a consolidated analytical framework for
identifying and analysing the intermodal semiotic resources that
contribute to impersonation and expectation in humour including
gesture and voice quality – paralinguistic resources vital but
underexplored in humorous texts. The framework is then applied through
close discourse analysis of excerpts from three stand-up comedy texts
by different comedians: Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard and Michelle Wolf.
The findings outline typical and more complex realisations of
intermodal impersonation, differentiate categories in how comedians
employ impersonation to create humour, and describe how linguistic
expectation can be established and subverted for humorous effect.
These findings will be of interest to readers across the disciplines
of linguistics, humour studies and multi/intermodality who are
interested in the interaction between paralanguage, expectation and
the negotiation of values so as to establish and maintain social
relationships.

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics




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