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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1015

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

“Pure genius kid!”: The sociolinguistics of performance of a Limerick city comedy duo.

Authors: Vaughan, Elaine Claire; Moriarty, Mairead
Submitted by: Vaughan, Elaine Claire (University of Limerick, Ireland)

The Rubberbandits are a comedy duo from Limerick in Ireland whose particular brand of satirical and musical comedy is based on the inner-city urban identity of Limerick, a city with a national reputation for social disadvantage and criminal gangs. While their comedy is also based on their appropriation and adaptation of artefacts from other urban communities of practice (cf. Wenger, 1998) – most notably their localisation of rap and hip hop genres to the context of Limerick city in their music – the mainstay of the humour invoked is in the simultaneous lampooning and glorification of the urban culture it is based on. In this way, the Rubberbandits make an interesting study in the way they appeal to both the in-groups and out-groups implicit and explicit in their humour. The real-life identities of the Rubberbandits are radically different to the alter-egos they inhabit as part of their performance. Although their actual identities are known, the Rubberbandits always appear incognito, with plastic bags covering their faces, and when interviewed stay in the characters of their alter-egos, Mr Chrome and Blind Boy Boat Club.

As a result, our paper takes as its starting point a recent special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on the sociolinguistics of performance (see Bell & Gibson, 2011). In this regard, we too are interested in fusing a number of theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of performance (Coupland, 2007; Johnstone, 2011). We combine aspects of performance theory (Baumann and Briggs, 1990), (virtual) ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to point to the particular social identities being played on by the Rubberbandits. We examine how the Rubberbandits push the limits of language creativity and stylization through these ‘staged performances’ (Coupland, 2007). Through our analysis we identify a number of the acts of stylization the Rubberbandits engage in. We focus on linguistic and multimodal resources the comedy duo draw on in order to authenticate themselves as members of an in-group, with particular reference to the idea of enregisterment (Agha, 2003, 2006; Johnstone, 2011), and also how they play with broader community repertoires to create the humour  and the effect of this on the audience.

Agha, A. 2003. The social life of a cultural value. Language and Communication, 23(3-4): 231-273.

Agha, A. 2006. Language and Social Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bauman, R. and C. L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88.

Bell, A. and Gibson, A. 2011.  Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5: 555-572.

Coupland, N. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Johnstone, B. 2011. Dialect enregisterment in performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5: 657-679.

Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: Language, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.