Stand-up comedy as a hallmark of western culture

ABSTRACT

The article examines stand-up comedy in view of the symptoms of Western culture that constitute the environment in which this artistic expression has matured. These systems of Western culture include: 1) the world of spectacles, 2) the dialectic and current domination of comedy over tragedy in Western culture, 3) the cathartic sources of performing arts genres, 4) the cult of art and the artist in Western culture, including the stand-up artist, and the Greek category of hubris, and 5) the function and value of stand-up comedy in Western culture and “comedy” in “dividual societies”. To expound this comparative cultural approach, which is rarely applied to stand-up comedy, I draw upon selected cultural examples, such as the rituals of some Native American tribes (Cochiti, USA; and Kamëntšá, Colombia) along with their stand on art and ethics and contrapose this with the performance “Koniec świata” (“The End of the World”) by the Polish comedy group Stand-up Polska (autumn 2019). By setting these examples in the historical context of the genesis of stand-up comedy and the cultural context of the development of communities unburdened by the individualistic and “progressive” ambitions of Western culture, I argue the position that stand-up comedy, like the initial comedy genre, abides by the goal of moral perfecting.

KEYWORDS:

• Comedians
• spectacle
• comedy over tragedy
• cult of art
• dividual society

The article examines stand-up comedy in view of the symptoms of Western culture that constitute the environment in which this artistic expression has matured. These systems of Western culture include: 1) the world of spectacles, 2) the dialectic and current domination of comedy over tragedy in Western culture, 3) the cathartic sources of performing arts genres, 4) the cult of art and the artist in Western culture, including the stand-up artist, and the Greek category of hubris, and 5) the function and value of stand-up comedy in Western culture and “comedy” in “dividual societies”. To expound this comparative cultural approach, which is rarely applied to stand-up comedy, I draw upon selected cultural examples, such as the rituals of some Native American tribes (Cochiti, USA; and Kamëntšá, Colombia) along with their stand on art and ethics and contrapose this with the performance “Koniec świata” (“The End of the World”) by the Polish comedy group Stand-up Polska (autumn 2019). By setting these examples in the historical context of the genesis of stand-up comedy and the cultural context of the development of communities unburdened by the individualistic and “progressive” ambitions of Western culture, I argue the position that stand-up comedy, like the initial comedy genre, abides by the goal of moral perfecting.

I complement the existing theoretical accounts of stand-up comedy which predominantly focus on its constitutive feature of interactivity (Rutter 1997), the universal world of its audience (Mintz 1985), or the recipients’ comical feelings and expectations (Douglas 1999; Myers 2011), through examining stand-up comedy’s genetic factors. These factors being i) brought out by confronting selected features of Western culture with elements of other cultures (Douglas 1999; Koziski 1984; Chindoy Chindoy 2020), and ii) found in theoretical reflection on the genres of comedy and tragedy. Ultimately, I am not interested in “cross-cultural” studies of the technical features of the comedy genre as realized in comparable cultural areas (Gilmutdinova et al. 2016), or those implemented by non-Western cultural areas and scrutinized in intercultural analysis (Morris 2010). Rather, I explore the relationships that show up against the backdrop of strong cultural contrasts. This is why in Section 5 I contrast the worldview of some Native American tribes with the aims of some stand-up comedians and the vividly developed stand-up of Poland, a country rooted in Western culture, but only now, due to spending decades under a communist regime and thus turning to its own historical-communal past to sustain its identity, is abruptly excelling in Western individualism. As an example of these socio-cultural tendencies, I will cite the latest show of the largest stand-up group in Poland, Stand Up Poland.

Stand-up comedy and the marks of the western world

Turning to some specifics of Western culture, such as spectacle, provides useful insights for grasping performing arts in general and stand-up comedy in particular. Spectacle, as I understand it, is not a simple translation, cradle, or continuation of contemporary Western visual culture (T. Carlyle, N. Mirzoeff). For the purpose of presenting the status of theater in contemporary Western culture, Zbigniew Raszewski (1991), a historian of theater, presented a conceptual framework named “the S System” (after the Latin spectamus, spectatores). The S System, embracing a theory of spectacle, is understood as “a type of presence created by a situation in which a community finds itself” (Raszewski 1991, 12), a voluntary or forced presence, always temporary. Raszewski distinguished distracting and focusing systems, with the latter including polar and dynamic focusing systems which are employed when the division into non-commutative poles is the result of a sequence of unusual events. Systems are also: 1) open when intentionally played and planned, as during demonstrations or open events with a planned audience, 2) closed when viewers are undesirable for various reasons, and 3) seemingly closed when the intentional actions of the organizers tend to be closed (in the form of a scene employing the forth wall), and when the audience is desired to achieve this goal.

Theater, including comedy, exemplifies the last kind of system, but the whole genre of stand-up comedy would not fit here. Stand-up comedy maneuvers between all types of systems, although its necessary ground is the borderline between seemingly closed and open systems. This is because stand-up comedy, on the one hand, is part of a long tradition of performing arts implementing the principle of the so-called “fourth wall,” but on the other, it is constituted by a mechanism of interaction, thanks to which not only enables a specific sketch or performance to take place (motivated by applause or laughter) but also frames this kind of action within a given culture as a syncretic and inter-genre form of expression.¹

Stand-up comedy implements the most distinctive features of spectacle which, following Raszewski, I understand as a manifestation of the collective life that humans evoke to arouse the admiration of other people for one’s special skills, thus using the S System (Raszewski 1991, 35). This is unsurprising, as the essential feature of artists in the Western world, and rather inseparable from the profession of a Western artist, is “aroused admiration” as found in the form of loftiness (Greek ύβρις).

