SK: Thanks for writing your paper, Lucy, and allowing us to discuss it. Before we do chat, can you give us a summary of the main ideas, please.

LOB: I wanted to write about a practice that strikes me as very weird, but highly significant: when they stand in front of a live audience, the stand-up comedian sometimes describes their failures, indeed they might belittle themselves. In doing this, they are inviting us to laugh at them through an act of self-deprecation. My first reaction is to see this activity as a strange and extraordinary cultural artifact. After all, we think that some forms of belittling are harmful in some way. Yet in this case, we readily create and participate in the practice. This is my starting point: what a weird activity. What is its nature, purpose, and structure? Why would we do it? Why would we participate in it and encourage it? There are many ways of exploring the human condition, of course, but this one is both a common activity in some cultures, but also has a strange edge to it. Also, I am particularly interested in what it is like to produce and participate in this activity as a group, and in why it is that we seem to value work of this sort and see it as having social value.

SK: Thanks Lucy. That's great. That sets the scene really nicely. Graeme, why don't you come in first.

GAF: I think there is something very interesting and good about how you are approaching this. Often the traditional way of doing philosophy of humour (or comedy) is to get straight into the business of definition and taxonomy. We are working out what we are doing simply by working out what category a thing falls under. In the case of humour (and comedy, perhaps), we work out whether it fits with the incongruity theory (and what form of incongruity it takes), or the superiority theory, or whatever. We look at the phenomenon (or the types of the phenomenon) and define the hell out of it. We might even think about necessary and sufficient conditions. I think that that type of project is quite boring, certainly when it comes to comedy.

You're doing something different from that. You have identified an extraordinary cultural artifact and then try to reconstruct it rationally and by doing so show us its distinctive value. Indeed, you are assuming it has value and then try to make sense of that value and the artifact itself.

I was struck reading your paper that you give us quite a range of activities in order to go about that rational reconstruction. It builds to an overall description that is rich. Also, the title itself – ‘priests of the absurd’ – is quite literary as is your style of expression. I suppose I simply want you to reflect on the methodology you have adopted for a moment and say more about it.

LOB: So, I think there are two questions here. First, let's think about methodology. Which methods are available to a philosopher? Very often, I find, philosophers don't ask questions about human activity in general: ‘What are we doing when we do X?’ questions. Or at least they ask and answer such questions in a way that misses out things that can be revealing. Instead, they ask questions about concepts or about speech acts, ‘What concept can be applied to this action?’. Or they ask, in some narrow fashion, which category of speech act does this action falls under. I am very sensitive to this tradition, of course. Yet, within the task of identifying what someone is doing or saying there is room for thinking in a broader way about human action, and for bringing different tools and perspectives to bear to think about their context, and variety. What it is to identify the activity we are interested in is itself an important and delicate task. I want to do more than (simply) ask what we are doing with certain words, and I certainly didn't want to list necessary and sufficient conditions, or apply only timeworn philosophical categories. In this piece I wanted to describe a very special, and specific, sort of activity and context: the comedian is performing, they are in control of a public space with an audience, and they are aiming to elicit laughter. Starting from that, I think we can make progress by talking through examples, and giving detail to actual instances of such an activity – rather than imposing familiar theoretical categories. This method has more chance, I think, of helping us see how weird yet familiar to us this activity is, and making sense of what it is and why we value it.

Second, there is the question about the style I adopt in approaching this topic. I would like to hear what Rosie thinks about this as a non-philosopher; to hear how dry, or otherwise, my approach seems to her! But I certainly didn't want to approach this topic in a typical, dry manner, listing conditions in a technical or semi-technical way. I did want to write in a way that appealed to practitioners, and that would be accessible to them. I wanted to use comedians' words, partly because they are funnier than me, and partly because they can get at the nub sometimes better than a philosopher; they are practicing and thinking about this stuff for lots of the time, after all.

GAF: And I take it that you don't think there is a tension there, and even that the two can complement each other: good philosophy doesn't have to be technical and carry with it the appearance (to some readers) of dryness.

LOB: Yes, absolutely.

GAF: Me too. But there are some academics and philosophers who are suspicious of that. There is a concern that we need to go in for what some people will think of as being dry or technical or highly structured language in order to get our thinking clear and settled. Otherwise, we let in too much ambiguity or sloppiness of thinking. Certainly, any rhetorical flourishes muddy things and levity of tone suggests that we are not taking the subject matter seriously enough.

