Persian comedy whispers out loud: a critical discourse analysis of Persian televised stand-up comedy

Abstract

This paper probes into the Iranian society through the ‘discourse access’ that Persian stand-up comedy provides. It is posited that Persian humorous discourse can be an effective and relatively safe communication toolkit to speak truth to power and address cultural deficits. Hence, it may be an insightful ‘point of entry’ into the below-the-surface construct of various social wrongs (e.g. social class inequality, cultural illiteracy). In particular, Persian stand-up comedy, as a young and burgeoning genre of Persian comedy, seems to be reliably reflecting such concerns in Iran. Within the general framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article inspected into a corpus of stand-up comedy performances by the Iranian participants of the first and largest televised stand-up comedy contest in Iran. The corpus included 11 stand-up comedians and 14 performances from the three seasons of the contest (2016–2022). The reflexive thematic analysis of the stand-up routines unmasked a wealth of social criticism which is discussed under four major themes of ‘economic stress’, ‘social class inequality’, ‘more equal decision-makers’ and, ‘agents of change’. The paper elaborates on Persian stand-up comedy as a potent driving force within the society to effect individual and social changes. It contends that Persian comedy can greatly contribute to discourses of awareness and transformation within the Iranian society.

Keywords:

• Persian stand-up comedy
• iranian society
• critical discourse analysis (CDA)
• persian comedy
• discourse of awareness
• post-revolutionary iran
• reflexive thematic analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mina Aghakhani on both personal and academic levels for her encouragement and also her assistance in the initial screening of the stand-up performances.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 At that time, diasporic Persian stand-up comedy was relatively more developed. Dual-nationality comedians or those grown up in exile (e.g. the USA, Britain, and Germany) performed before their small audience, almost entirely unknown to Iranians inside the country.

2 There were small discrepancies between the three seasons in terms of selection and administration of the contest. For the sake of brevity, such nuances are not detailed in the paper.

3 William Gibson (1948-present), the futuristic fiction writer who coined and popularized the term ‘cyberspace’ in his 1980s novels, asserts "the future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed".

4 This is an allusive reference to René Descartes, the prominent 16-17^{^th}century French philosopher, and his best-known philosophical principle, "je pense donc je suis’ (I think, therefore, I am).

5 Žižek (2006, p.137) points out that "the very way we perceive a problem [a social wrong] is an obstacle to its solution". He contends the "the questions themselves" should also be submitted to critical analysis.

6 A complex system, by definition, contains numerous interacting components which collectively produce certain effects. It manifests peculiar characteristics such as being sensitive to initial conditions, also being non-linear (i.e. predictably unpredictable), self-evolving, and greater than the sum of its parts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammad Ali Heidari-Shahreza

Dr. Mohammad Ali Heidari-Shahreza is a university professor, an applied linguist and a humour researcher. He has carried out extensive research on Persian humour particularly Iranian stand-up comedy from CDA and sociolinguistic perspectives. His studies have appeared in numerous, high-quality journals such as Humour: International Journal of Humour Research (De Gruyter), Gender Issues (Springer), International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Wiley), Society (Springer), TESOL Journal (Wiley), European Journal of Humour Research (ISHS), Adult Learning (SAGE) and Australian Journal of Environmental Education (Cambridge University Press). Besides several single-authored books, he has contributed invited chapters to edited monographs published by Routledge, Springer, Rowman and Littlefield, etc.