In deliberately arranged settings, organizers try to make a show similar to a catastrophe, with the catastrophe usually being caused by the activity of elements of nature. This similarity especially concerns the degree of tension that arises under the influence of fear concerning unexpected effects. Surprise is also a “natural” element of stand-up comedy, viewers arrive with a specific expectation of good, funny, entertainment, but every audience is diverse and reacts in different ways to the elements of a sketch. Not every viewer expects amusement at any price.

A feature of all spectacles, since Greek antiquity, has been their luxurious character. Everyday human life does not need any spectacles, today the collective life of many communities free of Western influence is dominated by forms of ceremony rather than by performances that require the participation of spectators. Under this Western influence, some indigenous North and South American communities have already largely suppressed the original tribal forms of expression. Nevertheless, it must be underscored that exceptionally restrained and resilient cultural groups still inhabit various places, for instance in New Mexico (USA) and Sibundoy Valley (Colombia). These facts remind the inhabitants of Western culture that no form of spectacle is an irreplaceable form of collective life, and that spectacle is not necessary for a given community to sustain harmonious interpersonal relations.

Spectacle as a luxury is specific to the expansive Western culture of modern societies. Stand-up comedy is part of this, though it may influence the values of social groups to some extent. Reevaluation of the roles of comedy, including stand-up, which exaggerate comedy’s importance, by almost all interested researchers and comics, as well as the classics of anthropology (M. Douglas), instantiates a certain trend in Western culture (scientific, artistic, and social) rather than the actual status and role of stand-up comedy in human collective life.²

There are two types of spectacles that intersect with each other, with this including 1) spectacles in which a result is important, such as sports competitions, and 2) spectacles in which the course of events alone determines value. The latter type of spectacles is subject to the verdict of the public, not a group of judges, and has a form of interpretation rather than a clear judgment. Thus, an ordering of types of spectacles emerges, going from those in which a judgment prevails, to those in which the interpretation of the audience is decisive and includes: 1) various types of contests (games, duels, competitions in terms of strength, cunning, or artistic ability), 2) displays (acrobatics, magic performances, dance presentations, clown acts, recitations) among which predominate soloists and their acts, and 3) performances which are subjected to the interpretation of the presented sequence of events (film, theater, television). Stand-up comedy is located at the borderline between the second and third group. On the one hand, after leaving a stand-up show one could witness comments like “That guy was the funniest one,” a judgment appropriate to the first group, but on the other hand, we are dealing with a clear situation of the non-identity of who delights us or offends us, or makes us laugh during a stand-up act, with what makes us laugh. This happens especially when a comic refers to her own experiences, acquaintances, or the facts of her own life. Comics often repeatedly do so by creating an impression of familiarity with viewers, which is necessary for basic interaction, but at the same time draws a thick line between the comic and the character they create on the stage.

The principle of non-identity is the basic criterion of theatrical performances, where we approve of an actor performing “ontological acrobatics” as exemplified by the quote, “while I am supposedly a Danish prince, I am supposedly not” (Raszewski 1991, 69). In stand-up comedy, we deal with a very flexible process of this same acrobatics. From the presented personal identity of a comic (often exaggerated), through animated mediation (when a comic plays someone else, two or more characters, or uses Brecht’s V-effect), up to complete non-identity, we deal with the creation, in the eyes of the viewer, of an autonomous character modeled on a theatrical one. All versions of acrobatics are possible even during one sketch. Considering this degree of flexibility, stand-up comedy is one of the richest forms of spectacle found in Western culture.

Stand-up comedy, through the key flexibility of a comic, fits especially into the two, mentioned at the beginning, forms of the S System: open activities—as when a spectacle is prepared with the intended participation of the audience, and seemingly closed activities—as when the fourth wall of theatrical illusion is arranged by the organizers, who expect the spectators to recognize this separation. Both systems, in different configurations, achieve different goals. Firstly, these systems establish and develop a thread of interaction, and secondly, these systems attempt to achieve the goal which is assigned to the social status of “risk taker” and subsequently is to “evoke admiration” (Raszewski 1991, 39) through the ability to create tension. Concerning the latter, in stand-up comedy, this is expressed (or released) through laughing.³

The risk taken by a comic is not lethal, but it exposes her to ridicule, mockery, and sometimes to rage, particularly that of the ridiculed. This is the risk of a warrior who has the chance to test the human endurance to criticism and may gain human laughter, relief, or perhaps a moment of reflection. Usually, the comic only gains applause for herself.

The dialectic and the dominance of comedy over tragedy in western culture

At present, I turn to outline another cultural field which determined the development of stand-up comedy. This is the phenomenon of the conceptual domination of comedy over tragedy in contemporary Western thought.

One of the speakers of the 2014 Berlin Symposium “Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre” intended to prove the superiority of youthful fun in the form of a performative experiment concerning the achievements of Jerzy Grotowski. The main argument assumed the superiority of distance and joke over the attitude of total commitment which was the determinant of the Laboratory Theater and the works of its creator. Unintended support for this position yielded another presentation, an interpretation of W. Shakespeare’s Storm (Trüstedt 2014) as embodying the idea of the genre variability of drama. Research and spectator experiences in Prague (November 2014) confirmed the social recognition and acceptance in many European circles of the idea of the superiority of comedy genres over tragic ones. For several years the fashions of various forms of comedy have also dynamically developed in Poland, with many thriving stand-up groups having been created, such as Stand-up Polska, as mentioned at the beginning.⁴

For us, as both participants and viewers, and due to the socio-political and cultural processes which have taken place in recent decades in Europe, the subsequent superiority of comedy over tragedy has been surprising. This triumph of comedy in Poland is particularly surprising, with Poland being the marching ground of the two most disastrous wars of the 20th century, and a witness to the iron curtain separation between the Western world and the Soviet dominated East. Perhaps this could be explained by almost half a century of forgetfulness and the generational change that alleviates tragic consequences. In art, this alleviation took the form of absurdity and the grotesque, artistic formulas concerning the inexplicable “human mystery” (G. Marcel).

