INTRODUCTION
Most linguistic and anthropological research on stand-up comedy relies crucially on the concepts of voicing and heteroglossia (Woolard Reference Woolard1987; Jaffe Reference Jaffe2000; Chun Reference Chun2004; Labrador Reference Labrador2004; Jacobs-Huey Reference Jacobs-Huey2006; Glick Reference Glick2007; Seizer Reference Seizer2011; see also Koziski Reference Koziski1984; Mintz Reference Mintz1985; Scarpetta & Spagnolli Reference Scarpetta and Spagnolli2009). Keane defines voicing as ‘the linguistic construction of social personae’ (Reference Keane and Duranti2001:268; see also Fox Reference Fox2004 and Woolard Reference Woolard and Duranti2004) and notes that it is closely tied to Bakhtin's (Reference Bakhtin1981) concept of heteroglossia. According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia is the ‘internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day’ (Reference Bakhtin1981:262–63). Through voicing, comedians and their audiences create complex relationships towards their lived experiences within a heteroglossic lifeworld, a lifeworld where varieties and the identities that they indirectly index are rarely treated as equal.
The most nuanced engagement with voicing and heteroglossia in stand-up comedy can be found in Glick (Reference Glick2007). Glick combines the concept of voicing with Bakhtin's related concept of chronotopes, or narrative spatio-temporal frames, to examine how comic Eddie Izzard performs critiques of colonization by voicing colonizing and colonized countries as contrasting social personae. The present article extends Glick's appreciation and application of a Bakhtinian approach to further underscore how heteroglossia and voice work in the performance context of stand-up comedy in the comedy club scene by comedians who use American Stuttering English (henceforth ASE). This article contributes to the burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on stand-up comedy and humor by focusing on ASE as an understudied variety and as part of the linguistic market (Woolard Reference Woolard1985; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991) in the United States. I foreground how one ASE comedienne in Northern California, Rona B, uses stand-up comedy to render visible language ideologies that position ASE as nondesirable and marginal. This analysis adds to the theoretical and conceptual literature on voicing and heteroglossia by foregrounding the often under-used concept of intersectionality as a powerful means for using performance as a critical perspective on everyday life (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) where, as we see in the data, sociolinguistic variation and gender meet and constitute each other.
Although the term has many uses within social science research, I specifically use intersectionality in the original tradition of critical race theorists. In their original theorizing on the experiences of African American women, such scholars noted that single-axis modes of difference and discrimination (i.e. a focus solely on gender or race) undertheorize the complex realities of social actors who occupy multiple arenas of difference that make them multiple and simultaneous targets for marginalization (see also Collins Reference Collins1990:18, 299). Applying this framework to a performance analysis, I contend that, when analyzing humor and cultural critique in stand-up comedy, a single-axis discrimination framework for addressing difference must be replaced by an intersectional one to capture the nuances of voicing for stand-up comedians and comediennes in general. In doing so, I participate in the shift to micro-interactional perspectives on investigations of the discursive constructions of intersections between gender, race, sexuality, and language (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz1999, Reference Bucholtz2011; Eckert Reference Eckert2000, Reference Eckert2008, Reference Eckert2012; Kiesling Reference Kiesling2004; Hall Reference Hall2005; Goodwin Reference Goodwin2006; Jacobs-Huey Reference Jacobs-Huey2006; Podesva Reference Podesva2007; Alim & Reyes Reference Alim and Reyes2011).
In this article, I demonstrate how stand-up comic Rona B uses intra-categorical complexity (McCall Reference McCall2005) in her voicing tactics to construct a critical stance towards her lived experiences in a heteroglossic lifeworld. McCall notes that intersectionality theorists across disciplines who place intra-categorical complexity at the center of their analysis ‘tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection—people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups (Dill Reference Dill2002, 5)—in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups’ (McCall Reference McCall2005:1774). McCall pushes for intra-categorical complexity as a middle ground between anti-categorical complexity and inter-categorical complexity in the study of identity. Scholars who examine intra-categorical complexity align with those who take an anti-categorical approach in that they call into question the ultimate logic of categories as descriptors. At the same time, the intra-categorical approach uses categories as points of comparison with groups perceived as the ‘norm’ in discussions of power and dominance within groups (inter-categorical complexity). Thus intra-categorical complexity calls attention to the diversity of subjectivities within categories, a diversity that allows for differentially enhancing and restricting possibilities for and constraints on agency and power in both language use and other aspects of identity construction. As an approach to voicing, heteroglossia, and performance, the intra-categorical perspective views performers as having multiple, rather than single identities, and positioning themselves to multiple aspects of social and sociolinguistic hierarchies. This affords a rich analysis of how multiply marginalized subjects like Rona B critique experiences of intersecting nodes of power (Wong Reference Wong2010) in performance.
