Playing to the out-group: discovering stand-up comedy’s ‘other’ audiences
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
Until recently, live joke performances heavily relied on the physical co-presence of comedians and audiences. This mostly exclusive and bounded space facilitated in-group scenarios usually haunted by out-group persons who, though physically absent, are almost always present as joke subjects. More recently, with the advent of accelerated online dissemination, comedy’s ‘other audiences’ have become virtually and physically present and critically engaged in ways that were previously impossible. In this essay, we comparatively analyze Hoodo Hersi’s and Russell Peters’ stand-up routines to highlight the differences between pluralistic and monolithic understandings of audiences. We also underscore the strategic shift inherent in the expansion of the joking space, comedians’ awareness of potential decontextualization, and shifting sensibilities among audiences (Nwankwọ, ‘Shifting Cognitions’), which reject conventional in-group/out-group divisions and counteract the increasingly nebulous and difficult-to-pinpoint practice of ‘punching down’. Building on scholarships about how performers ‘cast’ audiences (Lynch) and how social media affects stand-up comedy (Nwankwọ, ‘Incongruous Liaisons’; ‘Punch up’), we demonstrate how recognition of and increased scrutiny by comedy’s ‘other audiences’ is altering the exclusivity of the stand-up space by infusing global and multicultural perspectives, and thus reshaping comedians’ construction of, and audience engagement with performed jokes.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 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 it