Profane, Meet Profound: ‘Queering’ Stand-Up Through Spoken Word Poetry
by CHRISTINA MATTSON
Though often separated both in practice and within academic scholarship, spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy share many similarities. Though spoken word poetry may be seen as increasingly “autobiographical, issue-based, and dramatic” (Larkin 29), humorous spoken word poetry has a rich tradition in both the UK (Larkin, “Suffering Fools”) and the US (Aptowicz, “Funny Poetry Gets Slammed”). On the flip side, though stand-up comedy has long been known for its elements of social commentary and individual introspection, the “primary aim of any stand-up performance” is considered “to make the audience laugh” (Quirk 13); “The audience expects to laugh, and the comedian has a professional obligation to effect that laughter” (Brodie 217). That, however, is beginning to change—a recent wave of stand-up comedians have begun probing at the limitations of this “obligation,” challenging laughter as the primary aim of stand-up comedy—and, in doing so, further blurring the boundaries between stand-up comedy and spoken word poetry. My predoctoral research focuses on this movement of disruptive and self-reflexive comedy, which I have termed “queered stand-up,” and its reworking of stand-up conventions and connections to other performance genres.
I argue that queered stand-up, as a performance vehicle, enables comedians to bring aims that are often subsumed by conventional stand-up’s onus on laughter above all else—among them social criticism, therapeutic exchange, and artistic fulfilment—to the forefront of their comedy alongside humour. Queered stand-up specials, by comedians such as Hannah Gadsby, Jerrod Carmichael, and Cameron Esposito, are frequently formally innovative and meta-referential, at times both explicitly addressing the limitations of conventional comedy and working to embody something new; their content often focuses on experiences of marginalised and non-normative identities and sexualities, without shying away from taboo or traumatic elements and “serious” emotions. I use “queered stand-up” for this boundary-blurring comedy both to acknowledge that this wave is largely led by LGBTQ-identifying comedians centring their identities and their experiences within their performances, and for its project of disruption and ambivalences, considering ‘queering’ as a “narrative strategy” that uses “conventions of genre both to integrate and familiarize, and to de-contextualize and render strange” (DeAngelis 578). In a way, their disruptive, self-reflexive elements can be seen as utilising and incorporating elements of spoken word poetry. This effort is made more explicit, or perhaps more direct, in the work of two recent U.S. American stand-up comedy specials, both released digitally by Netflix in 2024: Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees and Langston Kerman’s Bad Poetry. Both specials directly incorporate and invoke poetry, blurring the lines between the genres and helping to tap into stand-up’s “serious” side.
Get on Your Knees—firsta lauded live show advertised alternatively as solo off-Broadway and stand-up comedy before its recorded incarnation appeared on Netflix under the label “stand-up comedy” in 2024—traces Novak’s complicated and shifting relationship with oral sex. Early within the performance, after an extended and dramatic metaphor about a sexual position, Novak “warns” the audience of her “poetic sensibility” (Novak 3:42), as she knows “it can be trying at times” (Novak 3:54). She explains that she used to write poetry, before becoming “tired of being in a constant state of enchantment” (Novak 3:59). Though this initially appears to be a self-deprecating joke about her previous activities, that poetic sensibility and sense of enchantment reappear throughout the special, as she explores a taboo subject, often considered “crass,” through metaphoric language, vivid imagery, and a rich vocabulary, as in her description of a vaginal orgasm: “It holds. It embodies the masculine, Stoic, ideal. It just pulses. Doing isometric work, contained and strong. A Viking against a tree after the battle is over. Just pulsing to the rhythm of the battle drums fading away” (Novak 19:47-20:12). Following her own introduction, Novak is able to use grandiose language and abundant metaphors to describe concepts as well as to frame that language as part of her “poetic sensibility,” to be viewed through a self-deprecating, humorous lens. She is able to both linger in moments of enchantment, of “nuance” (Novak 1:16:21), and draw comedy from these lenses—to take something ‘seriously’ and ‘unseriously’ at the same time.