The primacy of the status of comedy over the tragedy could also be explained by the domination of German philosophy in Europe and Hegel’s idealistic philosophy in particular. From Hegel emerged the cult of the idea of progress as the stages of the development of the spirit overcoming previous ones. Hegel conceived of culture as a stage in the development of the self-realizing spirit, who destroys the previous form:

“Here, then, we have the Spirit of this real world of culture, Spirit that is conscious of itself in its truth and in its Notion. […]. It is this absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought; it is pure culture. What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or the consciousness of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the noble and the ignoble consciousness), possess truth; on the contrary, all these moments become inverted, one changing into the other, and each is the opposite of itself” (Hegel 1977, 521, 316).

Hegel also emphasized the role of the self in achieving a higher form of existence:

“The self knows itself as actual only as a transcended self. Therefore, it is not constituted by the unity of consciousness of itself and the object; on the contrary, the object is, for the self, its negative” (Hegel 1977, 299).

However, for Hegel, like for Aristotle (Poetics II 1448), real comedy: “did not make fun of what was truly moral in the life of the Athenians, or of their genuine philosophy, true religious faith, and serious art” (Hegel 1975, 2, 1202). Comedy was subordinated to rational social goods, and the creators of comedy were to respect this bearing of art. Hegel, however, attributed self-consciousness with “real power,” “self-consciousness is and knows itself to be the real power of these spheres” (Hegel 1975, 2, 300), and forms of expression were hierarchized according to their dialectical level of self-awareness.

The dialectic of opposites and the idea of “Real Power of Self-Consciousness” significantly influenced thinking and everyday life of the Western world.⁵ The consequences thereof were particularly striking in the dimensions of rationalist philosophy, Western politics, social movements, and even in “the perception of reality by Western societies” (Kawalec 2017, 220).

Hegel conceptualized the progress from tragedy to comedy as dissolving the form of tragedy:

“In tragedy the individuals destroy themselves through the one-sidedness of their otherwise solid will and character, or they must resignedly accept what they had opposed even in a serious way. In comedy there comes before our contemplation, in the laughter in which the characters dissolve everything, including themselves, the victory of their own subjective personality which nevertheless persists self-assured. The general ground for comedy is therefore a world in which man as subject or person has made himself completely master of everything that counts to him otherwise as the essence of what he wills and accomplishes, a world whose aims are therefore self-destructive because they are unsubstantial” (Hegel 1975, 2, 1199) (my emphasis).

The influence of Hegel’s philosophy was so strong and broad in various fields of Western culture that Hegel’s thought also impacted the revolutionary ideology of progress, including political and artistic ideology. The presentations, mentioned at the beginning of this section, which argue in favor of the superiority of comedy genres over tragic ones, as well as the idea of the inevitability of revolutionary progress, are part of the post-Hegelian tradition, paving the way, as it seems, for the development of stand-up comedy. With Stand-up being a harmless and fun form of expression of self-awareness.

The cathartic sources of performing arts genres

Stand-up comedy is a descendant of the dramatic comedy genre in both artistic and social dimensions. Like tragedy and comedy, it has both mimetic and cathartic traits. Although the mimesis of the stand-up comedy is surely one of the key issues that deserves a separate study, here I focus on the uncommon attribution of cathartic value to comedy⁶ because I believe that the mention of even distant and significantly modified sources of the Greek choreia, such as varieties of dramatic species, can help identify the status and function of stand-up comedy in the Western world.

Of the many common elements of tragedy and comedy (Kawalec 2016, 8–9) and given the sources of stand-up comedy, we need to focus on: 1) understanding the purpose of a particular type of human action, and on 2) the implemented forms which specific tools and methods. The concepts of creator and recipient are also of great importance, but I will refer to them in the next section.

The most important contribution which exposes the roots of the comedy is the well-known work of Aristotle (2014). Few researchers, except for Amanda Morris (2010) and Andrea Greenbaum (Greenbaum 2009), bring out Aristotle in their examination of stand-up comedy. Both Morris and Greenbaum, however, focus on the rhetorical accomplishments of Aristotle and Isocrates, especially on “epideictic rhetoric,” referring to the effectiveness and accuracy of the contextual relationship between a speaker and listeners, with Morris focusing on the context of Native American stand-up comedy. Both academics argue that stand-up comedy is in fact a kind of rhetorical persuasion based on the idea of “ethos,” but not as how Aristotle understood the moral character of humans, but with the use of the Isocratean paradigm as talent, praxis, and theoria (Greenbaum 2009, 42), one can build a “comic authority,” “which establishes a speaker’s authority” (35) as well as the proper moment for a speaker’s interaction with listeners.

The ancient categories of rhetoric for Aristotle would not matter if not for their useful function in achieving the goal of shaping moral virtues. Thus, it seems that at least as important as the technical principles of rhetoric for explaining the sources of stand-up comedy are the elements of ethos in their original meaning, the moral formation of a comic (more in the next section), and the features of ancient comedy in the context of accomplished goals (Aristotle’s teleology).

