Types of Meaning in Stand-Up Comedy: A Semantic Analysis of Pauline Yasuda’s “I Love Being Asian”
Keywords:
laugh after dark, leech, linguistic analysis, Pauline Yasuda, semantics, stand-up comedy, types of meaningAbstract
This study explores Geoffrey Leech’s (1981) seven types of meaning within the context of stand-up comedy. The analysis focuses on Pauline Yasuda’s performance entitled "I Love Being Asian", featured in the YouTube series "Laugh After Dark". The research aims to identify and describe the presence of conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflected, collocative, and thematic meanings in Yasuda’s language. Using a qualitative descriptive method, data were collected through video observation, transcription, and classification of utterances based on Leech’s semantic framework. The findings reveal that stand-up comedy is a powerful medium for layered expression, where humor serves as a vehicle for conveying personal experience, cultural identity, and social commentary. Linguistic analysis of comedy not only enhances understanding of language in performance, but also contributes to broader conversations on identity, culture, and communication in contemporary media.
References
Baguley, D. (2008). Naturalist fiction: The entropic vision. Cambridge University Press.
Baumgartner, J. C., & Lockerbie, B. (2018). Maybe it is more than a joke: Satire, mobilization, and political participation. Social Science Quarterly, 99(3), 1060–1074. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12501
Berger, A. A. (1997). The art of comedy writing. Transaction Publishers.
Butler, N., & Stoyanova Russell, D. (2018). No funny business: Precarious work and emotional labour in stand-up comedy. Human Relations, 71(12), 1666–1686. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726718758880
Double, O. (2014). Getting the joke: The inner workings of stand-up comedy (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Dylewski, R. (2021). Dissecting the word: The use of the lexeme shit in selected performances of comedian Dave Chappelle’s stand-up routine. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 56(s1), 511–550. https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2021-0007
Firda, I. N., Hidayat, D. N., Alek, & Nurhalimah. (2021). An analysis of flouting maxim in a talk show program in Indonesia. Eduvelop: Journal of English Education and Development, 4(2), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.31605/eduvelop.v4i2.887
Hasan, M. K., Rahman, W., Zadeh, A., Zhong, J., Tanveer, M. I., Morency, L.-P., & Hoque, M. E. (2019). UR-FUNNY: A multimodal language dataset for understanding humor. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.06618. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06618
Hurford, J. R., Heasley, B., & Smith, M. B. (2007). Semantics: A coursebook (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU Press.
Kembara, G., & Kennedy, J. (2021). Cross-cultural communication in YouTube ads. Bureaucracy Journal: Indonesia Journal of Law and Social-Political Governance, 1(2), 126–134. https://doi.org/10.53363/bureau.v1i2.127
Larson, M. L. (1984). Meaning-based translation: A guide to cross-language equivalence. University Press of America.
Leech, G. N. (1981). Semantics: The study of meaning (2nd ed.). Penguin Books.
Mintz, L. E. (1985). Standup comedy as social and cultural mediation. American Quarterly, 37(1), 71–80.
Morreall, J. (2009). Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humor. Wiley-Blackwell.
Omar, Y. (2018). The challenges of denotative and connotative meaning for second language learners. University of Benghazi. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327656649
Putra, I. G. P. M., Candra, K. D. P., & Juniartha, I. W. (2022). The meaning of signs in Wi-Fi internet advertisement. Journal of Humanities, Social Science, Public Administration and Management, 2(2), 137–141. https://doi.org/10.51715/husocpument.v2i2.99
Saeed, J. I. (1997). Semantics (1st ed.). Blackwell Publishing.
Schlicke, P. (1999). Dickens and popular entertainment. Routledge.
Talooki, R. A. (2017). Let me tell you what it means: Reading beyond humor in selected Iranian-American memoirs, stand-up comedy, and film in the post-9/11 era (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Western Ontario. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4403
Vásquez, C., & Aslan, E. (2021). “Cats be outside, how about meow”: Multimodal humor and creativity in an internet meme. Journal of Pragmatics, 171, 101–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.10.006
Williams, R. (2005). Culture and society: 1780–1950. Columbia University Press.
Zola, É. (1992). The experimental novel and other essays. Haskell House Publishers.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 I Kadek Jeffry Sidmewa, Ni Wayan Kasni, Radha Andhra Swari
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
