Disorganizing Representation in Theatresports: A Case Study in Improv Comedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article offers a model of analyzing improv comedy by minoritarian improvisers that refuses to reduce the performance to being about race and gender. This work draws on critiques of identity and representation advanced by queer of color performance studies scholars to show how race and gender can matter in improv without their being the only aspects of significance. Examining a scene from Toronto’s fortieth anniversary of Theatresports, I highlight how the form of the “Dubbing Game”—where improvisers speak for one another—combines with the improvisers’ creative choices to produce a lively and laughable piece of improvised theatre. Exploring how the Dubbing Game separates voice from body shows how race and gender can be sensed as an event rather than strictly adhering to bodies. Through this exploration, I argue that part of what makes this dubbing scene funny is the disorganization of the representational logic. Importantly, disorganizing representational logic is only part of the scene’s comedy. This article shows the many ways that the scene’s comedy emerges through particular creative choices rather than from information about the “what is” of race and gender.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".