One of the elements of comedy is the drawing of characters as they are, or as worse (Aristotle Poetics 1460 b 33). Earlier, however, Aristotle stated that comedy “is imitating inferior people, but not in the sense of all their vices, but only in terms of ridicule, which is part of ugliness” (1449 a 30). Therefore, it follows that Aristotle, noticing the complexity of the moral world of people, allocated different types of entertainment and leisure to various groups (Nicomachean Ethics 1128b). This thesis corresponds to the Isocratician paradigm, but Aristotle’s thought seems more important in the context of the theory of art, and especially in the purposes of a performative work, which Aristotle in Poetics described as an example of tragedy.

Used in art counter-examples concern not specific individuals but rather the defects that lead to morally unacceptable behavior. A comedy writer did not display the suffering of a character (pathos). Her direct goal was not to arouse pity and fear, but to improve the society by evoking laughter and by alleviating the consequences of wandering, as achieved through a double ending (Poetics 1453 and 35).

Emotions were for Aristotle a plane for educating humans and shaping their virtues. Therefore, an emotional-moral interpretation of the category of catharsis, the purpose of tragedy and also—in adequate forms—of comedy, seems to be the most appropriate in understanding the status of comedy and its social function. The purpose of catharsis in the context of the said interpretation is to shape someone through facing situations with the right emotional responses. Catharsis thus means educating emotions (Golden 1992) or emotional and intellectual cleansing (Post 1951) in the following sense: I now know how I should act and I will act in this way.

In comedy, however, there may also be a feeling of fear of ridicule (as mentioned in Section 1) and fear, as Aristotle wrote, disposes people to look for a way out” (Rhetoric 1382a-1383b). So, even if during a stand-up performance there is a feeling of anxiety, whether it is a comic in a situation of standard risk associated with her presentation or a recipient identifies with the fate of the characters described during a sketch, this feeling fulfills the same purpose as fear in tragedy, namely it leads to shaping the moral attitude of the creator and the recipient. Aristotle explains, “The ridiculous is associated with some mistake or painless and harmless disfigurement” (Poetics 1449a 35), but the ridiculous also perfects the spectator. In a stand-up comedy situation, tragic elements are transformed depending on the disposition (character) and attitude of the creator and the recipient and on the individual experience of the time needed to transform the matter of life into a matter of humor (Double 2017).

The cited elements of comedy show that the provenance of comedy is derived from the natural drive of man to represent reality as worse, “as it is,” or, as in the case of the tragedy, “as it should be.” Moreover, comedy is aimed at moral improvement and shapes virtues through warning and counter-examples. Such moralizing purposes were the only sensible vision given Aristotle’s view of the purposefulness of the world.⁷

The cult of art and artist in western culture and Greek Hubris

Discussing the purposefulness of a work makes no sense without reference to its creator. Therefore, to point to the specifics of the creator of stand-up comedy, it is valuable again to turn to the source, the texts of Aristotle, and point to those elements in Aristotle’s image of a comedian which were the sources of trends which shaped comedy. Many of these features have been modified, but knowledge of the source can help guide the direction of the development of stand-up comedy as well as the requirements of each person. This includes the requirements of the one who is to perform the function of a “comic authority” because to become specialized as a “comic authority” a person must meet the condition of being an “authority”.

Much has changed since ancient times. Above all, viewers rarely expect a comedian to be an authority. A viewer wants above all to be made to laugh. However, separating the humorous function from a laughing person from an ontological point of view is absurd, especially if we accept the initial thesis that a broadly understood environmental context (Douglas 1999; Mintz 1977) is the foundation of interaction. A simple demonstration of the inseparability of the humorous function from the comedian is provided by the example of a sketch during which the stand-up comic laughed at her own jokes, and this playful attitude made the jokes credible and aroused lively sympathy with the comedian.

How important was the performer during the birth of comedy? Who was she? What did she present and by what means? We can deduce answers to these questions not only from Aristotle’s Poetics, although the above-mentioned features constitute the skeleton of comedy’s creation,⁸ but above all from the ethical works of Aristotle, which in this context are rarely mentioned, and show clearly in which direction the forms of developed comedy in the Western culture were created. Aristotle’s ethical works also present to us the origins of other pertinent dimensions of our culture.

Aristotle, in describing different kinds of comedians, wrote:

“Those who carry humour to excess are thought to be vulgar buffoons, striving after humour at all costs, and aiming rather at raising a laugh than at saying what is becoming and at avoiding pain to the object of their fun; while those who can neither make a joke themselves nor put up with those who do are thought to be boorish and unpolished. But those who joke in a tasteful way are called ready-witted, which implies a sort of readiness to turn this way and that; […] The ridiculous side of things is not far to seek, however, and most people delight more than they should in amusement and in jestingly, and so even buffoons are called ready-witted because they are found attractive; but that they differ from the ready-witted man, and to no small extent, is clear from what has been said. To the middle state belongs also tact; it is the mark of a tactful man to say and listen to such things as befit a good and well-bred man […] The refined and well-bred man, therefore, will be as I have described, being as it were a law to himself. Such, then, is the man who observes the mean, whether he be called tactful or ready-witted. The buffoon, on the other hand, is the slave of his sense of humor, and spares neither himself nor others if he can raise a laugh, and says things none of which a man of refinement would say, and to some of which he would not even listen. (Nicomachean Ethics 1127b 36–1128b 5)

The three types of personalities in this perspective of comedy also represent three types of general personality—buffoons, the ready-witted, and the boorish. Aristotle emphasizes that many people are looking for the funny side of reality at all costs. As a consequence, they re-evaluate the phenomenon of laughter, and thus treat a laughing person as ready-witted. For the Stagirite, however, the difference is fundamental. The purpose of a buffoon is to make laughter, while ready-witted achieves his goal if, by laughing, the listener is perfected morally. The boorish person for Aristotle is unworthy of consideration, because only an engaged, flexible attitude has the opportunity to experience that “rest and wit are something essential in life” (Nicomachean Ethics 1128b).

