Comedian Ethnography

Tonight I engaged in a thought I've been having since I graduated college.  When I was trying new things, I started doing some comedy at open mics.  At the same time I was reading books like Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Black Like Me.  Both of these books are ethnographies.  The former is a book that a journalist wrote after attempting to live off of a minimum wage job for a year.  The latter is written by John Howard Griffin, a civil rights activist who discovered what it was like to live as a black man in the south during the early civil rights era by artificially darkening the color fo his skin.  Since I was already engaged in both activities, ethnographies and stand up comedy, I always wondered what it would be like to combine the two.  I decided that one day I would do an ethnography of comedy.  Today was my first foray into that venture.

I recently read Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds.  Authored by one of the premier sociologists, especially among ethnographers, Gary Alan Fine.  This ethnography covered the rituals and traditions of Pen and Paper Role Playing games, as told by a participant-observer. It is a very good book that I highly recommend.  From this book, I reverse engineered that questions that an ethnographer should ask.  In the future I'll write those questions, but today I wanted to write about my first attempt at conducting an ethnography.

I visited a bar near my house that has an open mic every Wednesday.  I wanted to see what an ethnography of comedians would be like.  I knew that other people have thought of this before, but that wouldn't matter.  Plus this would be my research.  It also might look good in my cover letters for grad schools. Ha.