🎤 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 on how comedians shape audience response.

What’s missing, I argue, is a holistic, structuralist framework that treats stand-up not as a fluke of charisma or cultural timing, but as an art form—one with repeatable shapes, shared traditions, and formal elements that can be mapped, analysed, and, yes, taught.

That’s where this blog—and the idea of the Comedic Multiform—comes in. It’s an invitation to put stand-up under the microscope, not to kill the laughter, but to better understand what gives it life in the first place.

Why Stand-Up Needs Its Own Framework

Having asked why we pick apart comedy at all, we now need to ask what’s lost in doing so—and why stand-up specifically deserves its own lens.

Stand-up comedy, despite being one of the most widely consumed and instantly recognisable performance forms of the past half-century, still suffers from a kind of critical invisibility. It’s everywhere—on streaming platforms, in clubs, stitched into TikToks—but when it comes to serious academic inquiry, it often gets left behind the dressing room curtain.

Why? In part, because stand-up resists tidy categorisation. It’s not quite theatre, though it shares the stage. Not quite literature, though it’s often scripted. Not quite conversation, though it mimics one. It sits at a strange nexus—where performance, authorship, persona, audience participation, and cultural commentary all shake hands, crack a joke, and split the door money.

Yet most existing scholarship approaches it using tools borrowed from adjacent disciplines: literary theory for its language, sociology for its politics, or communication studies for its interactional dynamics. These lenses are helpful—sometimes brilliant—but they don’t always account for the particularity of stand-up’s live, iterative, and memetically evolving nature.

To make meaningful comparisons between, say, a local open-mic act and a polished Netflix special, we need a framework that acknowledges the complete ecology of the gig: the performer, the performance, the audience, the venue, and the cultural expectations that bind them. We need a poetics of stand-up—one that doesn’t just describe what’s funny or offensive, but maps how stand-up works across multiple layers of performance.

That’s what the Comedic Multiform is built for: to give scholars, performers, and curious onlookers a way of talking about stand-up that respects its complexity, without pretending it’s too sacred to scrutinise.

What Is the Comedic Multiform?

At its core, it's a framework for analysing stand-up comedy performances across three distinct but interrelated levels: frame, narrative, and material. Think of it as a way of zooming in and out—like Google Maps for comedy—moving from the broadest cultural framing to the nuts and bolts of the punchline.

🔹 Frame Level – Who’s Talking?

This is where we analyse the performer's identity, persona, and relationship with the audience. It's about more than “vibe.” The frame level asks: What does this performance assume about who the performer is and what the audience expects?

It includes staging, the comic’s relationship to authenticity, and how they manage the liminal space between their real self and their performed one. Mae Martin’s gentle intimacy, Nish Kumar’s righteous exasperation, and a newcomer’s nervous charm each offer different framing cues that shape audience interpretation from the first syllable.

🔹 Narrative Level – How’s the Story Told?

The narrative level deals with structure—how jokes build into bits, how bits form a set, and how that set articulates a worldview. This isn’t just about content, but about how the comedian organizes that content over time.

It’s also where callbacks, segues, pacing, and worldview emerge. The comic doesn’t just tell jokes—they construct a temporary, laugh-driven reality. Understanding the set’s architecture reveals how tension is managed, how momentum builds, and how different narrative strands intertwine.

🔹 Material Level – What’s Being Said (and How)?

Here we descend into the fine grain of delivery: rhythm, scansion, timing, mic technique, repetition, vocal tics. It’s the craft of comedy at its most detailed—the work that goes unnoticed until it doesn’t land.

The material level focuses on form: how verbal and non-verbal elements combine to elicit response. Is the laugh coming from incongruity? Subversion? Relief? Surprise? This level is where joke theory lives, but crucially, it doesn’t dominate—it supports.

Each level of the Multiform operates semi-independently but always in concert with the others. You can isolate them for analysis, but they function best as a layered, holistic system. The aim isn’t to reduce stand-up to a checklist—it’s to offer a language for what many comics instinctively do, and many audiences instinctively feel.

Why Structuralism, and Why Now?

Mention "structuralism" in a contemporary seminar and you’ll likely get a mix of polite nods, glazed expressions, and at least one raised eyebrow from someone who once had to read Saussure under creative duress. Fair. But structuralism—at least in its more agile, performance-aware incarnations—offers a powerful toolkit for understanding how meaning is produced, received, and repeated.

