What It Is to Perform , Not Tell , Jokes: Toward a Manifesto of Stand-Up Research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This essay makes a case for studying stand-up comedy with theatre analytical tools by highlighting its performative nature and discussing how body interactivities within its enactment produce meaning and humor beyond what comedians say. It provides an alternate reading of stand-up comedy to the prevalence of linguistic evaluations, which often conflate stand-up art with other comedic traditions that are not performed. I argue that such perspectives often downplay the co-participation of the audience and what comedians do with their bodies. Citing joke samples from three African diasporic comedians—Gina Yashere, Urzila Carlson, and Hoodo Hersi performing in the US, New Zealand, and Canada, respectively—I explore the use of the body, audience involvement, and other performed aspects from which hilarity is derived.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 it