Abstract
The dark side of stand-up comedy can take many forms. This chapter investigates the dark and light sides of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams. Shouse reflects upon how the personal lives, personae, and stage acts of these iconic stand-up comics made each a tragicomic figure, but for entirely different reasons. Reading the biographies of Carlin, Pryor, and Williams against their personae and stage acts raises important questions about the nature of the oftentimes dark “truths” shared in stand-up comedy. Ultimately, the chapter argues against both the naïve temptation to read a comic’s act as a truthful distillation of his or her essential personality and lived experience and the ultra-relativistic idea that truth does not matter and/or is completely impossible to discern in stand-up.
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Notes
- 1.
Although it is known as the “Philadelphia Incident,” the performance technically took place across the river at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey.
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Shouse, E. (2020). Person, Persona, and Act: The Dark and Light Sides of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams. 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_2
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