In stand-up comedy, this is vital. Because despite its reputation for spontaneity, stand-up is deeply patterned. It runs on schemas: narrative arcs, tonal modulations, performer–audience contracts, cultural scripts. In other words, it has structure—and that structure is often what distinguishes a funny person at a party from a professional comedian.

What structuralist analysis gives us, then, is a way of seeing stand-up as a system. Not a cold, mechanical one, but a dynamic ecology of signals, responses, and performative codes. It allows us to track how meaning travels from comic to crowd—not just via punchlines, but through persona, pattern, pace, and shared expectation. For an early template, see Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, where hierarchies invert, laughter becomes political, and meaning is made in flux.

Memes, Tradition, and Comedy as Cultural Replication

If stand-up comedy is an art form, it’s one with no original manuscript—only performance after performance, echoing, mutating, and responding to the world around it. In this way, stand-up functions much like a living oral tradition, one built not on scrolls or scripture, but on sets, riffs, and routines passed from mic to mic.

This is where the notion of memetics becomes useful—not in the internet meme sense (though there’s overlap), but in the Richard Dawkins–meets–cultural theory sense: ideas, tropes, and techniques that replicate and evolve through cultural transmission.

The observational setup, the self-deprecating callback, the “what’s the deal with…” opener—these aren’t just comedic habits. They’re meme-complexes: reproducible units of stand-up that persist because they’re effective, adaptable, and familiar enough to feel intuitive. Some comics inherit these forms knowingly, others pick them up by osmosis. Either way, the comedy club is a memetic crucible.

What this means is that stand-up comedy is not just a personal expression—it’s a cultural feedback loop. Audiences reward certain tropes with laughter, which encourages their survival and modification. Techniques spread across scenes, across cities, across streaming platforms. A bit that starts in a Brooklyn open mic may end up, in altered form, on a Melbourne festival stage six months later.

Analysing comedy as a memetic tradition invites us to treat its forms not as arbitrary, but as evolved. Not sacred, but persistent. And not immutable—because like all memes, they can be remixed, recontextualised, and rejected.

This view also helps situate comedy as a form of cultural memory. A well-worn format—like the confessional monologue, or the observational rant—carries traces of its comedic ancestry. We hear not just the joke, but echoes of past jokes, past performers, past expectations. The stand-up stage becomes a palimpsest: overwritten, but never blank. For more on memetic theory, see Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Blackmore's The Meme Machine.

The Performative Ecology

If the Comedic Multiform gives us the “what” and “how” of stand-up structure, then the performative ecology gives us the “where,” “with whom,” and “under what conditions.” Because stand-up doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It happens in rooms—sticky, loud, unpredictable rooms. And the room matters.

This ecology includes the venue, the audience, the tech setup, the comic’s mood, the social context, the ticket price, the compère’s tone, and whether the lights are too bright or the front row too far back. It’s everything that scaffolds the performance but isn’t “the material” per se.

A polished bit that slays in a 60-seat club might clatter awkwardly in a thousand-seat theatre, or disappear entirely in a YouTube clip watched on silent. Why? Because the ecology has shifted. What jokes are told, how they’re paced, even how the mic is held—these are adaptive responses to environmental cues.

The stand-up set is a negotiated event, not a static artefact. The performer brings a structure, yes—but they also improvise, adjust, and reframe in response to live variables. It’s more jazz than classical, more wrestling than ballet. And crucially, it’s co-constructed.

Conclusion – From Frog Dissection to Flight Paths

If we return to E.B. White’s frog, we might offer a small revision. Maybe dissecting humour doesn’t have to kill it. Maybe, if done right, it helps us understand how it lived. How it leapt. Why it startled us into laughter or sat awkwardly croaking for a laugh that never came.

The Comedic Multiform isn’t a formula. It’s a field guide. It helps us ask better questions: not just what’s the joke, but what’s the shape of this performance? Where is the laugh planted? How does the bit unfold across time, space, persona, and culture?

Future posts will zoom in on each layer of the Multiform with examples and micro-analyses. We’ll unpack bits from legends and newcomers alike. We’ll dive into frames, track narratives, and parse the fine grain of material. And we’ll always keep an eye on the room—the performative ecology that makes every joke a collaboration.

Until then, think of this post as an overture. The house lights are down. The opener’s off. Let’s see how far this thing can go.

What frames, narratives, or ecological factors have shaped a stand-up performance that stuck with you? Leave a comment below or share your thoughts—this conversation’s just getting started.