In her performances, Rona B takes on the voice of the ‘bitch comedienne’ (Gilbert Reference Gilbert1997) via the genre of the ‘female complaint’ (Berlant Reference Berlant1988:240, 243–45) as a strategic site of intervention for critiquing gender and sociolinguistic hierarchies that frame ASE as marginalized. She draws on stand-up comedy to critique two typically opposed political agendas in which she is caught up: the anti-sociolinguistic discrimination campaign (i.e. the campaign against people and institutional practices that discriminate against others for using nonstandard varieties) that habitually downplays or erases gender and the antisexism campaign that downplays or erases sociolinguistic variation. For instance, the first-ever discussion of the different kinds of discrimination women ASE speakers face was held at a convention of the Stuttering Organization of America (SOA) in 2003 in a closed forum for women ASE speakers. Yet, it was not placed on the mainstream agenda for that year's convention business for an open session. As Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1991:1249) notes, many academic and activist approaches to gender discrimination ignore the crucial significance of sociolinguistic barriers, be they related to multilingualism or variation within a language, as a vector in the complex experience of women. In the context of the SOA, the same can also be said in this case as well, in which gender has not figured prominently in campaigns to reduce sociolinguistic discrimination. This observation also affirms Crenshaw's statement that, in regards to political intersectionality, multiply marginalized subjects often feel torn between single-axis political agendas that ignore one or more aspects of their complex identities (Reference Crenshaw1991:1251–52, see also Reference Crenshaw1989).
In this light, I show that Rona B's comedy routine demonstrates that political agendas of both language variation and gender cannot be divorced from each other. Nor can they simply be fused together in an additive kind of analysis, conceived of as one that simply combines ‘everything’ we know about gender with ‘everything’ we know about language variation. As Troutman (Reference Troutman and Baxter2006) and Jacobs-Huey (Reference Jacobs-Huey2006) show in their work on African American comediennes, the language ideologies of multiply marginalized subjects relative to sociolinguistic variation and everyday life are complex and can have what seem to be contradictory stances (see Lanehart Reference Lanehart2009). An analysis of Rona B's comedic work reveals performance as a critical reflection on and contestation of lived, everyday perspectives on variation that is rooted in the complex intersections of gender and language discrimination that simultaneously enforce each other. Foregrounding intra-categorical complexity thus yields a mode of looking at stand-up comedy critique in a manner that moves beyond a single-axis focus on standard/vernacular or gender.
THE VARIETIES UNDER COMEDIC EXAMINATION: AMERICAN STUTTERING ENGLISH AND STANDARD AMERICAN FLUENT ENGLISH
ASE is defined in Dumas (Reference Dumas2012:217) as a variety of English that uses multiple partial reduplication (Ghomeshi, Jackendoff, Rosen, & Russell Reference Ghomeshi, Jackendoff, Rosen and Russell2004) in plain versus expressive morphology (Zwicky & Pullum Reference Zwicky, Pullum, Aske, Beery, Michaelis and Filip1987), a process known in vernacular discourse as ‘stuttering’.Footnote 1 I assume Landar's (Reference Landar1961) position of stuttering as normal sociolinguistic variation and distinct from self-initiated self-repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks Reference Schegloff, Jefferson; and Sacks1977) in everyday conversation (see Dumas Reference Dumas2011). This point is not trivial, for in many speakers' folk ideologies, speakers and hearers often conflate these two practices in the broader vernacular category of stuttering and the even broader category of ‘disfluency’. For this article, stuttering refers only to multiple partial reduplication in plain morphology, where it would be considered ASE. It also includes discourse strategies used by adult ASE speakers to intentionally mask ASE usage that is often negatively evaluated as disfluency. Such discourse strategies, such as the elongation or gemination of consonants and epenthesis of syllabic material like uhm before a stuttered form (see Dumas Reference Dumas2010), are often acquired during language socialization experiences that involve therapeutic institutions within and beyond education systems.
ASE differs from Standard American Fluent English (SAFE), an imagined, socially constructed, and unmarked (thereby, unnamed) variety that includes no stuttering in plain or expressive morphology. SAFE is a supralocal variety of Standard American English that overlaps with other regional and supralocal standard varieties of American English. It is also a sociolinguistic subjectivity that speakers, hearers, and institutions are socialized to have a ‘possessive investment’ in (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz1995). By possessive investment, Lipsitz refers to the ways in which some identities (whiteness in his work) have advantages that both encourage the work (‘investment’) of reproducing them, but at the same time ‘possess’ their owners without their conscious awareness. People associate Standard American English and varieties like SAFE with historically white, heterosexual, upper middle class, male-dominated public spaces such as political arenas (see Dumas Reference Dumas2013). My focus in the present article is on the circulation of ASE and ASE speakers in stand-up comedy.
ETHNOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ON ASE IN COMEDY
Rona B is a main organizer for a Northern California chapter of the Stuttering Organization of America (SOA) and a professor in her mid 30s at a university in Northern California. It was during my fieldwork in the Northern California chapters that I met her, just as she was beginning her career on stage. She is also a local disability activist because of her dyslexia. Rona B has performed at several open mic nights in and beyond California to mainstream audiences and posts some of her performances online via YouTube, the primary data set here. Rona B foregrounds gender in her stage persona by describing her comedic style as coming from the voice of an ‘angry bitch’. This self-referential practice (Hanks Reference Hanks1990, Reference Hanks2005) is used to take up a position in the social field of stand-up comedy as cultural production (see example (2) below). I foreground this to note that Rona B explicitly frames her perspective as gendered and not as a typical, unmarked white male ASE subjectivity. The unmarkedness of male gender is in part due to the ratio of 3:1 male to female ratio of ASE speakers often cited in research. Rona B does not endorse the sociolinguistic view of ASE as a legitimate variety but instead endorses neurological, rather than grammatical, understandings of ASE. This framing of ASE speakers as primarily but not exclusively determined by neurological processes downplays the representation of ASE speakers' agency and competencies, for example, to codeswitch between ASE and SAFE or to use ASE more fluently. This is shown in example (4), when Rona B discusses Marilyn Monroe. Despite these differences in language ideologies, I contend that Rona B does important work in confronting dominant ideologies of language variation and gender, such as socially constructed norms of appropriate or polite language for particular femininities and aural aesthetics of voicing that should be pleasing to an implicitly male ear.
Rona B's routines are situated in a complex history of ASE in mainstream and stand-up comedy. ASE speakers who portray comedic roles, such as Bruce Willis and Marilyn Monroe, narrate having to assimilate to speaking SAFE in order to make themselves linguistically presentable in communicative contexts where they will be deemed inadequate from the start. These examples of assimilation to SAFE are not unique to comedic ASE performers, but are also found in broader mainstream discourses and reflect pressure on ASE speakers to conform to expectations of their various audiences. At the same time, ASE speakers' assimilation to SAFE is not a gender-neutral process. Instead, it relies on pre-existing gendered tropes on context-specific masculinities and femininities that provide the template for assimilation processes. For instance, as I show below, Marilyn Monroe's breathy phonation type is one that she used to perform competency in SAFE, in order to achieve legitimacy in entertainment circles. It is also a sociophonetic practice that also comes to index a particular social type around knowledge and attractiveness that is indirectly mediated by racialized and gendered ideologies of beauty. Indeed, it is not just becoming a speaker of SAFE that is at stake. It is also about becoming an appropriate SAFE speaker that aligns with specific notions of gender and, many times, class and race.
While ASE speakers have had to assimilate, SAFE speakers have often portrayed ASE speakers in comedic roles in film, television, and stand-up comedy. In these different media, ASE invariably operates as the primary trademark of the characters. As a result, these comedic representations render visible the ‘possessive investment’ (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz1995) that many speakers have in SAFE as the standard. Three famous examples are Michael Palin's portrayal of Ken in A fish called Wanda (Shamberg & Chrichton Reference Shamberg and Chrichton1988), the character of The Champ in the film Harlem nights (Lipsky & Murphy Reference Lipsky and Murphy1989), and the Warner Bros. cartoon character ‘Porky Pig’. Moreover, in stand-up, mostly male SAFE speakers have used the voicing of ASE speakers for jokes, such as Bernie Mac's joke involving the stuttering of his nephew in The original kings of comedy (Latham & Lee Reference Latham and Lee2000).
Because normative stand-up comedy positions speakers of ASE as targets of humor, many ASE speakers view comedy with an especially critical eye. While one would expect that these representations would draw a unanimous stance of disapproval from ASE speakers, the interpretations of these performance events are often complex, contradictory, and interactionally negotiated in real-time interaction. For instance, during my fieldwork amongst local speech communities of ASE speakers in Southern California, I observed an intense and lengthy conversation on stand-up comedy between two ASE speakers, Will (mid 20s, Indian-American, college student) and Justin (mid 30s, African American, bank teller), both members of the SOA Westside Chapter. The text under discussion was Bernie Mac's performance in The kings of comedy, in which he performs a joke revolving around his nephew's stutter. While Will expressed concern with the representation, Justin remarked that he enjoyed the performance and praised Bernie Mac's comic skills (for a more detailed analysis see Dumas Reference Dumas2010). This shows that ASE speakers regularly co-construct different and, at times, conflicting assessments towards comedy, including stand-up comedy, as part of everyday talk.
DATA SOURCES AND METHODS
Data for this article comes from one of thirty-five videos on Rona B's YouTube video channel, posted between 2011–2014. Because of the number of videos on YouTube, I am able to examine how Rona B designs a somewhat similar joke for different audiences as well as how she negotiates and displays her competence as a novice comedienne over time. This intertextual series affords the analyst the opportunity to discern how performers negotiate complex relationships between text and context (Briggs Reference Briggs1988), or how performers draw on and reshape context to reconfigure a previous text, which in this case is a written joke. Finally, even though I am doing a single-case analysis, the analysis is supported by repeated viewings of different recordings of Rona B across performance contexts in different clubs over time. This includes her use of some of the same content in her jokes to challenge SAFE ideologies of language and gender.