Aristotle denies exaggeration in dress, gesture, and language (Nicomachean Ethics 1123a 22–27; 1127b 36–1128b 5), but appreciates the attitude of the “golden mean,” of virtue found in moderation. A ready-witted person is a man possessing virtues not only in the field of acting or any other profession, but has character traits which are revealed in everyday life situations that require appropriate conduct. Aristotle thus integrates the moral field with the professional field. A virtuous man is responsible and involved in improving himself and the whole community. He is virtuous, tactful, makes responsible decisions, and is trustworthy.

Unlike tactful people, buffoons are not virtuous, as their purpose is not moral improvement but amusement at all costs. Buffoons do not contribute to achieving catharsis, even the mild comedy, because this is not their goal. They become opaque to the plot and draw attention from the motives of characters’ actions. At the end of Poetics (1462 a), Aristotle criticizes actors for exaggeration, which is the opposite of tact and the virtue of the mean. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle calls the inventor without restraint (a virtue of truthfulness) a braggart, so too is the bold person who is eager to act, but when in reality retreats. In Eudemean Ethics, Aristotle uses this epithet for people without moderation in generosity and those without taste (e.g. those who spend excessive amounts of money without an adequate need (1108b 25–1233b 2–8)). A braggart is an unjust person who finds satisfaction in humiliating others, who harms others, undertakes risks for any profit, who violates native customs and habits, does not obey laws or rulers, lies, and cheats (On virtues and vices 1251 b).

In the context of the properties of the buffoon and braggart outlined by Aristotle, we can look at the comic slightly differently. This look was confirmed by the cited Raszewski when he pointed to the basic and necessary feature of the performer, the need for recognition, thus motivating the individual to take the risk of ridicule. This need pushes a person to an attitude of contumely, indignity, and affront. This is especially the case when humiliation and insults finds applause, which happens especially often in performances of standup comedy.

The presented diagnosis and assessment of the behavior of people deciding to be comedians deviates from all known studies on the topic, including the poetic and almost apotheosis expressed by Mary Douglas who writes about a joking person:

“Now we should turn to the role of the joker. He appears to be a privileged person who can say certain things in a certain way which confers immunity. […] we can see the appropriateness of the joker as ritual purifier. […] the joker who provokes the laughter is chosen to challenge the relevance of the dominant structure and to perform with immunity the act which wipes out the venial offence. […] Perhaps the joker should be classed as a kind of minor mystic […]. He exploits the symbol of creativity which is contained in a joke, for a joke implies that anything is possible” (Douglas 1999, 158–60)

The value of the attitude of the joking person in the above fragment of the anthropologist’s dissertation significantly differs from the style of Aristotle’s views regarding the status of the comedian. The British anthropologist Alfred Gell (1992) defines the contemporary exaggeration of the artist’s role and status as a “cult” of art and of artist which has replaced religious cults proper in the process of developing Western culture. A huge leap in the assessment of features and values may reveal a change that has taken place in Western culture, a change which could be operatively defined in relation to the role of a comedian. It is the change from a virtuous man to a superman enjoying mystical omniscience and the right to establish or even challenge (moral) norms. This path is not just the comedian’s route, the entire community of the Western world has passed through it, entering into the Hegelian dialectical process of the self-aware subject. Achievement of hubris (ύβρις) is characterized by a lack of responsibility for fundamental human affairs, as in the case of a joker, who is chosen “to perform with immunity the act which wipes out the venial offence” and is as in the case of Aristotle’s definitions a braggart, as he is eager to act, but when he finds himself in real danger, he retreats (Nicomachean Ethics 1116 a).

The function and value of stand-up comedy in western culture and “dividual societies”

Douglas, formulated the comedian’s apotheosis, taking into account Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of the release of tensions arising in the real world. The psychoanalytic interpretation was more appealing to Douglas as, “Freud’s approach is more complex because it allows that the relation of physical and moral could equally well be the other way round. What is crucial is that one accepted pattern is confronted by something else” (Douglas 1999, 150). She also took into account selected ethnographic interpretations that have almost empirically indisputable value today. There is no place here to argue with the specific examples cited in her dissertation, but I want to point out one more field that may be a thread that leads to an understanding of the phenomenon of stand-up comedy in the Western world. I focus primarily on the Western world, but I will cite two tribal practices, those of the Cochiti in New Mexico and those of the Kamëntšá tribe in Colombia. I will also use fragments of interviews that I conducted during fieldwork in New Mexico among the Taos, Santa Clara, and Laguna people. Even though the world of these people is centrally located in the Western world, and is most vulnerable to cultural destruction, some environments are extremely effective in defending against Western culture. The presented statements concern more fundamental issues than simply comic behavior, or stand-up comedy, but include statements that undermine theses that are bases of the Western world, such as conceptions of art, evil, beauty, and progress. I will also cite a contrasting example, the show “The End of the World”, as prepared by Stand-up Polska, a group of young Poles who have found a way of living in and enriching the Western society that is slowly forgetting its own past and the political and economic situation of some thirty years ago.⁹ A society that from the beginning of its existence has fallen between the Indigenous and Western worlds, currently “makes itself” a new neoliberal modern “mug,” as Witold Gombrowicz would call it (Gombrowicz 2012).

