Laughing from the outside: Hipsters and American stand-up comedy
Abstract
In recent years, stand-up comedy has enjoyed increased attention from both popular and scholarly audiences for its potential as a forum for public intellectualism. This study traces this rise in prominence to the hipster as both a cultural figure in post-war America and a comic persona in the years that followed. Through identification and analysis of the hipster and its aesthetic traits, I attempt to follow this persona and the type of comedy it performs from its origins to its current examples in order to understand what role this persona may play in both stand-up's popularity and in society at large. The hipster is a stand-up persona that utilizes a hip sensibility and satiric perspective both to produce itself and to critique the modes of production and consumption with which it interacts through constant and evolving use of technology and new media as a conduit for personal, existential, and social play. I begin with Lenny Bruce's hipster and, using the development of technology as my organizing principle, follow the footprints of hip through Bruce to Richard Pryor and then to twenty-first-century comedians Bo Burnham and Aziz Ansari. This study reveals the comic and intellectual sensibility of the hipster persona in its various iterations and examines that persona's role in the development of comedy as an intellectual forum in American society in the last half-century.
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- OSU Dissertations [11222]