The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-Up Comedy: a Case Study of Louis CK’S Performance in the Stand-Up Comedy Show “Live at the Beacon Theatre”

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Anglicist, Volume 06 No 01 February 2017, 36-42

The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-Up Comedy: A Case Study of Louis CK’s Performance in the Stand-Up Comedy Show “Live At The Beacon Theatre”

Novita Ida Agustina Ema Faiza English Department, Universitas Airlangga

Abstract

Humor is a universal phenomenon that exhibited by most cultures. One of the example of humor is stand-up comedy where a comic (a stand-up comedian) stands on stage and speaks directly to the audience. The material in stand-up comedy is generally scripted, nevertheless in the process of the stand-up comedy performance, the comic has to talk spontaneously without a script which is identified as the spontaneous speech. According to Ross (2005), there are five features of spontaneous speech in stand-up comedy, they are filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back-tracking, and sympathetic circularity. This study attempts to find out the features of spontaneous speech in stand-up comedy performed by Louis CK in the video entitled Live at the Beacon Theater. Moreover, this study also aimed to know what features do mostly occur in CK’s performance. As the qualitative study, Dornyei (2007) stated that one of the characteristics of qualitative research is the nature of qualitative data including recorded interviews, various types of texts, and images (photos or videos). In collecting the data, the writer took several steps, as follows: downloaded the video from YouTube, transcribe the video based on the topic discussed, identified and describe each features found in CK’s performance. In analyzing the data, the writer counted each features found and then interpreted the data to determine the most occurrence features in CK’s performance. The result of this study shows that Louis CK used all of the features proposed by Ross (2005) in the following order, start from the mostly appear to less: ellipsis, redundancy, filler, sympathetic circularity and back-tracking. Keywords: comic, features of spontaneous speech, stand-up comedy

1. Introduction Humor is a universal phenomenon that is exhibited by most cultures. One of the types of humor is stand-up comedy. Nowadays, there are many television stations make certain program of stand-up comedy show. It even becomes a joke contest where there will be a winner who is selected by some judges. Therefore, many comics or stand-up comedians attempt to perform the best material on their performance. The popularity of stand-up comedy show defeats the existence of conversational comedy which has been studied by many researchers. Stand-up comedy becomes world-widely spread in all over the world. In America, stand-up comedy increasingly finds its way onto mainstream TV and sales of videos of stand-up performances are high if judged by the high profile they command in high street record shops. More alternative stand-up – improvised, theatrical or cinematic – has also become popular in America, Britain, and Europe. There are so many comics with an excellent talent. One of them is Louis CK. He is not only a comic but also works as director, writer, television producer and also editor. Moreover, he got some awards related to his skill in comedy. In 1999, ‘The Chris Rock Show’ took him as the winner in the category of Outstanding writing for a Variety or Music Program ‘The Chris Rock Show’, in 2012 his performance ‘Louie: “Pregnant’ as the Outstanding writing for a Comedy Series of Emmy Award and he also got the Best Comedy Album from Grammy Award. Stand-up comedy seems to attract many people, either to enjoy the comedian’s performance or to be a stand-up comedian itself, who deliver the joke in front of the audience. In stand-up comedy, the material is scripted or prepared first by the stand-up comedian or called comic before he or she starts their performance. It is of course needed a skill and knowledge how to organize the script, so that they can

