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Content Provider (The Show)THE ULTIMATE CONTENT PROVIDER REVIEW

By Alan Bennett in London Review Of Books Posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Stewart Lee makes stand-up and almost moral pursuit., predicting an audience’s reaction (or lack of it), to his material in a way that makes the usual (and more popular) stand-ups seem crude and obvious. He’s fearless, undeterred by an audience’s failure to respond, even welcoming it so he can analyse it, tracking down the missing laugh until the audience laughs at itself. Erving Goffman (1) would have liked Stewart Lee, though the more accessible material put out by other (and more vapid) stand-ups derives in part from Goffman’s observation of small behaviour. Stewart Lee is the J.L. Austin (2) of what is now a rather sloppy profession

1. Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982) was a Canadian-American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some “the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century”. In 2007 he was listed by The Times Higher Education Guide as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.

2.John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts. Austin pointed out that we use language to do things as well as to assert things, and that the utterance of a statement like “I promise to do so-and-so” is best understood as doing something — making a promise — rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the name of one of his best-known works How to Do Things with Words. Austin, in providing his theory of speech acts, makes a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class of morphological sentence forms that function to do what they name. Austin’s work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.

Written by Alan Bennett in London Review Of Books on 5th December 2018. Filed Under: Content Provider (Show)
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