| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 105 === The four main functions of humor, a double-edged sword, are: identification, clarification, enforcement, differentiation (Meyer, 2000). While planning their performances, live stand-up comedians, to pursue laughter, tend to neglect the latter two functions of humor: enforcement and differentiation. This makes prejudices beneath punch lines to be rooted deeper, which are even more inevitable when comedians deal with gender and sexual orientation topics.
This study takes as examples stand-up comedies from Live Comedy Club Taipei and we choose performances that touch upon the gender and sexual orientation topics to conduct qualitative research. Based on the nature of the topics, we divide the performances selected into four categories: male, female, gay, and lesbian. We take the three main theories of humor, namely, superiority theories, incongruity theories, and relief theories, and also Humor in Freud as our basis to analyze these performances. We set out to explore the following questions. Is there a connection between the way humor is delivered and the specific topic of humor? Are the underlying prejudices in these four major topics against the target group as a whole or a specific sub-group? Most important of all, what lies beneath these prejudices, and what damage do they cause? Through interpreting how humor comes into existence, we aim to reveal the gender and sexual orientation prejudices in humor, and further reflect upon such phenomena.
The result shows, in terms of the four topics, how humor is delivered is more relevant to the gender of the comedian. Male comedians favor the superiority strategy and tendentious jokes, while female comedians tend to use the strategies of incongruity and descending incongruity of relief strategy. In male topics, male comedians seem to target specific subgroups of males, while their performances are in fact based on prejudices against women rooted in patriarchy. If male comedians want to degrade males in higher position, the most common way for them to do so is to insinuate the homosexuality of the target. This suggests that male comedians degrade homosexual men and view them as incompetents. Female comedians' attacks on males are weaker due to patriarchy, in which males are in higher positions and females in lower ones. In female topics, male comedians attack women on their appearance or figure, isolate these characteristics from women's entity, and evaluate females by parts. Since male comedians say what the audience dares not to say aloud, they can escape blame, as suggested by the Relief Theory. Performances against specific groups of women by male comedians reflect not only social stereotypes but also misogyny from patriarchy. Besides prejudices from male comedians, even female comedians may fall into the patriarchy trap as well while trying to identify and clarify themselves, which are two of humor’s functions (Meyer, 2000). Female comedians are in a dilemma due to the higher position of men in patriarchy. If female comedians voice for females by attacking males and thus rebel against patriarchy, consequences are that they may lose laughter from the audience. The discrimination between unmarried men and unmarried women appears while a female comedian mentions her marital status. Compared to unmarried men, unmarried women are more easily to be seen as deficient, which reflects that under the expectation from patriarchy, women are expected to get married and form a family at the proper ages. In gay topics, a recurrent theme from the male comedians’ performances is that gay are born to be feminine and confuses gender with sexual orientation. This also shows that under patriarchy, gay and femininity are mistakes that can be laughed at. In lesbian topics, the female comedian also shows the stereotype that lesbians are born to be masculine, and reflects the dilemma for homosexuals to come out under the world of heterosexuals.
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