36 The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-Up Comedy: A Case Study of Louis CK’s Performance in the Stand-Up Comedy Show “Live At The Beacon Theatre” smoothly deliver their joke. Theories about stand-upcomedy can be found easily, how to organize a good performance and how to manage the audience attention. However, the problem is there is still limited study about humor in terms of the language used. Therefore, it interact the writer as linguistic student to conduct a research about this phenomenon, Regarding those phenomena, it is obvious to know the features of spontaneous speech used by the comedian especially Louis CK in his performance. Through this study, other comedians can notice some features that should be included in their material. Moreover, it is also important to know which features that mostly used by comedian to get audience’s attention and attract them. There are two previous studies which concern in comedy issues. The first is a study from Ardiana (2014), he studied about the features of spontaneous speech in Indonesian comics namely Raditya Dika, it has different comic from different language and culture which led to different result later on. He found that that Dika’s performance contained all features proposed by Ross (2005) with the most occurrences is sympathetic circularity. In this case, we have different comedian as the source of the data which is possible to result different findings. Raditya Dika is an Indonesian comic, while Louis CK is an American comic; both of them have different language and cultures. The next study is conducted by Karuniawati who studied about flouted of maxims in training activity in Surabaya. She found that there are three maxims flouted during the quantum parenting training, such as maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. In this case, the type of joke is different between my study and Karuniawati’s study. However, this study neglected to consider the monologue joke, it concerned to the conversational joke. Humor is something that makes a person laugh and smile. She explains further that it is possible to claim something as a humorous one, even though no one laugh at the same time, and it can often happen that people laugh, but someone can claim it is not funny (Ross, 2005). Humor primarily consists of jokes (spoken or written) and actions which elicit laughter or generate mirth (Critchley, 2002). Furthermore, Attardo (2001) in his book stated that there are two types of joke or comedy; those are narrative and conversation comedy. Narrative comedy typically told by a narrator who often prefaces the joke with an announcement of the humorous nature of forthcoming turn. On the other hand, conversational joke is told as a regular turn in conversation, without prefacing and are strongly context-dependent. One of the examples of narrative joke is stand-up comedy which is so popular today. A definition of stand-up comedy has been proposed by Attardo (2001) who says that, stand-up comedy is a highly artificial, scripted genre, it represents a genre in which a single comedian comes on stage with a microphone and starts a performance in front of an audience. According to Ross (2005), she states that stand-up comedy is a spontaneous speech where the material is unscripted and informal. The features of spontaneous speech in stand-up comedy have been proposed by Ross (2005) in her book entitled The Language of Humor. She argues that there are five feature s of spontaneous speech in stand-up comedy, such as filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back-tracking, and sympathetic circularity. In addition, there is also a dissertation by Schwarz (2010) entitled Linguistic Aspect of Verbal Humor. This study supported the idea of Ross about those features. In this study, Schwarz (2010) mentions about pauses which related to the filler in Ross’ book, repetition as the supporting idea of redundancy and back-tracking, and direct address to the audience or sympathetic circularity in Ross’ book. The objective of this study is to find out the features of spontaneous speech in stand-up comedy which performed by Louis CK in his video entitled Live at the Beacon Theatre. The theory about Language of Humor will be applied to analyze those features containing in Louis CK’s performance. In addition, this study aims to know what features mostly used or frequently appear in stand-up comedy performed by Louis CK. As the main theory of this study, the writer applies the feature of spontaneous speech that was proposed by Ross (2005) in her book of The Language of Humor. Humor is something that makes a people laugh or smile; something that humorous depends on personal who responds the humor. The response of the audience played role as an importa nt factor in counting as humor. Examining the language can then help to explain why people laugh. The language of humor that proposed by Ross (2005) examines the

