A Pragmatic Study of Self-Deprecation in British Stand-Up Comedy Performances

Abstract

Self-deprecation is a form of humour where the speaker targets himself/herself in the joke, drawing attention to his/her weaknesses, failure, shortcomings, or unattractive features. The present study investigates self-deprecation pragmatically in selected British stand-up comedy performances by Tez Ilyas and Josh Pugh. It aims to find out what types of self-deprecation are employed in the selected data and to discover the impoliteness strategies that realise self-deprecation. A mixed-method approach combining qualitative and quantitative analyses is employed. Twenty self-deprecating utterances are purposefully selected from two full-length British stand-up comedy performances made available on YouTube; ten are selected from each comedian. The analysis focuses on four types of self-deprecation: self-defeating, self-enhancing, self-affiliative and self-referential. Furthermore, the analysis adopts Culpeper's Impoliteness Theory and concentrates on bald-on-record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, off-record impoliteness and mock politeness. The findings reveal that self-defeating is the dominant type followed by self-referential and self-affiliative while self-enhancing does not occur. In terms of impoliteness, bald-on-record is the most frequently occurring strategy, followed by off-record impoliteness and positive impoliteness. Negative impoliteness and mock politeness do not occur in the selected data. The findings indicate that self-deprecation in the selected British stand-up comedy performances is mainly realised through direct self-attack, indirect self-belittlement and derogatory self-labeling for humour.