cfp.english.upenn.edu

CFP for Proposed Panel: "Through a Lens, Comically: Stand-up Comedians in the Mass Media"
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
March 6-10, 2013
Chicago, IL

This proposed panel for the 2013 Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference seeks a disciplinary home for a popular culture archetype: the stand-up comedian. Playing “themselves” on stage, stand-up comedians fly under the radar of theatre scholars, and since they usually perform live, stand-up comedians are out of bounds for media studies scholars. In order to give them a home—or, at least, a temporary shelter—this panel will justify the stand-up comedian’s relevance to cinema and media studies.

Scholars from a range of disciplines—sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and history—have studied stand-up comedians, their corpus usually consisting of performances mediated by film, television and, increasingly, the Internet. But few have considered, for example, whether the ontological qualities of certain media forms, in contrast to a live setting, have affected stand-up comedy’s genre development and the public’s reception of comedy stars. By drawing on theoretical approaches to media studies, this panel will examine a critical yet neglected aspect of the stand-up comedian’s function within the culture, specifically American culture.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
- historical perspectives on the role mass media have played in stand-up comedy’s genre development
- the rise of certain media forms—for example, the comedy special and the late-night talk show—and the consequent homogenization of stand-up comedy
- the constraints certain media forms place on a comedian’s performance
- how comedians have used the media to blur the separation between their stage character and their “real” selves
- the transition performers have made between careers in stand-up and acting
- representations of class, race, gender, and sexuality in mass-mediated stand-up comedy
- the application of humor theory to mass-mediated stand-up comedy
- the impact of the mass media on stand-up comedy’s genre development in non-American countries

Please send a 250-300 word abstract and a 50 word bio to Sean Springer (sean.springer@stonybrook.edu) by July 15, 2012. Questions are welcome.