Laughing at Ourselves: Music and Identity in Comedic Performance

Standup comedy actively performs and engages with constructions of self and social identity, especially in terms of ethnic difference and the negotiation of American race relations. Musical comedy, wherein standup comedians perform song onstage, represents one facet of this expression that configures musical texts and expectations in the service of cultural observation and critique. Bo Burnham and Reggie Watts characterize two disparate approaches to the practice based on their aesthetic tastes, existential anxieties, and racial experiences. The two present their respective identities onstage in relation to a changing American political landscape of the early 21st century that has seen widespread social anxiety about gender and race, particularly. I argue that by presenting musically diverse and absurd representations of self, Burnham and Watts act out different types of hybridity, wherein they must confront their internal contradictions and respond either by reconciling them into a cohesive identity, or breaking down under the weight of the inconsistencies.

I first investigate Bo Burnham and his position as a white male within an entertainment industry that he despises because of its consumerist manipulations. I apply the work of Timothy Taylor on the connection between music and capitalism to explicate how the two interact in Burnham’s act, as well as that of Simon Frith and Paul Willis for how his popular performance serves to construct and signify identity. He performs genre parody that exposes the inauthenticity of massmediated cultural identities, as well as musical skits where he performs his own divergent identity and struggles for consistency. Secondly, I consider Reggie Watts as he mediates a hybridized racial identity through pastiche and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s concept of Signifyin’ on previous black musical texts. Based on Paul Gilroy’s notions of the Black Atlantic, double consciousness, and hybridity, I show that Watts constructs a unified identity that embraces the absurdity of his self-performance, and racial categorization in particular. Overall, my examination of these two performers argues for more study of musical comedy as a mediator of identity and hybridity.