Kerman’s blurring of the boundaries between spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy occurs less within his material and more within the surrounding elements of his special. Beyond the invocation of poetry in its title, Bad Poetry was filmed in an iconic early location of Marc Smith’s slam events, the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago; in an interview, Kerman cites Love Jones, a 1997 film about a slam poet, as the special’s “visual touchstone” (Kerman, quoted in Pandya). Within its material, Bad Poetry departs from stand-up conventions much less overtly. Though he deals with emotional topics, such as his fears and anxieties about the beginning of fatherhood, his hour is more devoted to humorous anecdotes and jokes. He references his own personal experience of poetry in a section devoted to his time as an English teacher. To connect with his students and encourage their appreciation for poetry, he shares a poem of his own with his class. He speaks of how much the poem, written to honour a friend who died in a car crash, meant to him at the time and explains “all this metaphorical work” he does “to compare her death to the death of a spider [he] found in [his] windowsill” (Kerman 28:35-28:43), before sharing, “The exact final lines of the poem go: How close to God this spider must feel/ Weaving a world above the earth/ The string as thin as breath/ The breath so easily silenced/ A net of wings/ Fluttering toward blind quiet” (Kerman 28:45-29:01). The passionate recitation is then undercut by a profanity-laden punchline about a student’s rude interruption, but, for a moment, Kerman pauses the humour of his special to fully lean into an emotionally resonant moment of his life, encapsulated by his own poetry.
The study of spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy has much to offer one another; so too does an exchange between the genres on a performance level. I argue that Novak and Kerman’s incorporations of poetry in their comedy performances offer an intriguing tool for the project of queering stand-up comedy, for engaging with aims beyond laughter. The further blurring of boundaries between stand-up comedy and spoken word poetry in Get on Your Knees and Bad Poetry suggests a use of poetry as a method for enabling an incorporation of, and creating space for, serious emotions within stand-up comedy, alongside—and even adding to—humorous elements. This exchange is ripe for continued investigation.
Works Cited:
Aptowicz, Cristin O’Keefe. “Funny Poetry Gets Slammed: Humor as Strategy in the Poetry Slam Movement.” Humor, vol. 22 no. 3, 2009, pp. 381– 393.
Bad Poetry. Directed by John Mulaney, performance by Langston Kerman, Netflix, 2024.
Brodie, Ian. A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014.
DeAngelis, Michael. “There and ‘Not There’: Todd Haynes and the Queering of Genre.”
Celebrity Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 2017, pp. 578-592.
Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy, 2nd edn., Methuen, 2014.
Get on Your Knees. Directed by Natasha Lyonne, performance by Jacqueline Novak, Netflix, 2024.
Larkin, Steve. “Suffering Fools: The survival and adaptation of British absurd, comic, and satirical traditions in the era of poetry slams.” Spoken Word in the UK, edited by Lucy English and Jack McGowan, Routledge, 2021, pp. 27–40.
Pandya, Hershal. “Langston Kerman and John Mulaney Made Stand-up’s Love Jones.” Vulture, 20 Aug. 2024, www.vulture.com/article/john-mulaney-langston-kerman-bad-poetry-special-interview.html.
Quirk, Sophie. Why Stand-up Matters: How Comedians Manipulate and Influence. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015.
Thumbnail by Hai Nguyen on Unsplash.
Author Bio:
Christina Mattson is a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna and an independent researcher on contemporary culture, with a focus on stand-up comedy. Her MA thesis, for which she received the Department of English and American Studies Student Award, explores a recent phenomenon of genre-blurring, “queered” stand-up comedy that raises vital questions about the aesthetic premises and cultural functions of stand-up comedy. She has joined the “Poetry Off the Page” project as a junior research associate to continue work on such hybrid forms and explore how comedy studies can be fruitfully applied to poetry performance research.