Subversive humor in Spanish stand-up comedy

This paper aims to explore subversive humor in Spanish stand-up comedy by analyzing the work of two well-known Spanish female comedians, Eva Hache and Patricia Sornosa. In order to reach this goal, a corpus of these comedians’ performances has been collected, comprising a total of 25 monologues, whi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Humor (Berlin, Germany) Germany), 2020-02, Vol.33 (1), p.29-54
Main Authors: Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor, Linares-Bernabéu, Esther
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Comedians
Comedy
Cues
Discourse
discourse strategy
gender
Heteronormativity
Humor
Power
Quantitative analysis
Sequences
Stand-up comedy
subversive humor
target
Teasing
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Summary:This paper aims to explore subversive humor in Spanish stand-up comedy by analyzing the work of two well-known Spanish female comedians, Eva Hache and Patricia Sornosa. In order to reach this goal, a corpus of these comedians’ performances has been collected, comprising a total of 25 monologues, which have been divided into humorous sequences, which come to a total of 76 in the corpus of Eva Hache and 37 for Patricia Sornosa. The qualitative and quantitative analysis has focused on subversive humorous sequences, which has shown that only 22.38% of the sequences from Eva Hache’s comic monologues are mainly built around subverting the status quo, whereas Patricia Sornosa challenges the heteronormative discourse in most of her sequences (87.93%). Further, in this case study, we have examined the main linguistic techniques they use when challenging the heteronormative standards, namely the topics, targets, discourse strategies and linguistic cues used to generate a subversive effect. Findings show that both comics use subversive humor but in different ways because of contextual constraints. Whilst Patricia Sornosa offers an overt critique, Eva Hache disparages in a subtler manner even when teasing and undermining male power.
ISSN:0933-1719
1613-3722
DOI:10.1515/humor-2018-0134