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.