A STYLISTIC STUDY OF SELF-DEPRECATION IN AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY PERFORMANCES

Abstract

Self-deprecation is a type of humor when the speaker jokes about one’s own weaknesses, faults, deficiencies, or personal limitations. This research analyzes self-deprecating humor in selected speech data from the stand-up comedy performance of John Crist in his What Are We Doing? (2019) comedy special. It specifically aims to address these questions: what types of self-deprecating humor are featured in the chosen samples? What stylistic devices are used to construct self-deprecation? How do these stylistic devices contribute to humor and to the audience interaction? Thus, this study is aimed to determine the types of self-deprecating humor used by the comedian, and to investigate stylistic means that realize self-deprecating humor.

The study selected ten utterances of data derived from comedian John Crist’s comedy special What Are We Doing? (2019). This study applies a qualitative approach to stylistic analysis. It utilizes four types of self-deprecation as the basis of analysis along with the framework of Leech and Short (2007) in its stylistic analysis of lexical features, grammatical features, context and cohesion, and figures of speech. The results of this study show that the self-defeating type is the most dominant among the other three in the selected data. Meanwhile, the self-enhancing, the self-affiliative, and the self-referential types have the lowest frequency.

Furthermore, the result of the study demonstrates that the stand-up comics used simple and informal language, declarative sentences, and figures of speech such as irony, hyperbole and repetition to depict themselves as weak, inexperienced, unable, physically frail or morally corrupt. Based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that self-directed humor is used in comedy performances as a linguistic feature and a literary device to convey a message of a humorous personal weakness and imperfections through the medium of self-ridicule.