Just Joking: Speech, Performance and Ethics
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1 Just Joking: Speech, Performance and Ethics by Emma Bennett A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD Queen Mary University of London School of English and Drama September 2016 2 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I, Emma Bennett, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Emma Bennett Date: 23 September 2016 3 ABSTRACT Why do people go into rooms to watch other people speak? What is it that is taking place when a performer walks onto a stage, or steps up to a microphone, and, in the silence that has fallen, begins to speak? This thesis considers both the pleasures and the anxieties that attend such public acts of speaking, and responds in particular to the kinds of utterances that announce themselves as in some way ‘non-serious’. It takes, as its founding example, comedian Stewart Lee saying, of Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, ‘I wish he had died in that crash’, before adding, ‘it’s just a joke… like on Top Gear’. This, I suggest, is a complex moment that calls into play many of the key questions of performative theory, restaging them within the context of early twenty-first century Britain, where speech is mediatized and monetized as a form of entertainment. Against this backdrop, the thesis draws on key works by Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler, to argue that the ethics that emerges from such an enquiry would be one based on our mutual, shared unknowingness about what our bodies ‘say’ when we stand up to speak. Crucially, this might also be an ethics responsive to a certain kind of funniness. This thesis examines performances that are attuned to this kind of funniness: the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee; the philosophical performance of J.L. Austin; the postmodern theatricality of Kinkaleri, and the stalled conversations via which the practice of performance studies itself takes place. Acknowledging the rhetoric by which its own 'voice' is figured, this thesis both narrates and stages moments of confusion between bodies and figures, examples and jokes, theory and performance. It aims to discover how such confusions, and the pleasure and anxiety they induce, might become politically useful. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my supervisor, Nicholas Ridout, for patient encouragement, timely interventions, and for generously encouraging the idiosyncrasies of the project. My thinking about this project has been immeasurably enriched through encounters with the work my colleagues and friends in the postgraduate research community at Queen Mary and in the interdisciplinary research environment created by Hubbub. Particular thanks are due to Felicity Callard and Lynne Friedli for helping me understand the stakes of my project, and its politics I wish to thank several good friends, conversations with whom have enlivened my thinking process and helped me through times of doubt: Ella Finer, for wise advice and vocal holidays; Eirini Kartsaki, for her impassioned feedback; and James Wilkes, for important exchanges on the funniness of things on wheels. Thanks also go to Marina Soteriou, who has taught me more about humour than almost any other person, and to Holly Pester, with whom I am engaged in a lifelong exploration of funniness. I would like to say thank you Rik and Linda Bennett, for giving me a place to retreat to, and emerge from. And, finally, my endless thanks to Killian Fox, for living through this project with me, and sticking with it until the end. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ……………………………………………. 2 ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………….. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………..4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ……………………………………………………….5 INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………7 1. Scenes of address ……………………………………………………….7 2. Speech onstage …………………………………….…………………..10 3. Just a joke …………………………………………….…………………18 4. Funny ethics ………………………………………….………………….23 5. Funny feeling …………………….………………………………………27 6. Pissing and myth-making ……………………………..………………..31 7. Figures of speech ………………………..……………………………...38 CHAPTER 1: THE PHILOSOPHER ONSTAGE: J.L. AUSTIN AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES ………………………..…………………………..44 1. ‘This guy’ …………………...……………………………………………. 44 2. Reading and not reading …………………………...…………………...53 3. Austin’s impasse ……………………………...………………………….58 4. Derrida’s Austin – avoiding the ditch …………………………………...63 5. ‘Signature Event Context’ (Derrida takes Austin seriously) ………….65 6. Austin’s philosophical performance …………………………………….73 7. The ‘opposite’ of serious …………………………………………………82 8. The scene of the promise ………………………………………………..92 9. The stage …………………………………………………………………. 97 10. Austin performing Austin ………………………………………………..104 CHAPTER 2: LITERALIZING FIGURES: STEWART LEE, DECONSTRUCTION, AND THE TEA COSY ………………………………....113 1. Not laughing: me at the gig ……………………………………………...113 2. A serious business: aesthetics and professionalism ………………....115 3. Figures of literal-mindedness ……………………………………………120 4. Deconstruction and wee ……………………………………….………...129 5. A joke 'about' a tea cosy …………………………………………………136 6. Literalness and serviceability ……………………………………….…...144 7. Resisting the ‘fit’ …………………………………………….…………….150 8. Wool is funny! …………………………………………….……………….154 9. How would that possibly work? …………………………………….……161 10. Herded up onstage ……………………………………………..…..…….165 CHAPTER 3: THEATRICAL HISTORIES AND SCULPTURAL FUNNINESS: WATCHING KINKALERI’S I CENCI / SPETTACOLO (2004) …………..……170 1. Bit of Business with the Microphone …………………..………………...170 2. I Cenci/Spettacolo ……………………………..…………………………..176 3. Turn-of-the-century gigness …………………………………..…………..181 6 4. If you don’t laugh ……………………………………………..……………184 5. Who and what ………………………………………………..…………….186 6. LOVING the floor …………………………………………………..………190 7. American Idol ……………………………………………………..………..192 8. Literalism and theatricality …………………………………………..…… 194 9. Muteness, hiddenness and the sculptural funny …………………..….. 200 10. Heroics ……………………………………………………………..……… 205 11. The joke of the brick …………………………………………………….....206 CHAPTER 4: IDENTIFICATION, COLLECTIVITY, GUILT: ON BEING STEWART LEE’S AUDIENCE ……………………………………….…………..210 1. The room …………………………………………………………..………..210 2. Put on display …………………………………………………………..…..220 3. Your anus ……………………………………………………………..…….226 4. Coincidence …………………………………………………………..…….232 5. Ethical problems, funny identification ………………………..…………..235 6. Interpellation and the temporal strangeness of guilt ……………..…….246 7. Always already ………………………………………..……………………252 CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………..………………257 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………….…………...265 7 INTRODUCTION 1. Scenes of address This thesis asks what happens when a person stands on a stage and speaks. It centres on performances that emphasize the act of speech, the kinds of performances that begin when a performer walks onto a stage, or steps up to a microphone, and, in the silence that has fallen, begins to speak. It responds to performances that begin with, or consist entirely in, acts of speech addressed directly to an audience. Such performances might well begin with a ‘good evening’, might well involve an audience being addressed as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, and being told ‘thanks for coming’. These sorts of utterances call attention to the situation of performance, to our shared presence in a particular place and time, either overtly or subtly: ‘I’m glad to be here tonight’, the performer might say, or ‘now I’d like to say…’ By beginning thus, with the scene of live performance, I hope to lay the ground upon which broader questions about the scene of spoken address might be staged. What are our expectations of that scene? How are we to define its limits, the limits of our responsibility within it? How are we to reconcile the embodied act of speaking with the effects and consequences that reach beyond it? And why might it remain important to ask what it was that happened when that particular body spoke those particular words in that particular place and time? After all, in this age of digital communications, have we not moved somewhat beyond the idea that a person’s physical presence is necessary for their act of speech to be received, understood, effective, of interest? Why then fixate upon this scene, the scene in which one a person, a lone individual, addresses a gathering of persons? Is this not an essentialist move, to return to the person standing there and saying things out loud, to imply that this constitutes speech ‘as such’? Can a research project framed thus really hope to discover something about our contemporary relationship with speech and language more generally? 8 The word ‘speech’ carries the connotation of something more formal than an everyday conversation,