Overview
Comic Lives examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and comedy within the theoretical and methodological frameworks of auto/biography studies. In stand-up acts, comedy specials, podcasts, and print memoirs, autobiographical comedy offers a productive occasion for addressing key concerns in the discipline, in particular the challenges of representing trauma and the testimonial uses of personal stories. The contributors take up examples of auto/biographical comedy in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States to explore the question of how comedians transform difficult life experiences—such as mental illness, the displacements of immigration, family conflicts, and institutional racism—into texts and performances aimed at making people laugh. Thinking about auto/biography and comedy, auto/biography as comedy, and auto/biographical comedy, this collection reflects on what auto/biography brings to comedy, what affordances comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and risks of playing life for laughs, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counter-narrative. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in fields such as literary studies, cultural studies, performance studies, and social theory, especially those exploring intersections of identity, trauma, and humor in contemporary media and performance. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Full Product Details
Author: Laurie McNeill (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) ,
John David Zuern
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.453kg
ISBN: 9781041002222
ISBN 10: 104100222
Pages: 123
Publication Date: 27 June 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
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Author Information
Laurie McNeill is Professor of Teaching in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. She is co-author (with Sonja Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Julie Rak) of The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022), and co-editor, with Kate Douglas, of Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (Routledge, 2017), and, with John David Zuern, Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of the journal Biography (2015). John David Zuern is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His work on auto/biography has appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, European Journal of Life Writing, and Life Writing. With Laurie McNeill, he is co-editor of Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of Biography.
