Intentions in Comedy Discourse presents a systematic pragmatic analysis of stand-up comedy. Drawing on previous literature on humour, socio-cognitive pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, storytelling, and media discourse analysis, the author proposes a theoretical perspective on comedy discourse that interrogates the way stand-up performers entextualise culture and society to instantiate situated actions with interactional, textual or social functions. The book addresses how we can objectively move from stand-up jokes to how humorous discourse does things in the real world, either in interacting with audiences or in creating heightened socio-political consciousness in them.

Ibukun Filani, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA.