The Language of American and Egyptian Stand-up Comedy: A Pragma-Linguistic Study

Abstract

This study provides a pragma-linguistic analysis of the language of American and Egyptian stand-up comedy. The study assumes that stand-up comedy is humorous satire, that is, the comedian employs humour to fulfil a satirical intention. It assumes that satire is an illocutionary act complex which is performed at the suprasentential level. It further hypothesizes that the speech act of satire is realized locutionarily through linguistic deviation. Accordingly, the current study attempts to examine the linguistic devices of humour correlated with the illocutionary act complex of satire in the selected instances of American and Egyptian stand-up comedy. The study questions are: 1) Is the current version of speech act theory adequate to account for satire as an illocutionary act? 2) What are the linguistic deviation devices manipulated by the comedians to perform the illocutionary act of satire? 3) To what extent is humour different or similar in both American and Egyptian stand-up comedy? The study adopts an eclectic framework which combines speech act theory as the main theory and a supplementary model based on linguistic deviation. The model is a threefold framework consisting of three main levels- structural deviation, semantic deviation and suprastructural deviation. The study is based on data collected from American and Egyptian stand-up comedy shows. The results of the study reveal that structural deviation is the least prominent category in both American and Egyptian stand-up comedy. The analysis also reveals that the most dominant strategies of linguistic deviation are those which pertain to the suprastructural level. It is also revealed that semantic deviation is equally employed in both American and Egyptian stand-up comedy.