Organizing team:
Maria De Simone (Music and Theater Arts, MIT)
Matthew McMahan (Center for Comedic Arts, Emerson College)
Grace Kessler Overbeke (Comedy Writing and Performance, Columbia College Chicago)
Katelyn Hale Wood (Department of Drama, University of Virginia)
“Comedy & Embodiment” approached the study of comedy from three complementary angles: its critical analysis, spectatorial act, and performance practice. The event encompassed scholarly discussion, the performance of stand-up comedian Negin Farsad, and a masterclass in the bouffon clowning technique led by Nathaniel Justiniano.
“New Directions of Comedy Studies,” Round Table Discussion
This discussion gathered leading scholars of comedy across the adjacent disciplines of theatre and performance, communication, media, and cultural studies. We addressed questions such as: What does a focus on embodiment bring to the analysis of comedy? What can comedy studies teach us as scholars, performers, and pedagogues? What are the many factors that contribute to how a person experiences comedy? How do comedians practice societal critique? How may the historical study of comedy enliven contemporary practice?
Negin Farsad, “The Case for American Exceptionalism by a Lady Muz”
Negin Farsad was named one of 50 Funniest Women by Huffington Post and was selected as a TEDFellow for her work in social justice comedy. She is the author of How To Make White People Laugh, a memoir-meets-social-justice-comedy manifesto that was nominated for the Thurber Prize for Humor and recommended by Oprah Magazine. She is also the director and producer of the feature film The Muslims Are Coming!, which follows a band of Muslim American comedians as they visit U.S. towns and cities to combat Islamophobia. Farsad is host of Fake the Nation, a political comedy podcast on the Earwolf network, and she is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. She started her comedy career as a Cornell and Columbia-educated policy advisor for the City of New York. Since her time at the City Council, she has been weaving comedy and social commentary to cleverly undercut stereotypes of her culture and Islamophobia at large.
Bouffon-style Clowning Masterclass with Nathaniel Justiniano
Bouffons are a clown type derived from Jacques Lecoq’s L’École Internationale de Théâtre. Nathaniel Justiniano describes bouffon performance as “a realm rooted in satire and mockery. It is often physically grotesque, confrontational, hilarious, and harnassed to point out and revel in society’s ills.” Justiniano is a queer, Cali-Rican theater artist. He is the founding Artistic Director of Naked Empire Bouffon Company, which began in San Francisco in 2009 with an activist mission to devise hilarious, cutting, and visually provocative satires to catalyze urgent discourse. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Comedic Performance at Emerson College.