37 Anglicist Volume 06 No 01 (February 2017) | Novita Ida Agustin; Ema Faiza importance of social context for humor. The language of humor describes how language is central to the construction and interpretation of a range of humorous texts. Spontaneous speech is the features of speech that would occur in unscripted and informal talk (Ross, 2005). However, in comedy, the use of language must seem spontaneous though it may be rehearsed and scripted before. As well as use colloquialism, there will be more fillers, like ‘short of’, ellipsis is a shortened forms of words, redundancy and back-tracking as the repetition of words and sympathetic circularity, phrases like ‘isn’t tha t right’ addressed to listener (Ross, 2005). 2. Methodology In conducting a research, method becomes an important tool for the researcher. The correctness of a study depends on the method that is used by the researcher. In this case, it obvious for a researcher to use an appropriate method in collecting the data, then analyze the data to get the final result of the research. This study used qualitative approach as the tool. By applying this qualitative approach, the data will be more descriptive in the analysis . According to (Dornyei, 2007), one of the characteristics of qualitative research is the nature of qualitative data including recorded interviews, various types of texts, and images (photos or video). In this case, the writer emphasizes on the term video that mentioned before, because the data of this research is video, thus, the writer considers that qualitative approach is best way in analyzing the data. Moreover, in this characteristic, Dornyei also mentioned that during data processing most data are transformed into a textual form. This study analyzed a video performance of Louis CK which needs to transcribe into textual form. Therefore, the characteristic of qualitative approach as proposed by Dornyei is suitable with this study. Some considerations take place over choosing this video as data source in this study. The video, one of the video performances of stand-up comedian Louis CK entitled “Live at the Beacon Theater” delivers Louis to be the winner of Emmy award in Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special category in 2012. Furthermore, it has almost two millions viewers in YouTube indicating that his performance has attracted more viewers compared to his other performances. This video is produced independently by CK and it becomes his first stand-up comedy performance which was produced and directed by himself. The length of this video is about an hour. In this research, the writer chose Louis CK as the subject because he has some special characteristics compared to other stand-p comedians. First of all, the writer needs to describe his short biography. Louis Szekely (born Louis Székely Jr. September 12, 1967) known professionally as Louis C.K. is a Mexican-American stand-up comedian, writer, television producer, director, actor, voice actor, and editor. He is the creator, star, writer, director, and, until February 2012, the editor of the FX comedy series Louie. Louis C.K. first took the stage in 1984 at an open-mic in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, he gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke. C.K. has performed his stand-up frequently on shows such as Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Lopez Tonight, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half -hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. C.K. also received many awards for his achievements as a comedian, writer, director, and television producer. he got four awards from Emmy Award, such as: Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Music Program in 1999 (The Chris Rock Show ), Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 2012 (Louie: "Pregnant”), Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special in 2012 (Live at the Beacon Theater), and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 2013 (Louis C.K.: Oh My God). Moreover, in 2012, his work ‘Hilarious’ was nominated as the best album comedy in Grammy Award 2012. In collecting the data some steps taken are as follows: 1) transcribed the video into textual form. As mentioned in the previous section that one of the characteristics of qualitative research is during data processing most data are transformed into a textual form. Thus, transcribing video is an important step that should be taken to facilitate the author in analyzing the data. In my thesis, the transcriptions follow the conventions established by (Dressler & Kreuz, 2000), whose model system is based on a survey of various transcription conventions for discourse analysis purposes. Transcriptions consist of numerous short lines which represent spoken language as segmented into intonation units. As

38 The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-Up Comedy: A Case Study of Louis CK’s Performance in the Stand-Up Comedy Show “Live At The Beacon Theatre” far as the English language is concerned, an intonation unit typically consists of about four to five words and expresses one new idea unit. Generally, intonation units begin with a brief pause and end in a clause- final intonation contour. The transcript is written in American English. The length of the single pauses has been indicated in parentheses. 2) Identified each features in CK’s performance. The writer started to highlight the features which appropriate with the spontaneous speech which has been proposed before. It started with the feature of filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back-tracking, and sympathetic circularity. Data analysis started to explore the data found in the previous step. The identification that has been found in the data collection, then started to be analyzed. In this case, the writer analyzed each features found and described the features in details. After the data has been collected and analyzed, the writer then counted each features in CK’s performance. The data was also presented in the form of percentage to ease the interpretation of the data. With this percentage number, the writer is able to interpret the second statement of the problem which is the most occurrence features in the stand-up comedy performed by Louis CK. The last step in analyzing the data was making a conclusion from the data. 3. The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Louis CK’s Performance

