2018 THESIS Comic Trans Presenting and Representing the Other in Stand-up Comedy JAMES LÓ RIEN MACDONALD LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES (LAPS) LIVE ART AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES (LAPS) 2018 THESIS Comic Trans Presenting and Representing the Other in Stand-up Comedy JAMES LÓ RIEN MACDONALD ABSTRACT Date: 22.09.2018 AUTHOR MASTER’S OR OTHER DEGREE PROGRAMME James Lórien MacDonald Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) NUMBER OF PAGES + APPENDICES IN THE TITLE OF THE WRITTEN SECTION/THESIS WRITTEN SECTION Comic Trans: Presenting and Representing the Other in 99 pages Stand- up Comedy TITLE OF THE ARTISTIC/ ARTISTIC AND PEDAGOGICAL SECTION Title of the artistic section. Please also complete a separate description form (for dvd cover). The artistic section is produced by the Theatre Academy. The artistic section is not produced by the Theatre Academy (copyright issues have been resolved). The final project can be The abstract of the final project can published online. This Yes be published online. This Yes permission is granted for an No permission is granted for an No unlimited duration. unlimited duration. This thesis is a companion to my artistic work in stand-up comedy, comprising artistic-based research and approaches comedy from a performance studies perspective. The question addressed in the paper and the work is “How is the body of the comedian part of the joke?” The first section outlines dominant theories about humour—superiority, relief, and incongruity—as a background the discussion. It touches on the role of the comedian both as untrustworthy, playful trickster, and parrhesiastes who speaks directly to power, backed by the truth of her lived experience. It also provides some context for the contemporary comedian, whose work follows them off stage and into the thunderdome of social media, where trolling and speaking truth are taken very seriously. Another section presented as background to the discussion is on transgender bodies in performance, focusing on performance art and in stand-up comedy. I argue that embodied transgender performances are largely still situated in the act of encountering a trans body. Speaking of contemporary stand-up comedy, I discuss the ways in which an abject identity or body may be exploited by the comedian onstage for laughter and also for activism. The comedy of Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford, Hasan Minaj, Jess Thom, Eddie Izzard, Dave Chappelle, Cameron Esposito, and others come into play. Comedy is a complex and interesting site of resistance and social change, since it deals in mockery and non-seriousness, but precisely these qualities allow it to convey messages that are necessary and not polite elsewhere. Finally, I describe my final artistic work, a one-hour comedy show called Gender Euphoria, which is about my own experiences in transitioning from female to male. I describe the ways in which the space and experience were designed to mimic the conditions of a stand-up club inside an institution of learning, and to what aim. The arc of Gender Euphoria is described as an autobiographical work of discovering identity, encountering medical institutions with that identity, encountering new social norms, and travelling through wave after wave of certainty in identity towards more complication, ambiguity, and liberation. I also discuss the material that I was too afraid to do, or that I self-censored out of a sense of not being able to convey the message properly, and fear of backlash from a community I attempt to support. As a whole, this thesis attempts to provide a viewpoint towards the playful and serious contradictions in stand-up comedy, in a way that is informed by practice in the field, from the point of view of a subject whose identity has up until recently been the object of derision, rather than the subject of resistance. ENTER KEYWORDS HERE Stand-up Comedy, Transgender artists, Performance art, Live Art, Performativity, Gender, Stand-up Comedy— Finland, Embodiment, Abject art, Transgender people, Queer, Artistic-based research TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 9 2. HUMOUR AND ITS PRACTITIONERS 14 Stand-up comedy 15 Theories of humour: Superiority 17 Theories of humour: Relief 20 Theories of humour: Incongruous juxtaposition 23 A lightbulb moment 26 Tricksters and pranksters 27 Parrhesia 29 Callback to theories of humour: Benign violation 35 3. THE BODY ALSO SPEAKS 39 Body Art and Gender 40 Transmasculine bodies in art 43 Callback to parrhesia: the body speaks 48 4. BODIES IN COMEDY 50 The abject 50 Abject to subject: Contemporary comedy 57 Isn’t it Ironic 61 Audiences 62 Presence and resistance: Recovery of the trickster by Netflix 67 5. GENDER EUPHORIA: A STAND-UP SHOW 69 Gender Euphoria: