Linguistic aspects of verbal humor in stand-up comedy

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This study explores how stand-up comedians organize and perform their material to create humor, elicit laughter, and engage their audiences. It highlights the audience's crucial role in shaping comedians' presentations. To provide authentic material, performances by Jerry Seinfeld and Steven Wright were transcribed and analyzed. The creation of humor in stand-up is viewed as a blend of various linguistic features, including wordplay, hyperbole, timing, and paralinguistic choices. Comedians also develop distinct stage personas and unique performance styles. Spontaneity and flexibility emerge as essential traits for successful performances. The analysis of these two contrasting comedians affirms that effective humor does not rely on a specific persona or style but rather on the comedian's use of diverse linguistic elements and the incongruity revealed in punch lines. This study offers a linguistic perspective on humor and contributes to discourse analysis, particularly regarding features such as repetitions, discourse markers, disfluencies, and intonation.