Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization

In the spirit of Bakhtin’s work on voicing in narrative chronotopes, this article explores the verbal art of stand-up comedy. One focus is on documenting a particular kind of multiply voiced chronotope in which British comedian, Eddie Izzard, transposes historical processes into a dialogic form that creates an imaginary historical real-time ‘peopled’ by fictionalized national entities in conversation with each other. The chronotope and the poetic parallelisms in which it participates are explored for the role they play in the principles of textuality generally and linguistic humor specifically.