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Comedy Afloat: Reflections on The Floating Fringe in York

There’s nothing quite like telling jokes on a barge. The room’s intimate, the ceiling’s low, and the only heckle you fear is from a passing duck. Performing stand-up in a gently echoing hull, just above the Ouse, adds a strange serenity to the usual pre-show nerves—less gladiatorial, more nautical. Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of performing and compering York the Plank — a stand-up showcase that was part of The Floating Fringe in York, staged aboard the beautifully ramshackle Arts Barge moored on the River Ouse. Friday night, I stepped up as a comic. By Saturday, I was compering the same gig, trying to keep both the show and the boat steady. Running from July 24–26, The Floating Fringe offered a grassroots antidote to more commercial circuits. With its blend of stand-up, theatre, and oddball performance art — some of which teetered closer to the surreal than the stable — it proved that fringe culture is very much alive, even when bobbing gently on a river. York the Plank Frida...
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Hecklers and the Art of Improvised Timing in Stand-Up Comedy Or, How to Slay a Disruption Without Losing the Room There exists a comfortably worn axiom in comedy that “timing is everything.” Rarely questioned, often quoted. But within the lived (and often loudly interrupted) reality of stand-up, this axiom is less a truism and more a battleground. Because timing, in the strictest structuralist sense, presupposes control — and in live performance, control is a negotiation. Consider the heckler: an uninvited participant in the collaborative performance contract. They do not operate within the expected bounds of comedic tradition — they rupture it. Their interjection constitutes a spontaneous reframing of the comedic artefact in progress. In the terms laid out in my poetics framework ( The Comedic Multiform , 2023 ), the heckler introduces a dissonant variable at the frame level — momentarily shifting the audience’s alignment, the performer’s authority, and the perceived rhythm o...
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🎤 Dissecting the Punchline: The Case for a Structuralist Framework in Stand-Up Comedy The Frog on the Board 🐸 “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can,” wrote E.B. White, “but the thing dies in the process.” It’s a line frequently trotted out whenever someone dares to take comedy seriously—as if the only dignified response to a joke is a laugh, and never a footnote. But what if the point isn’t to preserve the frog? What if the goal is to understand why it jumps the way it does—and how some frogs leap clean across a room while others barely make the lily pad? In comedy studies, stand-up has often been treated like that frog: alive, sure, but too slippery, too chaotic, too... culturally mucky to warrant real critical attention. Analyses tend to focus on the joke itself (see the General Theory of Verbal Humour by Attardo & Raskin), or the performer’s politics (see Lockyer & Pickering’s Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour ), or Sophie Quirk’s study in Why Stand-Up Matters ...
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