Abstract
In Working to Laugh, James M. Thomas centers stand-up comedy venues within the broader literature on urban nightlife to offer a critical examination of the production of “good times.” According to Thomas, stand-up comedy venues are largely absent from the study of urban nightlife, where bars and nightclubs have dominated this literature. By focusing on stand-up comedy venues, Thomas works to add to the “complexity and diversity of nightlife experience” (p. 6) and illustrates how comedy venues offer a “unique nightlife experience” where participants are more likely to be exposed to cultural politics. Unlike “bar-talk,” where studies suggest political talk is limited, Thomas contends that comedians frequently engage in “political talk” via their observations and commentary on “cultural politics and identity.” In turn, he argues stand-up comedy venues are an urban nightlife space where prevailing norms of race, gender, and class are simultaneously enabled, constrained, disrupted, and reinforced.
Thomas examines stand-up comedy venues with an 18-month ethnography (2010–2011) in three distinct settings in a Midwestern college town: The Comedy Kitchen, a prominent mainstream comedy club; Helter Skelter, a white subcultural bar; and Soleil, a LGBT bar on the southwest side of College Town. The first half of the book describes the first two settings and later introduces and applies the concepts of “affective labor” and “affective cultural assemblage” to show how comedy clubs are spaces that reproduce and contest racial, class, and gender inequalities. In particular, Thomas compares and contrasts the “assembling” of “good times” within The Comedy Kitchen and Helter Skelter.
Thomas describes how management controls the space at The Comedy Kitchen by screening patrons, using dress codes, managing seating arrangements, and carefully selecting staff (females in particular) to create an affective cultural environment where “good times” are ostensibly maximized for guests. However, as Thomas reveals, the production of “good times” in this space involves limiting access to communities of color and working-class attendants as well as the reinforcement of dominant heterosexual gender norms. Such strategies work to organize this space as one deliberately crafted towards middle-/upper-middle class white heteronormativity and sensibilities. Moreover, comics of color are a rarity at The Comedy Kitchen, as management believes they draw the “wrong crowd.” Both color-blind and color-vivid language (e.g., “black people don’t tip”) are contrasted with the hyperpolicing of nonwhite attendants by staff, the seating of people of color towards the back of the venue, and disciplining the behavior of nonwhite guests. Female guests and staff are also carefully arranged by management to reproduce them as sexual objects for male patrons, performers, and staff, which often leads to sexual harassment.
Thomas compares the careful arrangement of The Comedy Kitchen with Helter Skelter, which caters to white working-class subcultural sensibilities. While Thomas suggests this space is “more democratic,” as it is intended as an “anything goes” space, racial and gender normative orders are also reproduced here. For instance, white middle-class patrons seeking to “perform” working-class sensibilities primarily frequent this club. Moreover, while Thomas notes that incidents of “critical comedy,” which contest race, gender, and class inequalities, were more likely to occur in this setting, racial and gender minorities were largely absent from this space while the use of overtly sexist humor was a prominent feature in the production of “good times.”
Finally, Thomas briefly examines Soleil, a LGBT bar and “drag” show. This setting was more inclusive of racial and gender minorities than were the other two venues, while dominant gender norms were routinely contested. While the setting is well described, more could have been added to theorize this space in contrast to the other two venues examined in the book.
The strength of the book is its ethnographic detail. Thomas has a great ethnographic eye and vividly describes the settings and interactions he observes. Moreover, Thomas adds to the growing field of humor/comedy studies by critically examining the “exteriority” of comedy. That is, while other studies have examined comedy as a discursive practice, here Thomas focuses on the assembling/manufacturing process of comedy as a “pleasure space.”
While Thomas’s approach offers a critical examination of the organizational components of the comedy industry, I believe the book could have greatly benefited from directly incorporating racial theory, which is thin throughout. For example, Thomas makes much use of poststructuralism (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) to describe contemporary urban nightlife spaces as “affective cultural assemblages.” While this strategy allows Thomas to pay attention to “patterns of racial rule,” he rarely analyzes these patterns with contemporary racial theory. The clubs examined are predominantly white spaces, and many of the discussions and jokes described were fraught with racial meaning. Thomas could have easily drawn from Bonilla-Silva (2009) and Feagin (2009), both cited briefly in the text, to critically examine his descriptions in a more substantive way with regard to racial theory.
Overall, I believe the book makes a significant contribution to the study of urban nightlife and the growing field of humor/comedy studies and will be of interest to scholars interested in a cultural analysis of race, class, and gender in these and other fields.