Laughing behind bars: How stand-up comedy by people with lived experience of incarceration confronts and sustains stigma and marginalization

Abstract

Stand-up comedians provide insight into human positionalities, offer poignant social critiques, and can bring sensitive and uncomfortable subjects to the forefront of public discourse, including discussions around mental illness. Historically, however, the industry has relied on the stigmatization and marginalization of Others. Jokes about criminality, arrests, and incarceration are widespread across stand-up and other entertainment mediums, though often narrowly focused on individual behavior; these jokes fail to account for the known correlates of crime, which include economic vulnerability, un- and under-employment, and mental illness. More often than not, this humour fails to account for underlying socio-political, historical, and structural forces linked to carceral inequities, such as heteropatriarchy, Eurocentrism, and the historic and ongoing impacts of colonialism, dispossession, and slavery on health, social and criminal justice inequities, including mental health. In this context, comedians with lived experience of incarceration offer unique perspectives into the prison industrial complex and the impacts of incarceration on mental health and wellbeing. In this paper, we explore the work of comedians with lived experience of incarceration, highlighting the ways that comedy provides opportunities to confront pervasive stereotypes around incarceration and mental illness, while industry norms continue to sustain stigma, homophobia, and neoliberalism, and obscure systemic forces linked to carceral inequities.

Keywords:

• Stand-up comedy
• mental health
• mental illness
• stigma
• incarceration
• prison
• storytelling
• destigmatization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelsey Timler

Kelsey Timler is a settler and PhD student in the University of British Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Studies program, where she works on a number of Participatory Action Research projects in partnership with people who are or have been incarcerated, with the ultimate goal of supporting the health, wellbeing and dignity of those unjustly burdened by the carceral state. She believes in the power of food to bring people together, and the strength of storytelling to empower, disrupt, and dream. She lives on the unceded and occupied territories of the Stó:lō First Nation in British Columbia, Canada. [email protected]

Marcela Jordão Villaça

Marcela Jordão Villaça is an immigrant-settler on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences from Quest University Canada and uses her background in Restorative Justice to push communities and education systems away from a model of conflict and competition and towards equity, accessibility, and global peace. Outside work, she makes art, grows vegetables, and makes space for what feels important.