Since the mid-twentieth century, stand-up comedians have increasingly tended to build their acts around their perspective on the world, arguably making the art form they practise inherently political. This short book’s great value is that it focuses on a question that naturally arises from this, that of ‘the intention of jokes and their effects in the world’ (p. 1). The authors discuss this particularly in relation to how comedians’ work can now be plucked from its original context and placed online via streaming services and social media, often changing its meaning and creating controversy. Thus ‘these changes have unsettled the (never truly stable) relationship between comic performance and public speech’ (p. 3).

This makes for a highly topical read, but the historical background to the debates about persona and comic licence is not ignored. The chapter on persona includes a fascinating section on the origin of this concept, starting with Hobbes’s definition and tracing its development through literary examples before taking the reader through the origins of stand-up in the comic speeches of Artemus Ward, through vaudeville and into the ‘activist comedians’ of the 1950s and 1960s who established the world-view-focused style that dominates today. Alongside the varied range of anglophone examples analysed in detail (Stewart Lee, Hannah Gadsby, Sarah Silverman, Hasan Minaj, Dave Chappelle), there are also lucid passages on important historical examples like Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory.

The analysis is informed by good knowledge of the growing body of academic research on stand-up comedy and makes a series of valuable and convincing points in the well-chosen case studies. Thus Bruce’s legal difficulties are used to demonstrate that, ‘When removed from a mutually consensual performance context and divorced from his persona, the conditions for comic licence dissolve’ (p. 28). The way that controversial gags from Sarah Silverman’s act have been weaponized against her to undermine her political activism yields another important insight – that while stand-up ‘is often political, it is not political speech and it is a category error to approach it as such’ (p. 29).

Occasionally, the analysis left me with further questions. In particular, a Dave Chappelle routine which ‘makes light of the Holocaust’ is considered, leading to the conclusion that the analogy he uses ‘gives him the barest of covers, but just enough’ (p. 33). This made me wonder, enough for whom? Enough for the audience in the room while Chappelle was performing? Enough for the audience streaming the show on Netflix or happening across the clip on TikTok? That said, these questions are implicitly addressed shortly afterwards when Chappelle’s assumption of comic licence based on persona ‘maintained in the club by a consenting audience who accepted it as “make-believe”’ is questioned in the current context where stand-up is ‘pressed into new media and forms that flatten and distort its art’ (p. 33).

What makes this book so engaging is not just the quality of its analysis but also its topicality. This is highlighted by the fact that it ends with a recent example, giving a pleasingly thoughtful account of why Hannah Gadsby dropped their Banana Palace show trialled in December 2023, and instead presented a new show, Woof, at the 2024 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Comedy and Controversy makes an excellent job of providing the latest contribution to a growing debate about the meaning of stand-up and its effect on the world, by considering not just the performance but also how it spills out into wider debates, including comedians critiquing each other’s work. In a world where culture wars continue to rage, that debate is set to continue into the foreseeable future, among comedians as much as academics. I write this review a week after seeing Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, in which Lee’s response to what he sees as the bullying, transphobic routines performed by what he calls ‘sixty million dollar Netflix comedians’ – some of whom are analysed in Comedy and Controversy – is to dress up in an extravagantly ridiculous werewolf costume and perform a mocking imitation of them.