One thing I love about standup comedy—which is perhaps my favourite form of contemporary art—is that it is at once unmediated and reflexive. Standups speak directly to an audience, playing versions of themselves, sometimes with a pseudonym, more often sharing their performer’s name, but characters nonetheless. It’s the original autofiction.
The origins of standup comedy are often traced to the speaking tours of humorists like Mark Twain in the mid-nineteenth century, who made comic personalities of themselves. But the history goes further back. Minstrel shows in the early nineteenth century featured comic monologues (or “stump speeches”) that were racist precursors of standup.
And when you think about it, the form—direct address to an audience, intended to amuse or entertain—is older still. We find it in Laurence Sterne, the comic genius behind Tristram Shandy, who published his sermons, controversially, under the pseudonym “Mr. Yorick,” the parson of Shandy Hall, in 1760.
Yorick’s sermo…
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