Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

This exploratory qualitative study aimed to analyze stand-up comedy shows from both Egypt and the United States adopting two analytical approaches. One approach carried out a move analysis of a total number of 11 stand-up performances, six from the Egyptian corpus and five from the American one, attempting to reach a preliminary model which stand-up comedians follow to organize their shows. Results showed that a stand-up performance consists of six moves which are (1) greeting the audience, (2) announcement of topics, (3) illustration, (4) comedian{u2019}s commentary, (5) comedian-audience interaction, and (6) closure. The other approach adopted in this study followed an analysis of the comedians{u2019} linguistic choices to realize different features of humor, namely incongruity, allusion, hyperboles and obscenity. Major findings showed that comedians in both corpora realize incongruity either on the lexical level through homophones and polysemes or on the level of discourse through an unexpected punch line at the end of longer joke routines. Allusion is found to be an exclusive feature used by Egyptian comedians in the selected data while hyperboles are realized by comedians from both corpora through the use of exaggerated metaphors and through caricature-like depictions of public figures and hyperbolic dramatization of scenes. The last feature examined, obscenity has different realizations in both corpora. Egyptian comedians express obscene humor implicitly through the use of sexual innuendos while American comedians explicitly refer to obscenity through the use of swearwords as well as sexual jokes

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