LOB: We do have a burden as philosophers to keep track of our vocabulary. A good argument depends on using the same word with the same meaning throughout. One does carry a risk if one deviates from that: using many similar words, introducing metaphors, and so on, can lead to confusion. So, there are good reasons for writing and speaking as philosophers often do. But here I am doing something a bit different. First, my task is more descriptive than argumentative. I am trying to invoke recognition, and get a grasp on the type of activity I want us to be thinking about in the first place. Also, I am trying to connect with the mind of the reader, including people who aren't used to reading typical academic philosophy.

SK: Thanks both of you. Rosie, any thoughts from you?

RW: So, first, a quick comment that follows on from what you have been discussing. I really liked the style and appreciated how accessible it was, so thank you.

The main thing that I want to respond to is this idea of failure and the idea of reclaiming it. I think that is really significant. I find that in the UK at present, many newer and younger circuit comedians want to be on television, radio, or on social media of some form. And they might be having their personal troubles, of course. But many comedians of my generation, certainly those I was around, started to perform mainly because they were trying to reclaim some sense of experience that can be framed (at least by some) as failure: divorce, bereavement, losing jobs in dramatic circumstances, and so on. Many performers I knew felt they didn't fit into ‘normal’ society and ‘normal’ workplaces for some reason. (Perhaps some had an undiagnosed form of neurodiversity.) So, I am interested in how we might further understand this idea of failure.

There is one form of failure that is performed as comedy that points out the performer's flaws and foibles, but it is comfortable, a type of ‘safe slapstick’. In my early comedy I used to have a bit where I was skint. I went to the gym a lot but only because I had many free membership trials at different gyms. The piece was building around that – imagining ‘Wanted’ posters with my face on – and funny things that would happen at these gyms since I wasn't very fit. So that is one sort of failure. But there is a significantly different form of failure that can be performed, where one is tapping into something that is highly vulnerable and core to one's identity. For me that was finding a forum to express being a gay woman openly, at a time when things were not as progressive as they are now. Indeed, I think back to some of my performances and how I was pitching things. I wonder whether I was complicit in acts of homophobia, making light of my sexuality. I remember one time, for example, the MC introduced me as a lesbian and said, ‘But don't worry, she's still quite attractive’. When I was younger and starting out, I would play along with this type of set-up, as comedians often do with their Intro anyway. So, I would typically say to a man in the audience, ‘Oh, you're holding on to your girlfriend a little tighter now, sir’, or something. (I am now turning this type of experience into a novel.)

Now, I don't think of my sexuality as a failure, at all, to be clear. But some people would have judged me, and it is certainly something others would have thought of in a negative or very different fashion. I tried to frame it in a celebratory way to find the common bond between us all, whilst still making light of it. For example, I would tell stories about coming out to my mother. She would read out lesbian poetry to me and confess how close she had been to her friend Joan. That sort of thing. That is slightly different from the ‘gym failure’ I just described since it is closer to my (and others’) core identity. Further to this case, there are gigs and performances where there are different sorts of tension, with more uncomfortable stories and feelings. The sort of thing that Hannah Gadsby does in her Nanette (Gadsby, Reference Hannah2018) perhaps, or, the type of performance, now familiar on the circuit, of people fully exposing issues and failures about their illnesses or relationships.

So, I think it is worth us dwelling on the type of failure you have in mind, Lucy.

Further to this, I just wanted to pause on the quotation from Simon Amstell and what he says about shame. I just think it is a strange thing to use the audience as a barometer here; they would seem to me to be unreliable. It got me thinking about another important aspect of your account to bring out, Lucy. Amstell is successful and well known. He is used to commanding a room. Perhaps he can afford people making a judgement about him and even walking out. But there is a world of difference between that and a comedian who is just starting out or someone who is an amateur with little exposure. Making yourself out as a failure in that context can both feel different as a performer and perhaps is different when it comes to the performance itself. And that introduces this question. There seems to be a difference between failures that we know we are not ashamed of, or at least we are confident we can reclaim (such as my gym example), and cases of failure where we do feel ashamed or even are not sure and are letting others decide, live, as an audience.

