Cross-cultural study of American and British stand-up

Abstract

The nature of stand-up in the comparative aspect hasn't got extended coverage in linguistic literature. The analysis was based on the authentic data randomly selected from American and British comedian's shows from YouTube's recordings, which allowed studying the comedians' verbatim qualitatively and quantitatively. The hypothesis is that possible differences between the linguistic features of the American and British humor mirror the unique national characteristics, mentality and moral values. To verify the hypothesis, theoretical (analysis, synthesis and generalization) methods, empirical method of monitoring, statistical techniques: mean and variance; ranking, and non-parametric method were used. The findings demonstrate that American and British stand-up comedy is comparable in that the performance is based on jokes told to live audiences with the use of some verbal and non-verbal means. The research allowed distinguishing the following common features: structuredness, grouping parts of the text on the basis of semantics, contextuality, hyperbole usage. The differences which were distinguished reflect to a great extent the national character, values and mentality of the two nations. Ranking the scores order for each variable for the phenomena and the high value of p obtained ( .98) proved high rank order relationship between the data.