A common past experience

Nevertheless, I open with a case that connects both worlds and both experiences, the tribal world of America and the West and the destructive experiences of foreign invasion, with nations suffering at the hands of Germany in both cases. In 1876, one of the greatest Polish novelists Henryk Sienkiewicz came from Poland to the USA to establish a settlement of migrant artists from occupied (by Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) Poland. During his four-year stay he spent a lot of time traveling through the Western territories, but his stays among several shrinking tribes of Native Americans were a special experience. After returning from Santa Ana Mountain, he wrote a novel entitled Sachem about a circus performance in Antelope (Texas, US), a town founded in the 1860 s after the Native tribes were destroyed by new German settlers who came from the American settlement of Chiavatta. The performance was carried out by the only survivor of the German slaughter, the son of the tribal chief. He told the story of his tribe, and, at the end, sang a war song of revenge on the criminals, after which, in an atmosphere of terror, the kerosene lamps went out and the chief disappeared. German viewers waited with horror for the upcoming murderous act of announced revenge, but the Native returned with a hat, asking for payment for a successful performance. The survival of the audience, as an experience of catharsis, turned into the opposite. The maximum degree of released tension caused the Germans to begin to laugh and make fun of the spectacle they had just watched, and the threat of tribal revenge turned out to be not only an empty gesture, but an artistic step of increasing terror done to create a more effective and amusing work of art.

The above story, which was created as a documentation of the extermination of a Natives tribe and the consequences thereof in the form of the absolutely humiliating assimilation of the vanquished, and primarily as a documentation of a performative work carried out using techniques of “metamimesis” (Kershaw 2008, 2002; Author 2017), fundamentally brings the tribal and Western worlds closer together. While the performance of the spectacle 15 years after the slaughter of the settlement by the son of the exterminated tribe leader was done in order to amuse the spectators, who themselves were compatriots of the invaders, illustrates the role of time in the processing of private experiences. As discussed by Double, this displays the impact of environmental determinations, which themselves are so central in the process of performing arts, especially stand-up comedy. Similar environmental and historical conditions are frequent references of contemporary Native stand-up comedians, such as Howie Miller and Don Burnstick, whose goal is, “to change how we see ourselves, our nation, and how we talk and think about Native peoples” (Morris 2010, 39). Native stand-up comedians usually take the challenge of changing the attitudes of non-natives, and changing the perception of indigenous people, their civil rights, and customs. These goals are different from those practiced by teams from areas of Western culture, but the methods, as I will explain below, are similar.

Stand-up Poland—the modern western show

In the autumn of 2019, a team of the largest Polish Stand-up agency started to tour¹⁰ and presented a show entitled “The End of the World.” This act was a set of sketches on global ecological threats. The “Artists talk about disasters, diseases and war. The greatest dangers for humans, but also about the human race as the main contributor to the problems of the beloved Mother Earth.”¹¹ The show begins with a multimedia presentation narrating the human factor in a catastrophe at the end of the world. A universal and current topic. The following sketches present topics including space threats, new technologies, artificial intelligence, global warming, the refugee crisis, nutrition, war, and finally, species extinction.

Poles (and Europeans) are concerned about such topics, and as such nearly 500 people attended, mostly university students, salespeople, and managers, primarily aged between 25 to 425 and 45 years. The viewers laughed mostly at curses and profanity. The purpose of the show, according to announcements, was to inform the public that humans are the main threat to the world and to themselves. However, it is hard to resist the impression that while the topic was only an ornament, the form of the show had no intention of creating an atmosphere of tension. The main goal was to make the viewer laugh, and viewers’ verdicts after the show ranked the comics according to the criterion of being most funny. Through partaking in the show individually, comedians kept viewers’ attention on themselves. Hardly any discussion concerned interpretation or assessment of the main topic. It seems, therefore, that the Stand-up Polska agency earned considerable money on the route of the premiere show, and gained popularity among a specific group of recipients. All the while the title problem remained inconspicuous for most recipients.

New generations in countries that have been influenced by new trends of Western culture expect star performances, and the providing of entertainment tailored to their experience of the world. Antti Lindfors aptly captures the germaneness of stand-up comedy in such countries, claiming that stand-up, “exemplifies the selfindulgence of neoliberal Western mass-individualism” (Lindfors 2019, 1).

In concluding the above considerations regarding the historical and environmental conditions of performances, with the example of a new generation of Poles eagerly becoming participants of stand-up comedy, I will again refer to the cultural environment of some Native tribes of both North and South American. This time I will concern myself with personal experiences and the anthropological dimension omitted in interpretations of cross-cultural aesthetics. More precisely, I will deal with conceptions of the human being.

