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<p class="elementToProof" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Call for Proposals: The Comic Audience (Comedy Studies)</span></p>
<p style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For more information, see
</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(5, 99, 193);"><u><a href="https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/the-comic-audience/" id="OWA613edab4-195c-49b9-c367-ab172b0338aa" class="OWAAutoLink" data-loopstyle="linkonly" style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); margin: 0px;">https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/the-comic-audience/</a></u></span></p>
<p style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">How has the relationship between comedians and their audience changed? Mid-twentieth-century comedians such as Lenny
Bruce and Richard Pryor were counterculture figures who challenged what could be said on stage at the risk of censorship and arrest, though they also built audiences who expected this from them.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.12px; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> In contrast, some contemporary comedians such as Judy Gold, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle see comic speech as
silenced by left-wing morals-policing rather than the state. Other performers such as Hannah Gadsby and Zoe Coombs Marr have intervened in audience expectations that reinforce their social marginalization by changing their comic personae. Moreover, it is now
common practice for high-profile comedians to lock audience members’ phones in pouches during shows, restricting audience behaviour to prevent filming and distraction. These generational shifts, polarized political contexts, and technological considerations
raise questions about what audiences will accept in a genre that relies on what people share to make them laugh.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.12px; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Changes to the production and reception of comedy raise further questions about the comedian’s contract with the
audience. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century vaudevillians established the stand-up convention of comedians communicating directly with an outwardly responsive audience. While performing to a live room is still the foundation of stand-up, more people
encounter comedians on streaming platforms, on podcasts, as award show and comedy news hosts, and in social media memes and controversies.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 17.12px; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> For example, Chappelle, whose late work has courted controversy with rejections of cancel culture and jokes about
LGBTQ folk, appended a 23-minute Q&A epilogue to the Netflix release of <i>Sticks and Stones</i> (2019) in which he told the live audience, “I understand why I could hurt some people’s feelings, so tonight … I’m going to let you say whatever it is you need
to say to my face.” The live audience were Chappelle fans and did not seem to have hurt feelings; Chappelle was anticipating and addressing an expanded, offended audience outside the room who could not say anything to his face.<sup> </sup>In this context,
who is the audience and why does it matter?</span></p>
<p style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">This special section of the journal
<i>Comedy Studies</i> will focus on the comic audience, working from the premise that the audience is integral to the form and meaning of the comic event. The discipline of theatre and performance studies has developed robust if varied frameworks for studying
audiences as performers and interpreters in their own right. Building on this scholarship (but welcoming approaches from other disciplines), this special section invites papers that examine specific rather than idealised comic audiences.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Topics might include (but are not limited to):</span></p>
<ul style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; padding-left: 0px;">
<li style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Historical, cultural, or generational shifts in the comic audience;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Live, mediatised, and/or digital audiences for comedy;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Majoritarian and/or minoritarian comic audiences;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Audience behaviour and/or sociality;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Conventions of comic spectatorship: laughter, applause, “clapter,” heckling, etc.;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Methodological reflections on researching the comic audience;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Challenges to traditional comic license, such as debates about cancel culture or freedom of speech;</span></li><li style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Caring for the comic audience: for example, content warnings, accessibility, cultural safety, mental health</span></li></ul>
<p style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Please submit proposals (250-300 words) to Sarah Balkin <sarah.balkin@unimelb.edu.au> by Friday 7 June 2024. Selected
proposals will be invited to prepare articles of 6000-8000 words which will be due in November 2024 and will be peer reviewed.</span></p>
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