In this Brown Bag seminar I will introduce my research project, with a focus on the publications I am working on. I am a post-doctoral researcher in the project Digressions: a cross-disciplinary study of the indirectness of the human imagination, led by Morten Nielsen. My study is focused on stand-up comedy in Finland, where I completed 20 months of field work starting in January 2015.

Field work included going to see lots of comedy, hanging out with comedians, doing interviews, and becoming an open mic comedian myself. In addition there is a wealth of data in the form of podcasts, discussions in Facebook groups, comedians’ blogs and other social media, etc. I also have film and audio recordings of my own and others’ performances. I have continued to perform in English while in Aarhus. Currently I am working on turning this material into publications, with the ultimate goal being a monograph on stand-up comedy in Finland. I am now working on journal articles that would eventually become chapters in the book. My doctoral study was on ritual clowning in Northern Mexico. I’ve applied the theories of Roy Wagner – especially the idea of all culture as the dialectics of convention and invention, and later figure-ground reversal – to try and make sense of the Chapayekas, who represent Judas and the Roman soldiers in the Yaqui Easter ritual. I am working with the same theoretical models with stand-up comedy, but of course as this comedic performance takes place in a different social and cultural setting, my research questions are quite different. Some of the topics I aim to discuss in my work are: the semiotic techniques of ’making people laugh’, the relation of material and performer, and transgression and morality in stand-up comedy.