Politeness Strategies Used by Comedian
Background of the Study From past to present, entertainment stage would never die, because every people always need some kind of refreshment after they work or when they feel bored, for example they can go to the amusement park or recreation on the weekend, and they can also watch a comedy stage. But the writer thinks people will tend to choose to watch the stage of comedy on a television, because they can laugh and forget about thier fatigue easily without going anywhere. In modern era the fulfilment of a comedy spectacle will be very easy, because television makes us closer to anything.
Nowadays we can get various types of comedy shows in Indonesian television; there are ketoprak, lenong, opera comedy, ludruk, musical comedy, comedy , etc. In Indonesia, the latest version of comedy and quite dense now is stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy is the art, initially developed in the United States, of humorous dialogue presented before an audience. The talk itself is memorized and, today, usually expressed in a spontaneous manner, as if the performer were speaking to friends.
Although it tends to be one-sided, there may be interaction between performer and audience, which the former does not always want. Often verbal content is augmented with a range of theatrical embellishments such as special costumes and props, grunts, snorts, and howls, bodily movements and facial gestures. The typical act consists of anecdotes, narrative jokes, one-liners, and short descriptive , which may or may not be related. (Stebbins, 1990) In Indonesia, stand-up comedy is considered as a new type of comedy show, and it started to become famous and widely shown on television in 2011.
KompasTV is the television station that present and introduce the show of stand-up comedy for the first time, and now popularized by MetroTV. And there are also auditions held in many cafe for the open mic. The open mic is the term for testing the ability to provoke laughter of the audience, if comedians succeed in making audience laugh in open mic, this automatically lifts their name as a comics. So they can go to stand-up comedy stage and might be shown on television. Because comedians always have any idea to performs joke with their own style and characteristic in language.
There are some studies about stand up comedy, for example, Limon (2000) who studied about the existence of Jewish in stand-up comedy in America, Schwarzm (2010) tried to explore linguistic aspects of verbal humour in stand-up Comedy, Falk (2010) explained about the representations of ethnicity in stand-up comedy, and Lockyer (2011) also studied about stand-up comedy, and he focussed on the audience perspective. The several researchers above are interested in stand-up comedy and the language also relation between comics and the audience.
However they did not explore about politeness issue in language used by comedian or comics, so that the writer will try to conduct a study about that. Hopefully this research can be very useful for any studies about linguistics and also for researchers who focus are interested in this case. The topic of politeness strategies have been utilized by several researchers. One of them is a research conducted by Ika Puspita Wati (2010) entitled “Politeness strategies used in the ‘Today’s Dialogue’ Talk Show”.
This research tried to find out the kind of politeness strategies used in the talk show and the context in which the strategies emerge. But it is still different from the writer’s study in the term of the object of the study, the factors lead to the emergence of politeness strategies as well as the determined contexts. This research focuses on the use of language especially the using of politeness strategy in stand-up comedy show by comedians. The purpose of this study is to discover any existence of the politeness strategies used by comedians in stand-up comedy in Indonesia.
Statement of The Problem
What kinds of politeness strategies used by comedians in stand-up comedy show? C. Literature Review 1. Politeness Strategies According to Brown and Levinson (1987), “Politeness strategies are strategies that are developed in order to save the hearer’s face”. There are four kinds of politeness strategies introduced by Brown and Levinson; they are Bald On-Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off-Record. Bald On-Record is a politeness strategy which is used more directly and usually does not attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s face.
This strategy is most often utilized in situations where the speaker has a close relationship with the hearer. On the contrary, Bald-Off Record strategies is mostly used through indirect language and avoid the speaker to be imposed by the interlocutor. Furthermore, positive politeness strategies seek to minimize the threat to the hearer’s positive face, the desire to be approved. It is used to make the hearer feel good about himself, his interests or possessions. It is mostly used in situations in which the hearer knows each other fairly well.
