The asymmetry of the speech act in the stand-up comedy

Abstract

When, in mid-2011, a stand-up comedian became the center of a debate about the limits and objectives of humor, another discussion, not least important, was left out: what happens in the mechanics of representation and scene plays in a joke that fails? Our goal is to investigate and demonstrate the asymmetry between the process of production and interpretation of the speech act. The theoretical work lies within the scope of the ‘Semiolinguistics Theory of Discourse’ by Charaudeau (2001; 2010a; 2010b), and ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’ by Bakhtin (1997; 2012). The corpus of current paper comprises a joke by the comedian Rafinha Bastos, its aftermath and consequences. The study reveals that the cause of the asymmetry observed in the research lies in an aesthetic valuation of the text which is insufficient to the claims of the communicant subject.  The above is decisive for the failure of the discursive catchment strategy, due to the rejection transfer observed in relation to the enunciating subject (Ie) to the communicating subject (Ic) (transfer effects between the internal and external circuits).