CHALLENGING SAFE IDEOLOGIES OF LANGUAGE AND GENDER IN STAND-UP COMEDY
Instead of positing a universal ASE experience, Rona B's performances explicitly foreground her intersectional subjectivity as a white, heterosexual woman, a perspective often missing from many male-dominated discussions of ASE in mainstream representations outside and, at times, inside the ASE community. In particular, she deploys voicing in her caricatures of stereotypically white men's and women's voices to critique language ideologies of SAFE speakers that marginalize ASE speakers within cross-gendered and heteronormative interactions. Specifically, Rona B accomplishes this by quotatively enacting SAFE personas (who do not share her same understanding of ASE) and making them the punchline of her jokes. I analyze her comedy as a complex performative, or a collocation of acts that can constitute normative, alternative, or subversive subjectivities. Performances like stand-up also bring about new subjectivities, or transformation (Schechner Reference Schechner1985; Beeman Reference Beeman2010:129) on behalf of both the performer and the audience by encouraging new ideological identifications with previously marginalized sociolinguistic varieties through voicing. In the case of Rona B's performance, one sees how she invites them to identify with her gendered experience as an ASE speaker and how her deployment of multiple voices in the joke text alters prior comedic routines that make the ASE speaker and speech the object of humor.Footnote 2
Referential practice as a resource for placing an intersectional self in a deictic field in stand-up comedy
Example (1) comes from the opening of Rona B's routine, which follows her introduction by the house MC (not transcribed). As Scarpetta & Spagnolli (Reference Scarpetta and Spagnolli2009) discuss in their conversation analytic study of stand-up comedy, house MCs usually include in their introductions the name and other details of the comic, such as place of residence. Thus, the house MC's introduction in this example is intertextual with other house MC introductions and helps to categorize the style of the coming performance. The introduction also places responsibility upon the performer for a display of verbal art and makes her or him accountable to an audience via evaluation (Bauman Reference Bauman1977). Even though I am analyzing one of her stand-up performances, it is important to note that Rona B's opening is consistent across her other filmed routines. In this example, Rona B extends the MC's introduction and uses deixis, tense, lexical choice, and dialogic syntax to constitute her voice as that of an ‘angry bitch’.
(1) ‘Angry bitch’ (StutteringAwareness 00:00:00–00:00:34)Footnote 3
1 Audience: [((CLAPS))]
2 Rona B: [good?
3 good.]
4 I am,
5 the world's,
6 only,
7 female,
8 stuttering,
9 standup comic.
10 you can applaud there.
11 Audience: [((CLAPS))]
12 #: [woo:::::h.]
13 Rona B: [thank you.
14 thank you.]
15 I've had to overcome,
16 a lot in my life,
17 and it takes a great deal,
18 of courage,
19 to be up here,
20 if you stutter,
21 I'm an inspiration,
22 if you don't,
23 I'm just kind of an angry bitch.
24 Audience: [@1.1@]
25 Rona B: [and I'll] be playing the angry bitch card.
26 for this evening.
27 [uhm,
28 Audience: [@2.0@]
29 Rona B: @@@@]
In this clip, Rona B engages in self-referential practice to place herself in relation to her audience and the comedic industry as a broader field of cultural production (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1993). She does this by announcing herself, using present tense, as the “world's only female stuttering standup comic” (lines 4–9). Through her use of the quantifier “only” and adjective modifier “female” Rona B distinguishes herself from other comics within the stand-up circuit and from other male ASE comics (of which there is one on the international circuit). Note that she does not “stutter” (in her terms), or use multiple partial reduplication (in my terms) in this excerpt. Instead, she uses the first-person pronoun and present tense of the copula (“I am”) to explicitly constitute herself as an ASE speaker in the here and now. This is followed by her explicit beckoning for applause as a suggested appropriate second-pair part to this description (“You can applaud there”, line 10). Through this beckoning, she guides the audience to a particular kind of participation and reception of her performance. This is the only performance where Rona B explicitly scaffolds appropriate assessments to her talk by the audience. Thus, in this clip, audiences are not simply by-standers, but explicitly invited to be co-constructors of the event. Their responses allow for different moves to be made next by Rona B. After this instance in the performance, Rona B allows the audience participation to be more organic with less direct prompting for a particular kind of response.
Following the applause, Rona B invokes gender again through format tying (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1990) and dialogic syntax (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2010) in her utterance (lines 20–23), or the reusing of prior syntactic material to create resonance for the audience. So, while her first instance of doing gender is primarily about placing herself in relation to other comics in a broader community of professional comic artists, in this second instance, Rona B draws on gender to constitute herself in relation to the immediate co-present audience members. While format tying is often a characteristic across turns, Du Bois also observes that dialogic syntax is a phenomenon that can be produced by one speaker in the same turn across turn-construction units. To illustrate this, I have included a diagraph of the turn construction units of interest in (2) and (3).
(2) ‘Angry bitch’ (lines 20–23)
20 Rona B: if you stutter,
21 I'm an inspiration,
22 if you don't,
23 I'm just kind of an angry bitch.
(3) Diagraph of ‘Angry bitch’ (simplified)
Rona B: if you stutter , I'm an inspiration,
if you don't , I'm just kind of an angry bitch.
In the diagraph, one sees the parallel structure across Rona B's utterances according to the formula ‘If X, [then] Y’. In the first part of this utterance, “if you stutter, I'm an inspiration”, Rona B does not foreground gender in regard to the experience of ASE speakerhood. This implicitly suggests that gender is irrelevant to a shared experience among ASE speakers. In the second part, however, Rona B explicitly constitutes her voice as gendered through the noun phrase “angry bitch” (line 23) for those who “don't stutter”. Her use of “angry bitch” positions her gendered voice as countering stereotypical, essentialist language ideologies around white, middle-class heterosexual women's speech in the US as polite, rather than coarse. Thus, it is not just that she is a ‘bitch’, which for many speakers in the US would already index ‘anger’, but Rona B adds angry as a modifier that further intensifies this persona. As such, Rona B further aligns her comedic work with the discourse genre of the ‘female complaint’.
As she notes in line 25–26 through her use of future tense and progressive aspect, “And I'll be playing the angry bitch card for this evening”, Rona B intentionally projects her voice as ‘angry bitch’ in the performance to follow. This is not going to be a performance from the voice of an inspired ASE speaker on display. By choosing this lexical phrase for herself, Rona B engages in re-contextualization of the noun ‘bitch’ in addition to providing a ready-made frame of interpretation to her audience. This usage has intertextual links to gendered lyrics and titles such as Meredith Brooks' 1997 hit song ‘Bitch’ and Missy Misdemeanor Elliot's hit 1999 song ‘She's a bitch’, as well as the comedic work done by some comediennes who portray themselves as complainers to critique stereotypical and implicitly racialized normative femininities (see Auslander Reference Auslander, Hart and Phelan1993). Rona B specifies her use of the ‘bitch comedienne’ personae to critique the experience of sociolinguistic marginality associated with ASE speech and its broader intersections with gendered ways of being in the world.
As part of an intertextually linked series of performances in popular culture, Rona B participates in this broader project of reproducing and altering the word bitch as more of a space for empowerment for gendered ‘bad subjects’ (Althusser Reference Althusser1971; Kulick & Schieffelin Reference Kulick, Schieffelin and Duranti2004). This performative practice of reference and lexical choice attempts to bring about subjectivities that invoke and disrupt existing ideologies of gendered language. Moreover, her use of angry bitch as a self-referential noun phrase is highly political because of the historical, misogynistic use of the word bitch to insult and degrade women in male-authored cultural productions. In this sense, Rona B deploys political, gendered referential practice to place herself in relationship to her audience. She interrupts the hegemony of Standard American English speakers in stand-up comedy and draws attention to the intersections of gender privilege and sociolinguistic privilege in a predominantly male profession (see Auslander Reference Auslander, Hart and Phelan1993; Gilbert Reference Gilbert1997, Reference Gilbert2004; Willet, Willet, & Sherman Reference Willett, Willett and Sherman2012).
In this example, it could be argued that the intersectionality framework is not clearly applicable. Taking a strict transcript-level read, this example may appear to show Rona B attempting to utilize the same problematic strategy of invoking a universalizing discourse in which gender is irrelevant. It could also be argued that a more convincing example might be Rona B explicitly addressing this in her comedy by actively taking on ASE activists who speak on this issue. To understand this example as an intersectional act, however, one must go beyond the transcribed actions to the broader ethnographic context of ASE in the US. Within broader ASE speech communities that Rona B also actively participates in, this issue of male-centered discourse has been a growing concern. Some female members of the SOA formed a mini-meeting group at the national convention to address this issue. Yet Rona B is caught in an intersectional dilemma. Her challenge is to not undermine the sociolinguistic rights movement that members of ASE speech communities have created while also implicitly speaking to the internal and potentially tumultuous politics of diversity within such communities.
In this way, it is unlikely that Rona B would take an explicit stance against androcentric discourses in ASE speech communities as a part of her comedic routine. Rona B's use of intersectionality to challenge is more implicit here, relying on a complicated matrix of gendered and sexualized discourses that are often taken for granted as knowledge in ASE speech communities and not always relevant or known to people outside of these speech communities. This could also account for Rona B's underspecified use of the pronoun you in constituting her audience. This pronoun could be referring simultaneously to both ASE speakers and to women ASE speakers who often find themselves multiply marginalized. Such creation of ambiguity in texts is a strategy observed within oppressed groups to speak back to multiple regimes of power while appearing to uphold dominant ideologies (see Hanks Reference Hanks1986).Footnote 4
In sum, example (1) illustrates how Rona B aligns her personae and voice with the genre of the ‘female complaint’, which is often used by comediennes such as Roseanne Barr and Kate Clinton to contest normative gendered and sexualized ideologies of embodiment. Specifically, Rona B strategically uses the female complaint to critique the pathological language ideologies of sociolinguistic variation that restrict her participation in broader culture and society by marginalizing ASE as a legitimate variety. For Rona B, the comedic commentary on being a sociolinguistic minority cannot be divorced from gender, nor can her gender discrimination critique be removed from her lived experiences of sociolinguistic disenfranchisement. All of this becomes fused together through her adopting of the voice of the ‘angry bitch’. To analyze the introduction of her voice through a single-axis analysis (i.e. gender or language politics) would thus minimize the complexity of her invocation of the ‘angry bitch’, which speaks to the discrimination that comes from both political agendas.