Contemporary native stand stand-up comedy and indigenous forms of community

Edifying studies on this topic by Morris (Morris 2017) focus on the communication practices of specific Native North American comics in relation to rhetoric. I appreciate the author’s interpretations of stand-up comedy and here indicated purpose, “These are more than just superficial comedic performances purely for entertainment or even for education. Native American stand-up comedy is an amalgamation of these objectives but also reaches beyond these boundaries into the realm of historical pain and contemporary lived realities. […] Native American stand-up comedy potentially functions as a resistance strategy for cultural survival and as a criticism of mainstream culture, politics, and beliefs about First Nations peoples” (Morris 2010, 38). However, I believe that these practices or the acts presented by Natives¹² are not a creation native to indigenous culture, but express, at least partially, the Native’s assimilation into the cultural area of the Western world when considering the cultural phenomenon of spectacles.¹³ For this reason, as material illustrating the contrast between the indigenous world view and the Western perception of reality, I will not accept the performances of Native people, but will refer to the source, the culturally and artistically unmodified statements of Native American representatives.

In the above-mentioned Native tribal cultures, both north and south, ceremonial forms of participation are indigenous. In this, there is no polarity, no division into creators and viewers. An observation more relevant for our interpretative thesis is that in tribal ceremonies, we do not deal with the activities of isolated individuals, who, moreover, expect applause and fame and risk ridicule. In both Native Americans ceremonies in which I am familiar with, the Corn Dance of the Cochiti Pueblo and the Dance of Forgiveness of the Kamëntšá tribe (called Betšknaté), all residents and invited guests participate. Even if someone does not dance directly, everyone participates in a common prayer for the human community and in a common meal at the guest house, with there being thanks for the gifts of Mother Earth and solemn supplications. Both ceremonies are associated with the gift of Mother Earth to people, which is corn. In addition, the ceremony among the Cochiti and Kamëntšá tribes connects human existence with society and is a celebration of forgiveness and life. The guiding voices and instruments are not individual, and create a common rhythm of human life in time with the rhythm of Mother Earth. The same interpretation of dance among the residents of the Santa Clara Pueblo (New Mexico) is confirmed in a conversation by me undertaken with Tony Chavarria.¹⁴ “When you are dancing, all the sound vibrates within you. Your body becomes one instrument among others, a part of the whole …. Our dances, songs, and prayers join us to our world … The chorus of voices blends with all these elements to make a song to heaven.”¹⁵ Individuality and loftiness are, in my opinion, exclusively Western characteristics. “A degenerate ritual is a spectacle,” as the creator of the Laboratorium Theater Jerzy Grotowski proclaimed.¹⁶

The dividual person and dividual societies

To conclude, I recall the reactions of representatives of some tribes from the New Mexico area, whose responses reveal a human life form of art, an alternative to our Western one. Paradoxically, for us, in contrast to Natives, Aristotle’s view of virtue may appear detached from our lived experience of art:

“In general it belongs to goodness to make the spirit’s dispositions virtuous, experiencing tranquil and ordered emotions and in harmony throughout all its parts. […] It also belongs to goodness to do good to the deserving and love the good and hate the wicked, and not to be eager to inflict punishment or take vengeance, but be gracious and kindly and forgiving. Goodness is accompanied by honesty, reasonableness, kindness, hopefulness, and also by such traits as love of home and of friends and comrades and guests, and of one’s fellow-men, and love of what is noble—all of which qualities are among those that are praised” (On virtues and vices, 1251 b 24–33).

Aristotle’s work is admittedly one of the roots of Western culture, but these beginnings have a universal humanistic value common to the all Native Americans, especially from the period when Natives had not yet experienced successive waves of invaders. “Experiencing tranquil and ordered emotions and in harmony throughout all its parts” is the purpose of ritual purification, called among the Kamëntšá yajé ritual, “kindly and forgiving.” It is the essence of dance of this tribe, it is the “love of home and of friends and comrades and guests.” It characterizes both the Betšknaté and the ritual of the “Blessing of the Fields & Corn” of the Cochiti Pueblo.

The fundamental value, which is a counterweight to the culture of “mass-individualism” is “community” or “solidarity.” This is the value that characterizes communities in which the individual does not focus on herself in the first place and does not subordinate her comfort and ideology to the progress of the value of other individuals. In anthropology the term “dividual person” was formed into such a concept of person (McKim 1976). This “dividuum” is manifested on many levels of the above mentioneabove-mentioned life of tribes, including their judgment of beauty, which was expressed by Edwin R. Leon of the Laguna people,¹⁷ “Beauty is in the nature […] Human being is good and beautiful.” Beauty is also identified as being in art, “The art is when I experience nature for herself, just for herself (not for her economic value),” “He who creates artefacts … serves others, transmitting beauty of nature.” On the other hand, Edwin said, “Ugly is man who undergoes his EGO, who wants more and more.” The same meaning of ugliness was expressed by a twenty-year-old resident of Taos named Jalen Kopepassah,¹⁸ “Ugliness is when someone is not good person”, and she added concerning relations with nature, “Mother Earth gave us Nature to look after. We are to guard her and look after her.” Jalen also clearly saw her own belongingness to her community and place, “If I had to live among other people, on another land, I would lose a part of myself. I would not be myself.” Similarly, when asked why her community (the Taos Pueblo) lived without electricity and other amenities, she replied that for a thousand years her tribe had lived this way, that is, that this way of life worked, time had verified this, so subsequently this form of life turns out to be good and the most appropriate for the Taos Pueblo.

Jalen’s last statement strongly collides with Hegel’s idea of development, the ideology of (technical) progress, and the conformism of the Western world. Today, there are many voices for asceticism and respect for the environment, including the authorities of NGOs and even the Pope Francis (Laudato si). One of these voices spoke of the diagnosis of Western culture and was made by the philosopher historian Prof. Stefan Swieżawski, “The development of sciences, technology and convenience has been paid for by unbelievably great price, because it led to the loss of wisdom and sapiential-moral values” (Swieżawski 1995, 182).

