Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals

Abstract

also a useful way to teach (one gets the impression Clayton is a fine teacher of humor). How would the sketch have been different if instead of being about a parrot being returned to a pet store, it had instead been about “a rubber hammer being returned to a hardware store?” (2). Or what if the pet had not been a parrot but another animal, such as a dog? (3) The provisional conclusion as to the sketch-comedy value of the parrot is that parrots “are not so compassionate that the death of an unknown parrot could be felt tragic, but also not so simply decorative as to make it an impersonal matter of return-and-replace” (3). It’s impossible to summarize adequately here the account Clayton provides because its value is in its attention to the details of the scene. If we are going to talk about what makes things funny in sketch comedy then we do need to get down to the details. A later summary of a mock advertisement for the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is another fine example of what Clayton’s approach has to offer in its careful attention to detail (113–18). The book concludes with a suggestion that Aristotle’s famous three modes of persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logos—might be instructively applied to theorizing how sketches persuade us to laugh (128). While this is an interesting suggestion, it would have made more sense to have introduced it at the beginning of the book and then to have tried it out during the summaries of sketches that are the substance of the book. This method would have been consistent with the simple approach of the book and perhaps provided a light illustration of how to think through comedy, which is what this book has to offer readers interested in sketch comedy and humor in general.