GAF: That's a nice question, Rosie, at the end. Just to say I think there is a useful distinction that Lucy makes in a paper of hers (O'Brien, Reference O'Brien2020) between those things for which we rightly feel shame and those cases where we feel shame simply because others judge us in a certain way even if such judgements are not justified.

LOB: Yes, thanks Rosie. That is a really good question: what is meant by failure? I suppose in the paper I don't define it. Rather, I draw our attention to the comedian, as a person, often in charge of the room, standing there and giving an account of themselves. They are aiming to determine what counts as failure, and what type of failure it is. They may make themselves vulnerable – either by appearing silly or by revealing parts of their core identity; whatever they are exposing, they are inviting us to laugh at them for that. I find this very fact fascinating: how do we explain, simply, someone presenting themselves in this – in any – negative fashion, in a public performance where they invite us to laugh at them, and do it routinely as part of some cultural artifact? That alone is a puzzle, I think. But you are right that we can consider different forms of failure that are made into a comedy performance. The comedian is risking a great deal in your second type of case, when they are using and exposing parts of their core identity as the basis of their performance.

I suppose my first response here is that introducing this distinction – between silly and serious elements – only heightens the significance of my solution, or at least something like it. In order to make sense of how this specific form of activity could be entered into, encouraged, and welcomed, with the attendant risk, we have to assume that the comedian is, in part, doing something valuable on behalf of all of us, in the ways I indicate.

Now, I think that other point you raise, about the power of the practitioner, or the lack of it, is fascinating. Whilst recognising fully what you say about differences in power, I still think that even the comedian new to the circuit, or the amateur comedian – the performer with less power compared with other performers – still has some significant formal power. They are the ones at the front of the room, they are the ones with the mic. In some sense they are in charge of the room, and the next, say, twenty minutes. It's somewhat like being an inexperienced lecturer. They might not have much experience of performing in front of a class, but in a formal sense they are still in charge.

RW: Well, yes. But, the crucial difference is that the lecturer can't get gonged off!

LOB: True! But I suppose I am not focusing on that particular form of performance. In that type of set up, the performer does not have the formal power I am interested in. At least some of it is given to whomever is in charge of the gong. I am interested in the cases where we – be it society or the actual audience – are allowing and encouraging the performer to share their failures and vulnerabilities. Again, why would we do that?

GAF: So, I think you are right to some extent that the performer has a type of formal power, Lucy, but I think Rosie is right to get us thinking about the power dynamics in a live room. The performer, particularly in regular circuit gigs, has a matter of seconds to establish a certain power relationship where they have some measure of control over a room. If you miss that chance to establish power, it can be hard to recover. (There are certain other things to say here, about the difficulties of being a comedian who is not male, white, of a certain age, and so on.)

RW: Yes, I agree.

SK: Can I just pause and summarize where this line of thought has taken us, then. We all agree that Lucy has picked out a puzzling feature of a familiar, everyday type of stand-up comedy, namely: it can sometimes be self-deprecating and expose the comedian's failures, which they invite an audience to laugh at, and which is routinely encouraged and celebrated. So, why do we do this? What I take it we are doing in response to Lucy's central issue is to say that when you think about it, the puzzle might deepen for two reasons. First, the more the comedian is serving up failure (or possible failure) that strikes at the core of their identity, the more they are therefore likely to be offering real and raw vulnerability of themselves as material for public laughter. Second, it might deepen in cases where they are less experienced or less established as a performer because they are then likely to have, or potentially have, less power in the room. They are encouraged to perform and that seems to make them, in this situation, even more vulnerable. Does this seem right?

LOB: Yes, I think that these are good interventions and ways to develop the central case. I just want to keep the central case, and puzzle, in view. So, I think that the puzzle remains even if the comedian has certain amounts of power, and even if they are not exposing certain core parts of their identity.

SK: Here is a new point that I think helps to develop the central case further in line with Rosie's thoughts. There are flickers in the paper of the distinction between reality and artifice. That matters in stand-up comedy which, let us not forget, is a type of theatre. The comedian, as you say Lucy, has a type of formal power. (That can be negated or undermined in various ways by the audience or other performers, as we have acknowledged.) As well as commanding the stage and standing with a mic, one type of power they have is what they reveal about themselves and how they do so. Indeed, that type of power and decision-making, both when they are preparing beforehand and performing in the moment, gets right to the heart of what you are talking about. The comedian is self-deprecating and revealing their failures. But they don't reveal everything. And how they reveal those failures, as Rosie indicates, can be very different in character. In short, they are giving us a fictionalized version of themselves, a fiction that they create and perform.