Phonation type as caricature and critique of men's understandings of language aesthetics
Example (4) examines how Rona B, within the persona of the ‘bitch’ comedienne, uses variation in phonation type as part of constructed dialogue (Tannen Reference Tannen1989/2007) to perform stances vis-à-vis normative ideologies of language and gender through the issue of attractiveness. This example comes from a segment of her routine in which she performs a mock version of Marilyn Monroe's breathy, or whisper-like, phonation type that became indexical of sexiness and innocence. Phonation type refers to the qualities of voice that are produced through different states of the glottis, or vocal folds, such as creaky voice, whisper voice, falsetto, breathy voice, as well as regular modal voicing for conversation. Breathy voice is characterized by turbulent, noisy flow of air through the open glottis; very low muscular tension in the larynx; vibration of vocal folds but they do not meet completely; and high rate of air flow, producing a ‘sighing’ voice quality.Footnote 5
The story in which Rona B performs breathy voice phonation comes near the end of her performance. It is embedded in her larger narrative about her winning a middle-school election for student government, and her fear of stuttering while saying her own name during the inaugural ceremony. She narrates a male student attempting to give her advice about how to not stutter. She reports him saying that if she can say one word with similar letters, then she can switch them around and say her name. Her framing of his advice as unwarranted and bizarre provides a locally occasioned space for a series of stories from Rona B on the ‘bizarre’ advice-giving attempts that other non-ASE speakers have attempted with her.
In (4), Rona B notes that she, as an adult, was trying to explain to a man that stuttering has cognitive underpinnings. This framing underscores her language ideology of stuttering having a cognitive basis and also makes relevant her next interactive move around framing linguistic agency, or the human capacity to act within constraints (Ahearn Reference Ahearn and Duranti2001; see also Duranti Reference Duranti and Duranti2004:453), to pass for a SAFE speaker and align with language ideologies of standardness. In this way, this particular joke reproduces the deficit origin view, even though it relies on sociolinguistic understandings of codeswitching between varieties. To illustrate her point to the man in the story and also to the co-present audience of the performance, she draws on the story of Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe's breathy phonation type is argued to be a way that she intentionally manipulated her voice to cover up her stuttering.Footnote 6 Rona B enacts Marilyn Monroe's breathiness in order to first illustrate her point for the audience and then to do metalinguistic commentary.
(4) ‘Marilyn Monroe’ (StutteringAwareness 00:06:54–00:08:17)
395 Audience: [@2.1@]
396 Rona B: [#think about that.]
397 #: @@
398 Rona B: uhm,
399 @@
400 and my /fə–f–favorite/ thing that,
401 a fluent person ever /gai–gave/ me,
402 as, –
403 ai% – –
404 as advice,
405 I was trying to explain to him,
406 that,
407 /stʊ–st–st–s:tuttering/ is,
408 on the left /sə–side/ of your brain,
409 so when you use the right /sə–side/ of your brain,
410 then –
411 /th–then/ you don't /stə–stutter/,
412 like when you sing,
413 or when you use an accent or something,
414 and,
415 the example that I gave was,
416 Marilyn /Mə–mə–Monroe/.
417 did you guys know,
418 that she,
419 /stə–stuttered/?
420 #sh– – –
421 Audience: [#o:h]
422 #: [#wow]
423 Rona B: [she did.
424 she did.]
425 <VOX> that's,
426 why she talks like this,
427 cause when you talk like this,
428 you can,
429 trick your brain,
430 into not stuttering anymore. </VOX>
431 Audience: wo:w.
432 Rona B: ye:s.
433 this guy tells me,
434 I should talk like that all the time.
435 Audience: @1.7@
436 #: [((APPLAUSE))]
437 Rona B: [yeah.
438 I know.
439 I know.
440 <VOX> oh,]
441 because,
442 because,
443 talking like this,
444 I'll be taken much,
445 [more seriously,
446 Audience: [@1.0@]
447 Rona B: than if I stutter? </VOX>]
448 Audience: ((APPLAUSE))]
449 Rona B: so I told him I'd just,
450 rather /stə–stutter/.
451 so.
452 Audience: @1.4@
453 [((APPLAUSE))]
454 #: [woo:]
455 Rona B: [thank you.
456 thank you.]
457 it didn't go so well,
458 when I told him] that.
459 uhm,
460 @@@
Before completing the story of the conversation between the adult Rona B and the narrated adult interlocutor, Rona B suspends the narrative frame to elicit participation from the audience through a past-tense polarity question, or type-conforming yes/no interrogative (Raymond Reference Raymond, Drew, Raymond and Weinberg2006), and the second-person plural deictic phrase (“Did you guys know that she stuttered?”, lines 417–19). Through this question, Rona B checks the epistemic background of the audience. The audience members demonstrate their involvement in this action-in-interaction through the rising-falling intonation on “oh” (line 421 as a change-of-state token; Heritage Reference Heritage, Atkinson and Heritage1984) that indexes prior talk as new and as conditionally relevant in this sequence. One audience member also does an upgraded assessment of this change of state token through the multifunctional assessment “wow” (line 422), intertwining both epistemic and affective stance. Rona B displays an orientation to this change of state as well as intensifies her epistemic stance through repetition of her utterance (“She did”, lines 423–24).
