1. Rhetors and Jesters:
Rereading the Stand-up
Comedians as Sophists
By Jillian Belanger, M.A., N.B.C.T.
For the 2015 International Society for Humor
Studies Conference
2. Five canons of rhetoric
1. Invention
2. Arrangement
3. Style
4. Memory
5. Delivery
3. Who were the Sophists?
Sophists were traveling orators who went city
to city, selling speech as their product as they
taught the children of wealthy families, around
467 BC in Greece.
Speaking well became particularly important
once tyranny was overthrown in Syracuse and
law courts and other democratic institutions
called for people to be able to speak for
themselves in ways they hadn’t before.
4. An Important Shift
In centuries prior to the fifth, a young man from the aristocratic class
would have been “adopted” in an informal way and trained in
performance of fitting “words and deeds” by an older male friend of the
family… But in the middle of the fifth century, a small number of
exceptionally qualified traveling intellectuals began to gather young
men able to pay a fee into small “colloquia” or seminar groups for 3 or
4 years of political education.”
- Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists
Stand-up comedians are rhetors who have been delivering speeches and spreading knowledge and information to mass audiences in the tradition of what Apel and Habermas call open communication, and embodied, enacted discourse.
Bad rap- Just as “rhetoric” is used in a negative, pejorative way (“political rhetoric” is usually a slight), the definition of “sophistry” is “a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning,” and Sophists are often criticized for not having ethics attached to their teaching of how to argue.
From nobility to wealth
Before the Sophists arrived on the scene
As I mentioned, sophistry has a bad rap.
Dr. Attardo
Quote 1
Quote 2
Quote 3
Jesters
Jesters 2
Rhetoric- power of humor as a tool when used intentionally
Chris Bliss- some of you are calling on the 3rd Earl of Shaftsbury and Freud and other lions in philosophy and theory. I would like to share with you the wisdom of a juggler.
Elliott Oring yesterday-Freud’s Jokes and the Unconscious should be called “The Rhetorical Theory of a Joke”
Inside Jokes- Humor is an evolutionary way to reward ourselves for shifting our thinking
computational theory (error correction)11 pleasure evolved to reward reframing and revising beliefs
