WORKING HARD TO BE FUNNY: LEBANESE COMEDIANS’ LABOR, GENDER AND THE PURSUIT OF AUTHENTIC CELEBRITY

Abstract

There is a thriving comedic scene in Lebanon where online and standup comedians have used their skills in humor both to entertain and to critique their social, political, and cultural experiences. In this thesis, however, I go beyond the role of humor as a powerful means of communication and focus instead on the hard work, the compromises, and negotiations behind the humorous content produced and disseminated by both online and standup comedians. My aim is to explore the labor of these Lebanese comedians and how their creative work shapes their content and subjectivities. I build off of Brook Erin Duffy’s elaboration of aspirational labor and Angela McRobbie, Kylie Jerrett, and Isabella Lorey’s critiques of the gendered nature of creative labor within a neoliberal and postfeminist frameworks. I interrogate how this framework is implicated in the creation of the celebrity and the application of micro celebrity practices. Based on qualitative interviews with a dozen online and standup comedians I argue that comedy is a gendered form of aspirational labor that has inherent tensions between the comedians’ creative work and their sense of authenticity. This tension is heightened within the digital market economy as comedians apply micro celebrity practices that dilute some of the transgressive and queer qualities of their comedic content