COMM230
[I said right]
[I said some things about er]
The above sentence repeats the individual
phoneme /m/. Repetition of this sound
enhances and emphasises the content
of his words. The process of alliteration
is where the initial consonant is repeated
in the same sentence for dramatic effect.
Brand wants the audience to know that
he really does not care about the Jonas
brothers at all. Another stylistic device is
the pace of Brand’s performance: not only
does he vary his pitch but also the speed of
his performance. At some parts of the act
the pace of the speech appears to speed
up in order to build up to the punchlines of
his jokes. His varying pace shows that this
stylistic device is a good way of building the
audience up to the joke.
‘I said’ is repeated twice, conveying that this
is not a structured script and is impromptu
as he make a false start. Additionally, there
are clear fillers - ‘er’ and ‘right’ - which are
used throughout his stand up performance,
in particular ‘right’, a filler that is spoken
more than any other word in his speech.
The small amount of disfluency used in his
speech is not uncommon for a comedian.
Stand up is familiar to disfluency in speech,
a linguistic quality, due to the fact that most
comedians prepare only a loose script
beforehand and therefore disfluency is
inevitable. We expect comedians to have
some type of flawed disfluency due to
social expectations which allow us to think
that that stand up is largely unstructured.
Not all podium events, however, are
expected to be structured and have very
little flawed disfluency. An example of this
is Malala, an activist for female education
in Pakistan. Her United Nations speech in
their headquarters (New York) was a wellrehearsed speech with a firm script, which
was expected due to the context that her
speech was presented in.
Beyond the voice
Russell Brand’s stand-up act is one that is
full of expression and is quirky compared to
the typical comedian. In terms of staging,
there is a lot of movement taking place, with
Brand moving from one side of the stage to
the other. The stage itself is not specifically
designed for his act, and therefore Brand
has to use his own imagination to recreate
along with his words the situations that
he is describing. There are few props
used in Brand’s performance due to the
minimalistic setting. His main prop and the
most obvious in his act is the microphone
which has a long lead. This is particularly
unusual for a stand-up act as comedians
usually have handheld or even a handsfree microphones (which is more common
with comedians like Michael McIntyre, who
is very energetic throughout his act).
Rhetorical and stylistic devices
Most comedians, Brand included, use a
moveable script that has been prepared
and worked on beforehand. This gives
Brand an opportunity to think about how
his vocal performance can enable him to
achieve good comedy. The verbal content
alone does not necessarily make the
content of the script as humorous as it could
be. Some parts of Brand’s performance
would not be as entertaining if it wasn’t for
numerous vocal features that makes his
act all the more amusing. Timing, voice
quality and nonverbal vocalisations are all
vocal features that add emphasis to his
jokes to engage the audience. One s tylistic
device that can be found in Brand’s act
is vocal repetition, whereby repetition of
sounds occurs, in this case the repetition of
individual phonemes:
The long lead microphone used a lot in
Brand’s stand-up is also sometimes used
to interact with the audience, making them
move it for him. This is all done for a comical
value. Being a successful comedian means
that very few props are needed to create
comedy, as the voice and actions alone can
make a large audience erupt with laughter.
Therefore props are not actually necessary
for Brand, who can make people laugh just
with his vocal and verbal content alone.
There is a range of paralinguistic features
in the act. Brand’s action is elaborated with
bold arm gestures and very expressive
‘I don’t mind it doesn’t matter I was just
mucking around right’
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