Abstract
Comedians experience darkness in their personal lives. Some adopt dark personae. Others develop stage acts that revolve around a variety of dark topics. However, at some point, darkness must be reconciled with light and wit for humor to result. Unfortunately, the paradox of tragedy and comedy has regularly been resolved too simply in popular accounts of the dark sides of stand-up comedians. Too often all roads lead to their supposedly “dark and troubled minds.” Rather than resolve the paradox of tragedy and comedy in this fashion, the editors of this volume present a series of essays that wrestle with incongruities of light and dark. The result is an account of the dark side of stand-up that is often surprising, nuanced, and ultimately tragicomic, rather than predictably tragic.
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Notes
- 1.
Baldwin performed his open mic gigs in an eerily prophetic T-shirt that read, “The Anti-Christ of Comedy” (see Campbell, 2015).
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Shouse, E., Oppliger, P.A. (2020). Introduction: Come to The Dark Side. In: Oppliger, P.A., Shouse, E. (eds) The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_1
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