Creative or Primitive? Analysis of the Texts of Public Speeches of the Stand-up Genre from the Point of View of the Theory of Language Game

Abstract

This article studies the features of language game implementation in the modern media prod­ucts. The object of the study is stand-up comedy texts. Stand-up performance is a solo, humorous performance in front of an audience. The repertoire of stand-up comedians includes author’s mon­ologues, short jokes, and improvisation with the audience. These performances are based on a lan­guage game element implemented in a certain structure.

The purpose of this article is to identify stand-up genre speech techniques in public perfor­mances and analyse them from the language game theory viewpoint. The language game, comical, and verbal creativity concepts are considered in the article.

The main methods of research are descriptive, observation, generalization, data classification methods.

The linguistic examples of comedy texts are analysed from the language game implementation viewpoint at various language levels: phonetic, word-formation, lexical, syntactic. The public per­formances analysis makes it possible to determine the structure according to which jokes are devel­oped; the techniques of language game which are widely used by stand-up comedians. This analysis allows some negative features to be determined (profanity, parasitic words, meaningless phrases), which can worsen the language game understanding.

The article draws attention to the role of stand-up comedy genre public performances in the learning of comic aesthetic category realized in witty and fluent speech. The perspective of the study is to analyse the performances of female stand-up comedy and identify the influence of gender on the language of comedy texts.