Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand‐Up Comedy

This article concerns the genre of stand‐up comedy as a staged performance of self‐presentation constrained by a specific participant structure and an interactional setting that foregrounds both subjective (token‐specific) and objective (typifying) presentational orientations. By initially distinguishing between three modes of footing as pragmatically organizing the role configurations of this communicative form, I investigate how this tripartite dynamic is metapragmatically regimented within the genre, and further argue how performing stand‐up necessarily entails the calibration of multiple overlapping footings at once. Adopting the nascent yet thriving Finnish stand‐up scene as a point of entry to the international expansion and newfound popularity of stand‐up in the ongoing century, the analysis sheds light on novel intersections of publics and selves in increasingly mediated contexts of contemporary culture.