There are five features of spontaneous speech that has been proposed by Ross (2005): filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back-tracking, and sympathetic circularity. Hence, the writer will explain each features briefly. Filler is words or sounds that literally fill in the pauses in spoken language which do not carry conventional meaning but allow time to think. Then, ellipsis refers to the omission of part of a structure, it normally used for reason of economy and, in spoken discourse, can create a sense of informality. Redundancy is feature where items in the speech are repeated even though this is normally unnecessary, it is a means to dramatize the situation and to make people laugh, and it also can help the comedian to strengthen the rhythmic pattern of a joke telling session. The next is back-tracking, it is similar to redundancy, but it is purposed to correct if there is any mistake or wrong decision, it also repeated in order to improve the speech. The last is sympathetic circularity. It is a feature to maintain the attention of audience to invite listener to assume the speaker’s point of view. In the stand-up comedy performed by Louis CK, the writer found that he used all the features proposed by Ross (2005). Ellipsis is the most frequently used by Louis CK. The writer found 520 features contained Ellipsis which represents 31% from the total spontaneous features found. Redundancy is the second mostly occurred feature which is 112, it is about 21%. The next is filler. 103 filler were found in CK’s performance, it is about 20%. The writer found 100 utterances contained sympathetic circularity features, 19% from the total utterances found. And the 42 back-tacking feature found in CK’s comedy or about 9%. The first feature found is filler. The examples of filler will be presented in the following data, as follows: Uh (0.1) what else? No Jews. Just (0.2) cos also (0.3) also (0.3) it lights up your big dumb face. It lights it up. There’s been babies with, you know (0.1) connected at the face (0.1) to a dog or whatever,there’s been… In this case, the writer notices that the comedian used sounds, words, and phrases as the filler in his speech. This is a strategy for him to pause for a while which let him think the next idea he should deliver. In the time pause which presented in the parentheses, he planned what should he said after the previous idea. Moreover, this is also purposed to be a strategy to make the audience calm down, as presented in the excerpt 2. When saying the word just and also he raised his voice because the audience laugh and so crowded, thus he needed to get the audience calm down and listen to him again. While the last excerpt indicates that Louis used filler as a way to make the audience feel curious about his upcoming idea. Another feature found in CK’s performance is ellipsis. Ellipsis can be a shortened form of words. It is often used by the comedian as one of strategy either to create an informal situation or to limit the time while speaking, thus the comedian has to talk directly without any more time to think then it makes some word will be contracted. For examples: Don’t k eep tellin’ people what you’re doin’

39 Anglicist Volume 06 No 01 (February 2017) | Novita Ida Agustin; Ema Faiza

Just, cos also, also, it lights up your big dumb face. And I’m gonna move into a place with him in the village for couple of months and totally… Moreover, the omission of part of structure also consider as the ellipsis feature according to Ross’ book. It is as a means to create informal tone in his speech, so that the audience enjoy the show. It can be the omission of verb, pronoun, or even a phrase. The examples will be presented, as follows: (Do) You think they get to go on a cool green plane with a red light? And he writes F on her tit with a sharpie and (he) just throws her down a shoot on a pile of F bodies. What it is, it’s a place where you can go and (you can) be with a dead body and you just do whatever you want. Redundancy feature as employed during the performance allows the comedian to repeat what he says. Just cos also, also, it lights up your big dumb face. It lights it up. He repeated the complete sentence as presented in bold. However, the comic substituted the object your big dumb face with the pronoun it. In this case, Louis CK wanted to get the audience by repeating this sentence. The first time he said: “it lights up your big dumb face” the audience started to laugh, then he decided to repeat it, thus the audience still have chance to laugh. “Sir, come on. Let’s go. Come on. Yes. Let’s go” In this excerpt, the comedian repeated the sentence but with different word pos ition. Yet, it does not change the idea of this sentence. Louis CK used command sentence and then repeated it to make the audience laugh. ”What is a job? Explain to me, what’s a fuckin’ job?” In gaining the audience laughter, Louis CK also used interroga tive sentence. He added the word fuck ing to emphasize his idea when the audience started to laugh which indicates that they get the point of the comedian. I’m going to tell you about him and I have to make up a name because he’s a realchild who lives in this city, so I have to make up a name in order to tell this story about him, uhm uh (0,3) his name is just, Jezanthepuss. Let’s just call him Jezanthepuss. Jezanthepuss, fine. Ok ay The affirmative sentence “I have to make up a name” is repeated in this excerpt. The comedian tried to affirm that this is what he going to do. By doing this repetition, the audience started to laugh. Regarding the results of redundancy feature shown in the previous section, there are some things can be inferred from the result. The use of complete sentence either to dramatize the situation or to make people laugh shows that Louis CK tried to control his idea. In this case, he wanted to maintain the rhythm of his speech performance by showing the full sentence. When Louis CK repeated incomplete sentence or even only the adverbial phrase, it indicates that he wanted to keep the important topic in his speech, thus he only repeated certain part of the sentence. The feature that also present repetition is back-tracking. Different from redundancy, back- tracking is purposed to correct the mistake when he said something unclear or maybe consider as wrong choice. Louis CK has some style in correcting the mistake in his speech in order to improve his joke. Sometimes, when an utterance is begun, before he finished immediately replaced by something else. In this level, he replaced unfinished word such as: I don’t k now your death is whatev- some people uh they, they want you to do things when they die with… He also repeat a complete with, and then correct it with a clearer word to mak e the audience understand what he point is, and of course to get laughter from the audience, lik e: My grandma uh grandmother, she’s just uh for the layman… Furthermore, he even repeated a complete sentence with a clearer idea, such as: I’ve been think in’ about my memories because I have k ids now, and my k ids are at an age where I remember being their age, I remember being a s ix-year old, I remember being a nine-year old.

