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CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION
7.1 Overview of chapters and summary of findings
Chapter 1 discussed the notion of performance, which has different everyday and technical meanings. In everyday use, performance is 1 action that is believed to be
highly intentional. On the other hand, in technical use, performance is 2 artful ways of speaking Bauman, 1986; Hymes, 1974 or 3 doing, practicing, and achieving actions.
Whether doing is a conscious act does not matter, according to Butler 1990, who conceptualizes the notion of performativity as tied with iterability i.e., repeating and
changing conventional actions. This chapter also dealt with the notions of language ideology and code and claimed that
the research on Hawai‗i comedy that this dissertation presents could deepen our understanding of these sociolinguistic ideas.
In order to examine stylization or performativity in a highly playful genre, Chapter 2 took issue with the deep-rooted belief that comedians do things deliberately on
stage and exaggerate them for humorous effects. The dissertation does not deal with the issue of intentionality; audience members may think that the comedians do things
deliberately, but what is relevant to discursive analysis is when and how the comedians bring various categories into being and perform actions such as exaggeration. Based on
discursive analysis of live stand-up comedy shows, I demonstrated that the comedians draw on shared knowledge and indexicalities to stylize or performatively materialize
various culturally-specific membership categories such as Locals and non-Locals. Another important issue that I discussed in this chapter was transcription of Hawai‗i
Creole, which is a historically stigmatized language.
268 Chapter 3 examined participation frameworks or the way comedians stylize their
audiences into two distinctive categories: Local and non-Local. The comedians deployed membership categorization devices and stake inoculation to performatively construct
these different kinds of comedy audiences. Frank DeLima and Augie T called a Local audience into being by referring to membership categories and their category-bound
predicates as well as by reworking the nature of their jokes. These comedians also stylized non-Local audience members within the larger audience through membership
categorization devices and stake inoculation. Meanwhile, Bo Irvine stylized his audience as predominantly non-
Local, giving explicit instructions about social life in Hawai‗i to his mostly tourist audience. Stylizing their audiences, these comedians deployed semiotic
resources that include ethnicity, middlefamily names, and place names, all of which are indexicals ideologically mediated with historical and conventional meanings.
Chapter 4 continued to examine stylization, focusing on the use of Hawai‗i Creole popularly known as Pidgin and English in live stand-up comedy shows. I examined two
discursive contexts: 1 reported speech and constructed dialogues and 2 narration. Comedians such as Andy Bumatai and Bo Irvine demonstrated their linguistic ideology
by deploying Hawai‗i Creole in reported speech and constructed dialogues and by deploying English in narration. Hawai‗i Creole was often stylized as the Local voice, and
English as the non-Localhaole voice. In contrast to these comedians, Augie T and Timmy Mattos dissolved this contrastive linguistic ideology between Hawai‗i Creole and
English by deploying Hawai‗i Creole not only in reported speech and constructed dialogues b
ut in narration. In other words, Augie T and Mattos deployed Hawai‗i Creole
269 as the code of narration, thereby stylizing themselves and their audiences as Locals who
address and are addressed in that language. Chapter 5 investigated the use of other codes
in Hawai‗i comedy. These codes other than Hawai‗i Creole and English were deployed for mockery or linguistic and racial
stereotyping. I took a more explicitly sequential approach to these multivocal semiotic resources to illustrate how the comedians use them in performances-in-interaction. I
demonstrated that the comedians initiated a mockery sequence with ethnicization of their audience and deployed a stylized language, which was followed by laughter from the
audience. I also showed deviant cases in which ethnicization is absent or in which a mockery sequence is followed by delayed laughter, second laugh, or translation. Despite
these deviant cases, the comedians successfully deployed mockery as stylization because it is a powerful multivocal discursive tool that assures them laughter. However, Local
comedians were not the only ones to use language performatively. The audience members or focus group participants did the same thing as these comedians when they
were engaged in meta-performance talk. Chapter 6
, the last data analysis chapter, took a discursive approach to Hawai‗i comedy, but it dealt with reception or meta-
performance of Hawai‗i comedy, based on interview and focus group data. I investigated the construction of interpretive frames to
illustrate the cultural specificity of Hawai‗i comedy. Shared cultural knowledge is
required to interpret Hawai‗i comedy, and such knowledge is inevitably indexical and intertextual. I demonstrated the local production of such intertextual knowledge in an
explicitly interactional context. Focus group participants constructed socio-dramaturgical characters such as Locals, for instance, by stylizing Barack Obama as Local while
270 accounting for who would or would not be able to understand Hawai‗i comedy. In
contrast to th is, ―white washed‖ emerged as a category-bound attribute of being non-
Local. This ideological contrast between Local and non-Local became even clearer when the focus group participants discussed different kinds of multivocal humor. The
participants also st ylized Hawai‗i comedy as affective comedy, talking about the cultural
specificity of Hawai‗i comedy and orienting to Local normativity. The comedians also generated meta-
performance talk to treat being Local as ‗natural,‘ ‗fixed,‘ or ‗expected.‘ In other words, both the focus group participants and the comedians constructed who
non- Locals are by talking about how Locals would interpret Hawai‗i comedy.
7.2 Implications of the study