So that is worth bringing out explicitly, I think, as part of the rich description of the cultural artifact we are discussing. Similarly, we can add layers here. For example, depending on the comedian and even the generic style, some people in the audience will know or guess that what they are seeing is a fictionalized or highly fictionalized version of the comedian. I am just wondering if this adds to your picture or changes the dynamics of what you want to say, Lucy.

LOB: That's a really nice point. One of the things I want to say in the paper is that absurdities of the human condition always have to be explored in the particular. It is essentially a concrete first-person activity. So, it is distinctive of the kind of stand-up comedy that I am focusing on that someone is doing it in their own name. For that reason, I want (explicitly) to rule out character comedy here; it might be interesting, and related to what I want to consider, but it needs its own treatment, I think.

However, you are right, that even in the case that the comedian is doing something in their own name, they are, as you say, Simon, constructing a persona of sorts, to explore the comedic situation and to be the vehicle for the comedy. I think that what matters is something I think of as ‘deliberateness’. The comedian is deliberately inviting the audience to listen to their failures and laugh. We still get our puzzle if we are thinking about it whether the comedian is showing more or showing less of their ‘real’ self. We aren't talking about character, just different facets, or versions, of themselves failing. But do you think there was more of a problem, Simon?

SK: It's not that I thought there was an out-and-out problem, I just wanted to explore it more. Consider this idea, given we are talking about priests of the absurd. Compare stand-up comedy with testimonies in church, particular evangelical, charismatic churches. In the case of the comedians you are thinking about, Lucy, they are inviting us to laugh at failure. Testifiers are also expressing failure – perhaps they express a time they have sinned, or how they have suffered from some addiction – and are wanting some positive reaction. So, they have something broadly in common with the type of stand-up you have us focus on. But, the positive reaction that the testifier is looking for is not laughter. Instead, they are inviting others to do a range of other things: asking the congregation to lift them up, seeking their forgiveness, and so on. They might also simply be wanting to show the congregation how the Lord saved them. Despite this difference, I suspect that people who testify in this way are also creating personas, revealing parts of their history but not all of it. Perhaps there are some things they don't want to be shared in public. Perhaps they overemphasize some aspects of their experience to elicit the right sort of reaction. And so on.

So, to turn back to Rosie's distinction. In one general sense they are the same type of thing: a comedian revealing how they have failed to elicit laughter in a deliberate and public setting. And you are right to draw our attention to this as a puzzling and extraordinary cultural phenomenon, Lucy. But I do think there is something different about the two types of case that Rosie indicates. There is something different about the atmosphere, the laughter, the performance depending on whether I was just stupidly failing by routinely falling over gym equipment or ordering too many doughnuts that one time, and the case where I am revealing something core about my identity and how this might be viewed by some audiences as a form of failure (that is, a ‘failure’ to be ‘normal’). Think about the church testimony case again. Imagine we have two testifiers in the same service and that both are being sincere. One of them talks about how they were so very grateful that having driven around for ages, the Lord finally found them a parking space so they could do their Christmas shopping. The other expresses how terribly low they were because of some awful addiction they had and how this had wrecked their life, but that the Lord intervened and their life changed course. We would probably have a different reaction to these two cases. The same is true in the comedy cases and the distinction Rosie points us to. Both are valuable sorts of comedy performances, and both can be done well or badly. But they are distinct from one another, even if they both fulfil the general description you point to. And in both cases, we get different facets of the performer revealed, that speaks to my point a moment or so ago.

LOB: That's an excellent comparison, even if there are some differences. (The support the testifier gets is prima facie less troublesome than the laughter of an audience.)

But, one thing I am happy to agree on is that that there is something distinctively raw and important about those cases where the comedian is both in control, and yet heavily emotionally invested. (Whether they are working themselves up into a frenzy, or have got drunk before going on stage, or be genuinely upset, or whatever.) They seem to reveal more of themselves. The most interesting routines, of the general type I am pointing to, are those where the comedian transports us, the audience, into their reflections, and does so partly by not closing down their affective self – or ours. So, yes, I can embrace the distinction between the silly and the serious that Rosie gives us, and the one you point to with the church testifiers, Simon. It seems to me that when a comedian takes the risk of revealing a core part of themselves that they are emotionally invested in, and does so in public asking the audience or congregation to laugh, they both make it boldly manifest to the audience that they are in the business of genuine first-person reflection, and use the emotional aspects of their performance to carry the audience with them.

