Funny Business: Exploring Inequality in Stand-Up Comedy Work

Abstract

Much of what we know about workplace inequality, we know from studies on work in industrial and information-based economies. There has been less interrogation into how processes of inequality are formed and sustained in creative work and cultural industries. Given the growing trend away from traditional work rooted in formal organizations and toward cultural industries, how can we understand the relationship between work and inequality in non-standard, creative labour? To answer this question I explore the world of stand-up comedy by drawing on 25 semi-structured interviews with stand-up comedians and over one hundred hours of observational data. My analysis reveals that comedy work is organized around the image of an ‘ideal worker,’ an ideal maintained by intersubjective mechanisms of rule: diversity logics, compulsory networking, and creative license. The existence of the ‘ideal worker’ influences how, when, and under what conditions work happens in stand-up comedy for those who fall outside of that ideal. Specifically, workers’ social locations shape how they self-manage, marginalized workers must self-regulate in relation to the work (like everyone else) and the ‘ideal worker.’ Finally, the analysis reveals that workers in stand-up comedy use various strategies to negotiate consent and resistance in their work arrangements in terms of where and under what circumstances they work. Overall, this research highlights how the micro politics of capital are informed by larger power relations that sustain inequality in cultural work settings. Specifically, this work demonstrates the need to address how ‘ideal workers’ are maintained in cultural work, as well as how social location shapes processes of self-management and strategic engagement within unequal work environments.