Style as a bonding element between stand-up comedy and literature

This paper discusses an approach between literature and stand-up comedy. The aim is to investigate the traces of defamiliarization of the speech contained in the stand-up comedy, of the style of his writings and of what constitutes the quality of author of its artists. Let’s examine the text of the genre, identify its traces of this particular and singular style and investigate the role of it in the mise-en-scène of this Communication situation. The theoretical framework lies in Bakhtin (1997; 2012) and proposals about the style and the ethical act (philosophy of responsible act), complemented by Charaudeau (2008; 2010a; 2010b) Maingueneau (2008; 2012) and Proença Filho (2005). The research is descriptive and bibliographic with qualitative approach. The corpus is composed of excerpts from texts of American comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Mitch Hedberg. We found that the ability of exploring the abnormal in what seems ordinary by the lyrically reconfigured language, impression of the author’s distinctive style, makes a bond strong enough to identify the stand-up comedy as a literary variant.