Title: Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals and Activists
Abstract:Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical tool to inform and persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. In this dissertation, I work to recover the rhetorical mo...Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical tool to inform and persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. In this dissertation, I work to recover the rhetorical motives of stand-up comedy, just as rhetoric and composition scholars before me have reread and recovered the legacy of the Sophists. To that end, I align stand-up comedians first with the historical heritage of Sophists and jesters, and then with the more contemporary tradition of public intellectuals and social activists. Using excerpts from stand-up comedy performances, I demonstrate how stand-up comedians are able to persuade and educate with humor. Moreover, I argue that stand-up comedians represent a shift in access to messages, away from the prerequisite of formal education required by many forms of rhetoric and toward a more innately compelling method of information sharing, available to wide, diverse audiences.Read More