In her explanation to the audience, Rona B does not actually quote any lines from Marilyn Monroe's films or interviews. Instead, she re-animates the breathy phonation type that Monroe is identified with (lines 425–30) and uses deictics (“like this” in lines 426, 427 and “like that” in line 434) to refer back to this voicing strategy. Rona B's gestures, particularly her hair sways, intensify the vocally enacted persona of the innocent and dumb blonde type that Monroe popularized. The occurrence of the phonation type in this part of the performance supports Podesva's (Reference Podesva, Cathcart, Chen, Finley, Kang, Sandy and Stickles2013:431–32) argument that most nonmodal phonation types, such as breathy voice, are found in instances of constructed dialogue that entail a shift in footing (Goffman Reference Goffman1981) and can also be a means of conveying stance, particularly negative affective stance in this case. After the first re-voicing of Monroe, Rona B takes the audience back to the narrative present (“tells”, line 433) by quoting her male interlocutor's appraisal of that phonation type as more desirable than Rona's standard ASE speaking voice (lines 433–34). This elicits laughter and applause from the audience (line 435–36). Afterwards, Rona B repeats her performance (lines 440–47) to underscore a metalinguistic stance that using the phonation type of Marilyn Monroe undercuts her seriousness as a female ASE speaker.
Throughout this example, one sees how Rona B takes a stance on particular images of linguistic hygiene (Cameron Reference Cameron1995) that frame her intersecting experiences as a white, middle-class woman and as an ASE speaker. Cameron (Reference Cameron1995:166–211) notes how business training seminars focus on fixing stereotypical constructs of women's speaking styles, which are presented as inadequate for success in the corporate world because they are presumed to index insecurity and lack of confidence. In a similar vein, ASE speakers are often targets of another kind of linguistic hygiene, be it homemade folk remedies or formal speech therapy programs that treat their speech as problematic. While not narrating a formal training seminar, Rona B's story highlights a micro-version of this multiply marginalizing space in everyday life. Her narrated male interlocutor's re-animated words position her vernacular ASE voice as problematic within a heteronormative and gendered frame. The joke also highlights and challenges the language ideology that sociolinguistic sexiness is incompatible with epistemic stances of certainty about one's utterances.
In this re-enactment, the male interlocutor of the story uses the deontic modal “should” (line 434) as a mitigated directive towards Rona B for how she must speak to achieve the ‘right’ kind of attention. The performance is gendered because of how Rona B connects Monroe's breathiness to a version of white femininity. Rona B expresses her outright rejection of the use of the Monroe phonation type in favor of her ‘own’ ASE voice (line 449–50). In this way, she opposes discourses of gendered sociolinguistic assimilation for desirability. Rona B critiques her male interlocutor's idea that gender subordination would be a desired alternative to open ASE speakerhood. In short, Rona B uses quoted speech, with emphasis on phonation, to co-construct a performance with the audience that speaks against a sociolinguistic and gendered hegemony around beauty, including aural desire. Indeed, while Monroe ‘lost’ ASE for comedic appeal, Rona B capitalizes on her ASE competency to gain acceptance in comedy without making her speech the focus of the joke.
As observed in this joke and her multiple other routines not discussed here, Rona B is not necessarily legitimizing ASE as a sociolinguistic variety. In fact, her comedy explicitly endorses a relatively neurocentric perspective, which is consistent with a pathologizing approach to ASE that does not threaten hegemonic views of standardness directly. What makes this routine powerful is that instead of making herself (and her speech) the focus of the joke, she makes SAFE speakers the comedic targets. This way of legitimizing ASE is complex. While ASE is not meant to be laughed at in Rona B's routine, non-ASE speakers' reactions to it are, especially those from persons who identify themselves as SAFE speakers. This legitimizing project on the politics of heteroglossia cannot be divorced from her gender, nor can her critique of gender in the routine, as put forth by her evocation of Marilyn Monroe, be fully understood without reference to the sociolinguistic issues of standard/nonstandard varieties.
More broadly, this example complements and expands on sociophonetic research that foregrounds suprasegmental resources like voice quality as significant semiotic devices that combine with other grammatical and interactional devices to do identity work (e.g. Hay & Drager Reference Hay and Drager2007; Podesva Reference Podesva2007, Reference Podesva, Cathcart, Chen, Finley, Kang, Sandy and Stickles2013; Mendoza Denton Reference Mendoza-Denton2011). This analysis has thus shown how stand-up comics like Rona B use voice quality, particularly phonation type, as a resource for changing footings and taking simultaneous and mutually constitutive stances on SAFE, ASE, and gender. By focusing on intra-speaker variation, we can see how social actors in staged and everyday performances utilize nonreferential indexicality, or sociolinguistic features and tactics that implicitly point to rather than explicitly announce other identities at play, to critique both gender and language ideologies of standard/vernacular varieties through voice and embodiment. For multiply marginalized subjects like Rona B, a commentary on one ideology is a commentary on both/all. Rona B's routine draws attention to the lived reality that, for her, it is not simply a matter of standard/vernacular in framing her identity as an ASE speaker. Instead, her experience is complicated with intersecting ideologies of gendered language that are also a source of marginalization in broader social and cultural participation. In this case, mutual attention to both in an intersectional analysis allows scholars of heteroglossia within stand-up performance to see the richness of this routine.
CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
In complicating the concepts of heteroglossia and voicing through a focus on intra-categorical complexity in an analysis of stand-up comedy, this article has demonstrated how voicing strategies by multiply-marginalized comics can be used to critique power and normative participation in the sociolinguistic soundscape of the US. In the first example, I argued that Rona B's brief self-referential practice of explicitly invoking the ‘angry bitch’ persona allows her to align her comedic voice with those of other cultural producers within and beyond stand-up comedy who utilize the ‘female complaint’ as a genre. In this case, Rona B uses the ‘female complaint’ genre for addressing sociolinguistic discrimination towards female ASE speakers who often do not figure prominently in universalizing discourses on ASE experiences that assume a (white) male subjectivity as well as deliberations on sociolinguistic minorityhood that may not figure into discourses of gender discrimination. The second example demonstrated how Rona B uses different phonation types, another kind of sociolinguistic variation in juxtaposition to ASE, as a means of shifting footings and stances within her narrative critique of racialized and gendered language ideologies that pit SAFE and ASE against each other around ‘attractiveness’. With the audience as co-author, her performance does a radical inversion on the usual ‘possessive investments’ that social actors are socialized to partake in and benefit from in regards to prior comedic representations that encourage an allegiance to SAFE as ‘The Standard’.
Moreover, this study adds to our understandings of ASE as sociolinguistic variation through the use of performance data, complementing insights from surveys or researcher-prompted reports about actions-in-interaction. Rona B's deployment of heteroglossia in comedy highlights how her participation within the political economy in stand-up comedy and society, more generally, is restricted along intersecting lines of gender, race, sexuality, and language. I emphasize race, particularly ‘whiteness’, here, because, while Rona B does a gendered and sexualized critique, such a critique is also a figure against the normative background of whiteness, to which she herself even draws attention at certain parts of her other performances.Footnote 7 The performance frame also allows Rona B to turn the gaze back upon the regimes of power and privilege in everyday life and the workplace of stand-up. Her routine refuses to adhere to genderless ASE speakerhood by drawing on white (hetero)sexualized gender tropes, such as Marilyn Monroe. Thus, Rona B's performance complicates how racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics differentially shape ASE speakers' embodied experiences of institutional and interactional inequality. Her comedic critique of intersecting nodes of language and gender, however, carefully stays within the pathological view of stuttering, which still aligns, at least on the surface, with mainstream ideas that limit its realm of contestation. In this way, her comedy blends together both an intersectional critique with a conventional understanding of language difference that still reproduces pathological rationalizations of language.
This article represents a shift in research on stand-up comedy and other performances of verbal art on language variation. I suggest that more detail should be explicitly paid to intra-categorical complexity as both a limitation and a resource for performers to exploit in their attempts to challenge language ideologies. One never speaks on and with language variation solely as a comic, nor is the power of a comedian or comedienne equally distributed when intra-categorical complexity is taken into account. In this light, I extend the call from sociolinguistic scholars who have encouraged use of intersectionality in work on language variation to examine how multiply marginalized subjects provide new insights on language variation and change. This includes detail on constraints on what changes are possible in this historically contingent moment and how these constraints are experienced differentially in intersectional analyses.
By focusing on performance as a means of complementing analyses of everyday language variation of multiply marginalized subjects, this analysis also expands insights on the importance of staged performance in understanding language variation. As part of the investigation of understanding language variation and change, we can explore stand-up comedy to get at the further range of everyday language ideologies around heteroglossia and how it restricts participation in differential ways depending on who is involved. In doing so, we move beyond traditional categories that do not necessarily work in this contemporary moment to encapsulate the complexity of multiply marginalized subjects who are also verbal artists. In these cases, performers rarely speak as one or other identities potentially relevant for our analysis. Instead, we see them as always already coming with a multiplicative identity that contributes to their voice, restricting as well as enabling new modes of critiquing emergent, intersecting nodes of power.
APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS
Transcription conventions are based on Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2006) and Du Bois et al. (Reference Du Bois, Cumming, Schuetze-Coburn and Paolino1992).
- #:
unidentified speaker
- ,
end of intonation unit; continuing (fall-rise) intonation
- .
end of intonation unit; terminative (falling) intonation
- ?
end of intonation unit; appeal (rising) intonation
- –
self-interruption; break in word/sound abruptly cut off
- – –
cut off intonation unit
- word%
glottal stop or creak
- :
lag (prosodic lengthening)
- [ ]
overlap
- @
laughter per pulse
- @n.n@
continuous laughter over .5 seconds
- <VOX>word</VOX>
voice of another speaker
- ((WORD))
comments by analyst, including gestures
- #word
best guess from transcriber
- word
emphatic stress; increased amplitude
- /wo–wo–word/
multiple partial duplication; partial copies use IPA