RW: Yes, I just want to say that some of the best gigs are ones where there is less distance between the reality and the comedian's persona, both from an audience's point of view and from the performer's. I had a gig once where I had just been dumped that day. The whole routine was about love and being in a relationship. I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to perform. But I went on and I was able to turn the material and be honest about what had happened that day. The audience were immediately on my side and I was able to deconstruct the material on the hoof. And it worked brilliantly! It could only have worked in that way at that moment. It was really powerful.

LOB: Good. So, what you bring out is that there is something distinctive about elements of spontaneity. I can see the value of that, especially in this context. I will have to consider more deeply how it affects things here, but it clearly will be important. The comedian is standing in for me, a member of the audience, but they need to be doing it in their own name, in a way that is authentic. A first thought is that spontaneity, lack of scripted rehearsal, emotionality, riskiness are markers of authenticity, of the comedian really giving of themselves. They add to the sense we have that what we are witnessing is something real.

GAF: I am reminded at this point of a talk I once heard Jane Heal give (subsequently published as Heal (Reference Heal2020)). She talked about how important the first-person plural is: we and us. It strikes me that when it comes to stand-up comedy, it is more effective when the performance is authentic, more closely authentic to the comedian themselves. And that might be a matter of not just being less fictionalized but of drawing out core aspects of the person's identity, as Rosie got us to start thinking about. In that way, the performer has a better chance of creating a ‘we/us’ with the audience. It is particularly effective when it is spontaneous. There is something special about us, now, in this moment. This singular performance could not have happened without us, the audience. As Rosie says, the very best gigs have this kind of electricity.

LOB: So, I recognize that. But we need to not lose sight of the fact that the core of that situation is the comedian themselves. They are the performer, and they choose whether to be authentic and how to be authentic, they are the ones being spontaneous. The audience are witnesses to this. They are not the co-producers of the content of the experience.

SK: Hmmmm. I think I will push back against that a bit, Lucy. So, of course, the comedian is the one with the mic. They are on the stage and they are deciding what words come out of their mouth, as well as deciding how much to reveal of themselves and how. Of course. But, in the type of gig we are thinking about now, so much of what the comedian decides to do and how to say what they say is a reaction to the audience: their laughter, their silences, perhaps the odd heckle or whatever. The type of gig we are imagining or remembering is so dependent on the comedian reading the room, and that in turn means that the room – the audience – is doing certain things. Willing the comedian on, encouraging, sympathizing, and so on. The audience isn't a passive witness, just as with a congregation in the charismatic church case. The testifier will be speaking and whipping up the congregation, but they themselves will respond to how the congregation reacts.

GAF: Yes, it is communion! (See Stanislavski, Reference Stanislavski and Hapgood1936/1980.) There is something where we are all together and the event or activity gets its value from a ‘collective we’.

LOB: Okay. There is clearly interaction involved in a live set, and the audience can play a critical part. But, can we agree that the comedian is still in the driving seat? They are the ones deciding how much to reveal of themselves, whether to be spontaneous and go ‘off-script’. Similarly, the priest is in charge when it comes to a literal act of communion, even if everyone is taking part. Just as the priest is the person leading us to a sense of the holy or the spiritual, so the comedian – those who give of themselves and indicate failure in the way I discuss – is the person leading us together to experience the absurdities of life.

SK: Yes, I think that is broadly right, Lucy. Of course, as you say, the individual particularities of each case will matter and affect how much they are in charge at the wheel. How experienced are they? What is the mood in the audience and the rest of the night? What is the tenor of the material, and so on. So, I think we can all agree that you have started us thinking about a very interesting aspect of certain forms of stand-up comedy, Lucy. What we have just started to investigate are the different facets of stand-up performance that can deepen or change the case, and how they can reveal more about what is puzzling about this cultural artifact. Lots more to think about! Let's leave it there, though, for now. Thanks very much for the paper, Lucy, and to everyone for your time and thoughts.