designing the situation 71 Breaking the Ice 73 The Set: What the Jokes Were 76 The Body in the Work 81 Improvisations and failures 84 Confessional 86 “Tranny” and the limits of parrhesia 88 6. CONCLUSION 92 9 1. INTRODUCTION London, UK, the summer of 2000: my boyfriend and I were cat-sitting for some colleagues of his; the big sell was that they had a huge flat-screen TV and a few hundred DVDs. The downside, which curiously they didn’t tell us about beforehand, was that they were the sort of people who hadn’t cleaned their kitchen floor since Thatcher was devastating The North. I remember two things about that weekend: one, a kitchen floor that was remarkably sticky for being so matted with cat hair, and two, Eddie Izzard’s stand-up special Glorious. Izzard is world-famous for being not only a stand-up comedian, but also, in his own words, an “action transvestite”.1 He dressed in varying degrees of femme—makeup, painted nails, heels, tailored suits with a feminine cut, skirts, and in Sexie, had breasts that he described as “not implants; they’re ims, but they’re not planted”. He wasn’t a man in a dress making fun of men in dresses. He was himself. He only briefly even mentioned transvestism in the 100-minute show, and when he did, I understood it better. His jokes largely concerned anthropomorphic animals and absurd, nerdy/popular takes on history and culture (Noah, when asked to build an ark, speaks in Sean Connery’s accent and tries to convince God that a speedboat would be sexier; Achilles could have saved himself by putting his foot in a block of concrete but would then be a hero with a maximum radius; etc). His gender presentation, however, was always noticeable and constantly part of the act—not as travesty, but as a definitive expression of his identity. The joke was not “Eddie’s a transvestite”, but at the same time, his transvestism also said something. Gender-nonconforming and comfortable about it, openly nerdy, left-wing but not aggressively so, and hilarious, Izzard presented an image that was, to me, unique among comics. His challenge to the audience came in the form of a celebratory show, revelling in all the stupidities and frailties of human nature, and doing so in a way that was more inviting than accusatory. The materiality of the appearance of a man in drag, but not performing drag, was perhaps so challenging already that to make political comedy about it would be overkill. 1 Izzard nowadays often identifies as a transgender person or even “transgender man”, which I find absolutely delightful, since he identifies as transgender and as a man. Usually a person assigned male at birth and trans would be a trans woman, or nonbinary trans person, but I like that his definition focuses not on what he was “born as”, but what he identifies as now. 10 In any case, the challenging appearance alongside the inviting performance was a successful combination. For a long time, Izzard was the only comedian I appreciated. I was averse to public anger and averse to public sexuality, while at the same time idolising and romanticising counterculture literary figures like Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsburg. I also didn’t care for the trappings of a stand-up performance: a too-wide grin, shouting and posing, performing rather than just being. It’s amazing I ever ended up in comedy. In the same year, I was introduced to the work of Bill Hicks, which is not to say I was a fan at first. Much of Hicks’ act was dark, angry, misanthropic, misogynistic, libertarian, homophobic, and crass, and has not improved with the passing of time. The rest I still find brilliant. In Revelations (1993) he presents an uncompromising argument towards marketing and advertising professionals to kill themselves for the good of the species, and the routine turns in on itself so many times, caught in an escapable web of capitalism, that it’s worth watching for the rhetoric alone. Even though I hated about half of Hicks’ material, I never forgot the way he presented it: ugly. Sweating though a bad haircut, screaming at the audience so hard he distorted the mic signal then ranting to himself onstage as though nobody else was even there (a terrific contrivance), and using language that went far beyond rude; he was never an object of desire. He could go for minutes onstage without a laugh, which, in comedian years, is a very, very long time. It looked like he didn’t even care if the audience liked him at all, a contradictory position for a profession of people who need people to like them. Comedian Stewart Lee wrote of Hicks in The Times: Hicks was given to philosophical pronouncements on the comic’s role. The actual material on his first two albums rarely fulfils his theories. “The comic is a flame, like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are,” he said.