Why are they laughing? : the re-formulation of identity in Canadian stand-up comedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an ethnographic account of the world of Canadian stand-up comedy which explores the conflict and congruence between shifting identities, divided loyalties, private and public selves. Comedy is seen as a dance between the performers and audience members, symbolizing the everyday communicative experience of identity transmission. These identities are cultural, political, spatial and reflect popular values, beliefs, and shared knowledge. The process of this dance is both inclusive and exclusive--inclusive of those who share the dominant value system and exclusive of those at the margins who are not recognized as a part of the whole. Those who laugh, belong; laughter measures inclusion and exclusion. The sense of belonging resulting from inclusion and is linked to the metaphor of 'home' which ties into the cultural, social and geographical elements of a politicised identity. Paul Ricoeur's three levels of mimesis are used to explain identity formation of self and other. The research uncovers the love/hate duality of performance and mirrors the individual's need to be both who one is and whom others expect one to be . The comedic experience exposes the constant societal negotiation for control and the exchange of power. In the title 'Why are they laughing' they refers to both the performer(s) and the individual audience members which participate in comedy. Some laugh because comedy offers the opportunity to reinvent and express oneself. However, not all laughter is joyful, and not everyone is laughing.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".