As the opposite of positive politeness, negative politeness strategies are oriented towards the hearer’s negative face, the desire to be unimpeded in one’s action, and emphasize avoidance of imposition on the hearer. Face refers to the “public self-image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself” (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 66). To maintain the other’s face means to recognize and respect the claim members of society make with respect to each other in interaction. The act of communicating such an acknowledgment is politeness.
Face (Brown and Levinson, 1987) is assumed to be of two types: positive face, or the want to be approved of by others, and negative face, or the want to be unimpeded by others. Acts that run contrary to these wants threaten the face of the speaker (e. g. apologies) or the hearer (e. g. requests). Certain acts of politeness, such as orders or requests, are intrinsically face-threatening (FTA) and thus require strategic redress.
Method of the Study
The aim of this study is to figure out the kind of politeness strategies used in stand-up comedy show in Indonesia by comedians.
The writer applies qualitative approach to interpret the data in transcript, because the process to get the data deals with video recording. According Merriam (1999) characterises qualitative research as understanding the meaning people have constructed in which the researcher is the primary instrument for data collection and analysis. It usually involves fieldwork as primarily employing an inductive research strategy focusing on process, meaning and understanding resulting in a richly descriptive product.
Population and Sample
The population of the data is the videos of stand-up comedy Indonesia in 2011 which are broadcasted by MetroTV and uploaded on YouTube site. There are so many videos on YouTube about stand-up comedy, especially for stand-up comedy which shown in Indonesia. Then the writer will only choose the top five videos which have highest rating and subscriber on YouTube, and the videos of comedians became a sample for this research.
The reason of choosing these samples is because the videos become the best in YouTube for stand-up comedy Indonesia which contains of comedian’s speeches and jokes who got the best response from the audience and the subscriber of their videos on YouTube.
Technique of Data Collection
The first thing that the researcher will do is collecting the data by downloading the videos that have been recorded by the official of stand-up comedy organizer from YouTube site. After downloading the videos the researcher will transcribe the speech of the comedians from the videos into text files.
After that the writer will observe directly to the aspect of politeness strategies used by comedians from that transcript. And then the data from transcript will be classified based on the theory of politeness strategy.
Technique of Data Analysis
After making the transcription of the data from videos of comedian, the researcher will identify it into several types of data based on the theory of politeness strategy; they are Bald On-Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off-Record as Brown and Levinson introduced in their theory.
And then writer tries to conduct an analysis based on classified data, why some of their speech classified as one of the types of politeness strategies theory. And then after that the writer will interpret why the comedians act like that in stand-up comedy show and why they speech. Eventually, the writer comes to the last step which is making a conclusion.
Scope and Limitation of the Study
This study focuses to observe the politeness strategies used by comedian in stand-up comedy stage, especially stand-up comedy Indonesia that showed up by MetroTv and then become famous in Indonesia.
The videos uploaded again by YouTube in internet, so subscriber can watch and give comments or subscribes the videos. This study narrows its discussion to the study of the way comedians use politeness strategy in stand-up comedy Indonesia in which audience expectation about comedy is become the main reason. It does not cover all discussion of politeness strategies occur in all contexts of males and females or every aspect in stand-up comedy.
Significance of the Study
The study has the aim to give the contribution to everyone who wants to get the knowledge about the research of politeness strategy, especially how the way a comedian performs to fulfil the audience expectation in comedy stage using politeness strategy, and also the communication between comics as a comedian and the audience in stand-up comedy show which delivered by monologues trough politeness strategies. The research is also enriching the knowledge about the uniqueness of stand-up comedy and some communication aspects of comics when telling a joke that supplies other researchers the reference and literary analysis.
References
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- What’s so funny? Joking among women. In S. Bremmer, N. Caskey, & B. moonwomon, Proceedings of the first Berkeley Women and Language Conference (pp. 135-151). California: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Lockyer, S. (2011).
- ‘It’s about expecting the unexpected’: Live stand-up comedy from the audiences’ perspective, Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 165-188. Merriam, S. (1998).
- Qualitative Research and Case Study: Applications in education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Schwarz, J. (2010).
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- The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy As Art, Business, and Life-Style. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wati, I. P. (2010).
