Discourse Analysis On Stand-up Comedy: From A Social-semiotic Perspective

This paper explores the discourse of standup comedy from the perspectives of social semiotics by taking George Carlin’s five signature pieces as examples. Discourse analysis and social semiotics are interlocking through the whole research process. The study firstly probes into the Discourse of standup comedy to locate the sign systems, and with gathered sign information to construct six building tasks of standup discourse. Hence, sign decoding, the Interpretant in social semiotics, is made possible through the six building tasks. With the steps the thesis argues for the value of social semiotic approach that can closely and systematically examine stand up comedy’s Discourse.Based on M.A.K Halliday’s language as Social Semiotic, representamen of Discourse in this thesis ranges from linguistic network (e.g., phonological network, lexicogrammatical network, semantic network) to non-linguistic network (context of situation and context of culture). Representamen from various network provides clues for information gathering, thus to achieve the construction of six building tasks in Discourse analysis. According to James Paul Gee, the six building tasks for Discourse analysis are semiotic building, world building, activity building, Socioculturally-situated identity and relationship building, political building, and connection building. Moreover the six building tasks are not clear-cut but they facilitate each other, for example, semiotic building contributes to world building, which on the other hand facilitates socioculturally-situated identity and relationship building.During the analysis, the author found that varied sign systems contribute to different tasks building, which on the other hand were subject to Discourse themes and applied sign systems: virtual motifs need to construe concrete building tasks such as world building and activity building for gathering situated meanings and strengthen their validity; on the other hand, connection building and identity building would suffice concrete motifs. Moreover, stand-up comedy builds a bridge for intercultural communication, from which audiences are able to observe concerns of society, mainstream values and beliefs, and attitudes toward authority, family, and society as well. Furthermore, the research is significant since it brings in new perspective for digesting semiotics by conducting Discourse Analysis, which materializes the abstract Interpretant-decoding process in semiotics. For example in this paper, it explores the salient identities and semiotic network of standup comedy.