The comedian’s identity, audience’s perspective(s) and problematic jokes

Abstract

This paper examines the interconnection of performers’ institutional identity, audience’s perspectives and offensive jokes in our contemporary world, where there are increasing debates on humourists’ rights to free speech and audience’s (or the target’s) right to face wants. Commonly, because of their social licence for deviant behaviour, humourists in public joking genres like stand-up comedy and satirical television shows play with the limits of jokes. However, people could take offence whether they are the target of the joke or not. Adopting a socio-cognitive pragmatics perspective, I explore the significance of participants’ institutional identity in performance humour and how institutional mapping of roles should determine saliency in the interpretation of humorous cues. Using Trevor Noah’s France world cup joke, I argue that the interactional structure of performance humour allows comedians to privatise common ground features while the audience cannot adopt the same egocentric strategy in the interpretation of jokes.