Marc Mierowsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 6334518 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Mierowsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Mierowsky |
| SIGNATURE | MIEROWSKY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1285-4890 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings…
The Style of Defoe’s Correspondence
This chapter examines Daniel Defoe’s use of letters, both within printed works that adopt an epistolary format such as The Complete English Tradesman (1725–7) and his personal correspondence with politicians and other associates. The chapter reveals Defoe’s cultivation of what he understood to be a ‘plain’ prose style as a literary and ethical ideal. It thus explores Defoe’s self-fashioning as a plain-dealer in his letters by setting his epistola…
Daniel Defoe on Naturalization
This essay explores the connection in Daniel Defoe’s writing between naturalization as a civic concept and naturalization as an epistemological or literary-critical process. For Defoe, the incorporation of new subjects was a moral project that entailed the literary interpellation of a more productive, tolerant and empowered populace. A history of his efforts to encourage immigration by broadening access to legal citizenship provides, then, not ju…
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an alternative history of stand-up
In this article, we use a critical analysis of the first season of the Amazon 2017-9 series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as the starting point to examine its central proposition: that a female Lenny Bruce could have existed at that particular time and place in comedy history. We furnish contextual analysis, and survey some routines depicted in the show in terms of both form and content, examining the titular Mrs. Maisel against female comics of her …
How to do things with jokes
How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other…
Public conscience of ‘the chosen people’
We locate the comedian Sarah Silverman's career trajectory within the rich tradition of Jewish public intellectuals in America, particularly those who have used comedy as their vehicle. We show that Silverman is in many ways the most current inheritor of the mantle of Lenny Bruce, not only in the sharpness of her observations and the unerring pitch of her comedy but also because of her perfect timing in the political zeitgeist. We argue that Silv…
Crowd control in restoration tragedy
This article traces the development of heroic drama into a more affective mode of tragedy. Using contemporary reappraisals of Aristotelian catharsis as an optic for this generic development, it shows that the emotions involved in the love plots and melodramatic endings that distinguished affective tragedy from its forebears were thought to have a normative ethical content as well as a purgative effect. This view poses a challenge to the accepted …
Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy
We examine the notion of obscenity in relation to constructions of Jewish sexuality in stand-up. Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up has been defined by extreme licence. Acknowledging that stand-up is reliant on the construction of performer identity, we examine the routines of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female Jewish contemporaries of Bruce, in contrast to Bruce, and show that Bruce used his construction of Jewish identity as a scourge to beat a wi…
How to do things with jokes
How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other…
Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy
We examine the notion of obscenity in relation to constructions of Jewish sexuality in stand-up. Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up has been defined by extreme licence. Acknowledging that stand-up is reliant on the construction of performer identity, we examine the routines of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female Jewish contemporaries of Bruce, in contrast to Bruce, and show that Bruce used his construction of Jewish identity as a scourge to beat a wi…
Daniel Defoe on Naturalization
This essay explores the connection in Daniel Defoe’s writing between naturalization as a civic concept and naturalization as an epistemological or literary-critical process. For Defoe, the incorporation of new subjects was a moral project that entailed the literary interpellation of a more productive, tolerant and empowered populace. A history of his efforts to encourage immigration by broadening access to legal citizenship provides, then, not ju…
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an alternative history of stand-up
In this article, we use a critical analysis of the first season of the Amazon 2017-9 series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as the starting point to examine its central proposition: that a female Lenny Bruce could have existed at that particular time and place in comedy history. We furnish contextual analysis, and survey some routines depicted in the show in terms of both form and content, examining the titular Mrs. Maisel against female comics of her …
Crowd control in restoration tragedy
This article traces the development of heroic drama into a more affective mode of tragedy. Using contemporary reappraisals of Aristotelian catharsis as an optic for this generic development, it shows that the emotions involved in the love plots and melodramatic endings that distinguished affective tragedy from its forebears were thought to have a normative ethical content as well as a purgative effect. This view poses a challenge to the accepted …
Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy
We examine the notion of obscenity in relation to constructions of Jewish sexuality in stand-up. Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up has been defined by extreme licence. Acknowledging that stand-up is reliant on the construction of performer identity, we examine the routines of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female Jewish contemporaries of Bruce, in contrast to Bruce, and show that Bruce used his construction of Jewish identity as a scourge to beat a wi…
How to do things with jokes
How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other…
Public conscience of ‘the chosen people’
We locate the comedian Sarah Silverman's career trajectory within the rich tradition of Jewish public intellectuals in America, particularly those who have used comedy as their vehicle. We show that Silverman is in many ways the most current inheritor of the mantle of Lenny Bruce, not only in the sharpness of her observations and the unerring pitch of her comedy but also because of her perfect timing in the political zeitgeist. We argue that Silv…
Crowd control in restoration tragedy
This article traces the development of heroic drama into a more affective mode of tragedy. Using contemporary reappraisals of Aristotelian catharsis as an optic for this generic development, it shows that the emotions involved in the love plots and melodramatic endings that distinguished affective tragedy from its forebears were thought to have a normative ethical content as well as a purgative effect. This view poses a challenge to the accepted …
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an alternative history of stand-up
In this article, we use a critical analysis of the first season of the Amazon 2017-9 series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as the starting point to examine its central proposition: that a female Lenny Bruce could have existed at that particular time and place in comedy history. We furnish contextual analysis, and survey some routines depicted in the show in terms of both form and content, examining the titular Mrs. Maisel against female comics of her …
Daniel Defoe on Naturalization
This essay explores the connection in Daniel Defoe’s writing between naturalization as a civic concept and naturalization as an epistemological or literary-critical process. For Defoe, the incorporation of new subjects was a moral project that entailed the literary interpellation of a more productive, tolerant and empowered populace. A history of his efforts to encourage immigration by broadening access to legal citizenship provides, then, not ju…
The Style of Defoe’s Correspondence
This chapter examines Daniel Defoe’s use of letters, both within printed works that adopt an epistolary format such as The Complete English Tradesman (1725–7) and his personal correspondence with politicians and other associates. The chapter reveals Defoe’s cultivation of what he understood to be a ‘plain’ prose style as a literary and ethical ideal. It thus explores Defoe’s self-fashioning as a plain-dealer in his letters by setting his epistola…
The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings…
Art (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Comedy (4 works)