I claim that if the creators of individual stand-up comedy show neglect in considering the need to stress these wisdom and sapiential-moral values in their meetings with participants (or, following Grotowski, “witnesses”), as happened during the aforementioned performance by the Stand-up Poland! Group, and if they do not follow the principle elaborated upon by a senior member of the Kamëntšá tribe in his statements, “We should always be careful in what we tell ourselves” and “words of wisdom are as difficult to cultivate as corn in winter,”¹⁹ then the time of stand-up comedy may be much shorter than one would expect and the genre itself may bring about more harm than good to the Western community.

Conclusion

This article captures those fields of Western culture that are sources of stand-up comedy. In describing phenomena such as spectacle, dialectics, the current domination of comedy over tragedy, the cathartic sources of the performing arts, and the subsequent cult of the artist, I aimed at confronting the current stage of Western culture with its origins, showing the path of the changes it underwent. Statements by representatives of some indigenous communities of North and South America, though symbolic in scope, show an alternative to the Western way of thinking about humans and the consequences of their actions in the social world and the natural environment. One of the discussed forms of activity is stand-up comedy, which sharply reveals the current features of the Western world. These features include individualism and neoliberalism, or rather “mass-individualism,” which is an ideology of progress, that achieves individual goals at any price, which in the case of some stand-up comedy performances means causing laughter at the price of contempt for humanistic values, ecological values, and linguistic culture. The presented sources as well as the cross-cultural dimension of this work fulfill the function of the authors’ argument for the need for consistent inclusion of sapiential-moral values in stand-up comedy.

Acknowledgments

The project is funded by the Minister of Science and Higher Education within the program under the name ‘Regional Initiative of Excellence’ in 2019-2022, project number: 028/RID/2018/19, the amount of funding: 11 742 500 PLN.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Anna Kawalec

Anna Kawalec is professor of philosophy at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. A former visiting scholar at Brunel University, she holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of theatre and religion, and a Habilitation in cultural studies. She coordinates applied anthropology program.

Notes

1. Raszewski emphasizes, however, that in spectacular forms one cannot be both a spectator and a creator at the same time, but one can be a participant through their presence and intense or weak feedback. The same conclusion was the result of a sequence of trials by Jerzy Grotowski, whose experiments related to ritual in theater led to a conclusion on the status of the spectator as a witness (Grotowski 1990).

2. On how, for instance, the community of 18th century Geneva managed without this type of entertainment, perfectly replacing it with other forms of collective life, as J. J. Rousseau wrote to M. D’Alembert in a letter on spectacles.

3. This is symptomatic for sketch comedy, as when a comedian laughs at her own jokes. Moreover, she loudly assesses them as the best among other comics without a trace of irony or comedy. Such a presentation was rated as “the most funny” and a comic from “The End of the World” by Stand-Up Poland aroused the most laughter and sympathy among the audience. It seems that in some situations, a stand-up comedian laughing at their own jokes bridges the gap between the stage and the audience, the comedian assumes a status similar to the viewer and perhaps in this we are incidentally dealing with Aristotle’s principle of creating a dramatic character that in a tragedy was to achieve fear, which, along with pity, was to lead to catharsis.

4. https://stand-uppolska.pl/, accessed 13 November 2019.

5. Paul Giladi (2016) understands the concept of Hegel’s art in the context of “reflective aesthetics,” as a form of inquiry in the field of social and cultural normativity.

6. On catharsis in the general context of comedy see (Kawalec 2016), see also (Morris 2010).

7. An interesting gloss to this point is the position of Mika Suojanen (2016), who problematizes the value of aesthetic judgments in social relations, claiming that aesthetic judgments perform a demoralizing and oppressive function in relation to the subject of a judgment.

8. Aristotle, esp. in Poetics, often referred to “creators of comedy” (Kawalec 2016, 13).

9. On the role of memory and forgetfulness within a tribe, see (Chindoy Chindoy 2020). While concerning the transnational dimension, it is particularly interesting to analyze behavior in the context of European Union politicians working for localities and translocalities. See John Sundholm (2011).

10. For the list of “The End of the World” team comics see https://stand-uppolska.pl/.

11. Promotional material, https://www.ebilet.pl/widowiska/stand-up/wielka-trasa-stand-up-polska/, accessed 13 November 2019.

12. Such as Howie Miller, Don Burnstick, Jim Ruel, JR Redwater, the 1491 s, and Tatanka Means among others.

13. The phenomenon of assimilation to the conditions imposed on Natives by Westerners refers, in my opinion, to the form of stand-up comedy performances performed by North American Natives, as well as to the migration of reserve inhabitants to cities in which economically more favorable living conditions prevail. The view of the non-source nature of the stand-up comedy genre to North American Native culture is also presented by Morris, “While Native American comedians are trained and practiced in Western stand-up forms, they are adept at mediating between the worlds of indigenous experiences and Euramerican ignorance of the mess, mayhem, and trauma of our shared histories” (Morris 2010, 38).

14. Personal communication, 12 July 2019 at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.

15. This is a direct quote from “Here, now, and always—voices of Native People … from Exhibition in Museum of Indian Arts and Culture,” Santa Fe, Museum Hill. Tony Chavarria participated in the preparation of this exhibit.

16. This statement was recorded by Georges Banu and published as Performer.

17. Author interview, Laguna Pueblo, 5 July 2019.

18. Author interview, Taos Pueblo, 7 July 2019.

19. The words of the author’s grandfather (Chindoy Chindoy 2020).