40 The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-Up Comedy: A Case Study of Louis CK’s Performance in the Stand-Up Comedy Show “Live At The Beacon Theatre”

The last feature is sympathetic circularity. It can be in a form of word, phrase, and sentence. This is where the comedian tried to ask the audience to always with him and stay on his rails of ideas. For example: Cos I’m in first class, why? For being a professional asshole. Well, you know, sexual perversion is uh problem, it’s… No, it’s just that, you know what I mean? He was trying to fuck me all the time. 4. Discussion Based on the findings and the analysis of Louis CK’s performance presented in the previous sub chapter, the writer found that Louis CK used the entire features of spontaneous speech in his comedy as proposed by Ross (2005) which is filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back- tracking, and sympathetic circularity. The total number of utterances which contain spontaneous speech features is 520 features. The most occurrences number in his performance is the feature of ellipsis. The writer found that there are 163 features. It represents 31% from the total spontaneous features utterances found. In this case, the writer can interpret that he wants to make his performance more intimate with the audience. It can be seen from the ellipsis features he used in his joke performance. As mentioned by Ross (2005), ellipsis can create the sense of informality. Louis CK delivers his joke informally because he wants to gain the audience’s admiration. Moreover, with the occurrence of ellipsis features in his joke, it makes his performance not clumsy, thus the audiences enjoy the performance which takes for about an hour. It is long enough for audience to just sit and listen to his joke. Therefore, Louis CK uses less formal words in his performance. The second mostly occurrence feature is redundancy. From the total spontaneous features utterances found in his performance, it takes about 21% or 112 utterances. It indicates that the comedian tends to repeat his phrase or word in his joke delivery. Related to this phenomenon, the redundancy or the repetition of some items in CK’s comedy is aimed to get audiences’ laughter and to dramatize the situation. He wants to strengthen the rhythmic pattern of his joke telling session. In accordance with the length of his performance, he wants to make his joke more interesting and the audience will not be bored to enjoy his joke performance through the redundancy he used. Furthermore, through the redundancy shown in his performance, he makes the audience is easier to follow the talk, because not every word contains new information. In addition, the repeating phrase or word, he wants to make sure that the audience has recognized his idea, so that he can continue his joke without confusing the audience. Filler is the third mostly occur in Louis CK’s performance. There are 103 utterances contain filler. It represents 21% from the total spontaneous speech features utterances. Filler gives time for comedian to think what material should he or she delivers for the next punch line. This number shows that Louis CK rarely uses filler. He just takes a little time to think and fills the pauses. It means that, his joke is actually well-prepared, thus he does not need more time in gaining idea and produces a lot of pauses. Meanwhile, the occurrence of pauses in his joke is a strategy to keep audiences’ curiosity. The pauses he produced give the audience some times to think about what the speaker said before. The next feature in CK’s performance is sympathetic circularity. It is a feature which aimed to maintain the attention from audience. In this case, sympathetic circularity occurs in 100 utterances he produced. It represents 19% from the total spontaneous features utterances found. It is realized that a stand-up comedy is a type of comedy which the comedian delivers his joke without any interruption from others. Nevertheless the audience interaction is also important for the comedian. That is why Louis CK also uses it as his strategy to maintain audience’s attention and allow them to follow his train of thought. Through this feature, the c omedian is able to make sure that the audience gets his points. The occurrences of the words like ‘you know’, you know what I mean’ can make the audience feels that they play a role in his joke. In this case, the audience joins him with laughter and amusement, which reveals their solidarity with him. Including the audience in his performance can be a delicate business because the performer must then be prepared to respond to his audience simultaneously. It also can be a sign for him. It means that when he produces sympathetic circularity and the audiences’ response is weak laughter, it

