Comic Lives

Laurie McNeill · John David Zuern

Jun 2025 · Taylor & Francis

Ebook

134

Pages

Eligible

About this ebook

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 counternarrative.

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.

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 concer...

Discover more

About the author

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.

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: Con...

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets

Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.

Laptops and computers

You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

Flag as inappropriate