The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form Review

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(More customer reviews)The following review has been posted here on behalf of its author, Izuu Nwankwo (PhD student, Nigeria)
There are very few scholarly books on stand-up acts and Tafoya's work remains the most current and insightful. Many books on stand-up comedy tend to be promotional, aimed mostly to serve as developmental guides for upcoming stand-up comedians. In Tafoya's the use of existing theory and criticism is at once innovative and groundbreaking, in stand-up comedy research. I find this book useful especially in the creative and convincing way it has manipulated the Freudian concepts of the id and the super-ego, in the understanding of how jokes make us laugh. One other thing that makes this work outstanding is the conversational manner in which the book is written. While we read, we are aware at the back of our minds that this is a scholarly work written by a practising stand-up comedian. In my view, this makes for a much more pleasurable reading as we get a grip on how and why stand-up comedy can also be categorised as literature. I have found this book indispensable in my own research due to the overall background information it carries with it. As such I believe it is a catalyst for further research, not only into stand-up, but also into other emergent popular performances and literature.

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Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention.The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a look at the works of specific comedians such as Steven Wright, whose three decades of performances comprise a single picaresque tale, and Richard Pryor, whose 1982 masterpiece Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip serves as modern America's answer to Dante Aligheri's epic poem, Inferno. The result is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.