Negotiating the Line: Perceptions and Approach to Performing Stand-Up Comedy amid a PC Moral Panic

This dissertation examines how the linguistic, perception control strategy of political correctness (PC), driven by moral panic over free speech and incentivized by special interest groups and humor tastemakers, has imposed constraints on the social critiques made by stand-up comedians past and present. To explore historical changes in stand-up comedy before and after the implementation of PC in the late 1980s, this study’s methodological approach involves analyzing the different rhetorical strategies, performance tactics, and types of “politically incorrect” content found in the works, released between 1960 and 2019, of ten notable stand-up comedians. In addition, through in-depth interviews with current aspiring and established professional comics, this research investigates how factors, such as comedic identity, mediums and venues, and real-time feedback, influence negotiations between comics and audiences over the line between offensive and acceptable material today. It also examines comics’ perceptions of the influence of humor tastemakers and PC pressures on such negotiations and professional norms and practices. I argue that by restricting how and what comedians can and cannot joke about, PC constrains opportunities for received wisdom and conversations that may challenge ideological conformity, contest oppressive norms, and make the anxiety-inducing aspects of life less menacing.