41 Anglicist Volume 06 No 01 (February 2017) | Novita Ida Agustin; Ema Faiza indicates that the audience does not really appreciate his performance, thus CK has to react quickly by changing his routine so as not to bore his listeners and lose their attention. The less occurrence feature in Louis CK’s performance is back-tracking. Back-tracking is the repetition of words in order to improve or correct the previous words. In his comedy performance, Louis CK produced only 42 utterances which contain back-tracking feature, it represent 9% from the total spontaneous speech features found. As mentioned before that Louis CK has a well-planned material, thus he rarely produces unnecessary topic that should be replace with other topics. 5. Conclusion The material in stand-up comedy is rehearsed and may be scripted before it is performed. Therefore, the mistakes, gaffes, offensive material cannot be edited out. This phenomenon affects the use of language in stand-up comedy which is interesting to be analyzed. The language that produced by the comedian is spontaneous, as uses colloquialism. The stand-up comedy which is performed by Louis CK is spontaneous; it means that he delivered his joke spontaneously in front of audience. By using the features of spontaneous speech proposed by Ross (2005), this study aims to find those features of spontaneous speech used by Louis CK in the stand-up comedy show Live at the Beacon Theatre. In this study, the writer found all of five features introduced by Ross (2005) in CK’s performance, those are filler, ellipsis, redundancy, back-tracking, and sympathetic circularity. The finding of this study showed that Louis CK mostly used ellipsis in his joke. He wants to make the situation of his performance became more intimate through the informal talk he performed. As mentioned before that ellipsis is mainly aimed to make the joke becomes casual and informal. Moreover, Louis CK tried to strengthen his joke telling session by producing redundancy which occurred mostly after the ellipsis. In this case, he wants to maintain the rhythmic of his performance through the redundant word or phrase he uttered. The pauses or filler occurred in Louis CK’s speech showed that he wanted to maintain the understanding of the audience toward his material, it gives time either for himself or the audience in gaining the idea. The use of sympathetic circularity which appeared afterward showed that he wants to improve the interaction with audience, and to make sure that the audience still followed his train of thought. Meanwhile, back-tracking was rarely used by CK in his performance. The improvement of correctness also rarely did by CK. This study is limited to the spontaneous speech in the stand-up comedy show of certain comedian. It neglects the other features of stand-up comedy which allow further research in the same topic. Thus, it opens the chance for the next researchers who intere sted with stand-up comedy show to conduct a study about stand-up comedy especially its features. 6. References Ardiana, Y. C. (2014). The Features of Spontaneous Speech in Stand-up Comedy. Surabaya: Universitas Airlangga. Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous Text: A Semantic and Pragmatic Anlysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Critchley, S. (2002). On Humor. London: Routledge. Dorney, Z. (2001). Motivational Strategies in the Language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Double, O. (2005). The Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy. London: Methuen. Kande, J. (2012). Comic Timing - The Pause that Refreshes. Retrieved from http://westsidetoastmasters.com/article_reference/comic_timing_pauses.html Karuniawati, R. (2008). An Analysis of Flouting of the Maxims to Cause Humorous Effects in Training Activity (A Case Study of Jokes in One Day Quantum Parenting Training). Surabaya: Universitas Airlangga. McGraw, P. (2011). The Importance of Humor Research. The Humor Code. Mcllvenny, P., Mettovaara, S., & Tapio, R. (1993). Stand-up Comedy and Audience Response. Finland: University of Oulu. Montgomery, M. (2007). An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Routledge. Oring, E. (2003). Engaging Humor. Illinois: Board of Trustees. Ross, A. (2005). Language of Humor. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Schwarz, J. (2010). Linguistic aspects of verbal humor in Stand-up Comedy. Dissertation: Dokto University of Chicago Press. Top 10 Funniest Stand-up Comedians. (2013). Retrieved from Thetopten: http://www.thetoptens.com/funniest-stand-up- comedians/