When Joseph Richards first performed stand-up for a final as an undergraduate student at Georgia College and State University, they said their jokes were awful, but it sparked their love for comedy.
On Thursday and Friday, they will put on their 30 minute original interactive stand-up show “Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Comic Body on Stage” at the Media Art Space on Franklin Street.
“If you want to see a slightly unplanned, interactive exploration of how many bodies are onstage in a stand-up show at one time, this is the show,” Richards said.
Richards is now a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communications at UNC, writing their dissertation on contemporary stand-up comedy from 2013-2023 from a performance studies focus.
They are interested in researching stand-up as an embodied form, rather than just the content of the jokes, and they said their upcoming show will be an exploration of that idea.
“If I tell a story onstage as a comedian — let’s say I talk about my mom or my brother — all of a sudden, I’ve brought them onstage whether or not they’re in the audience,” Richards said. “I’ve brought them — I’ve started shaping them in front of you."
Richards said they began to fully flesh out the idea for “Whose Life is it Anyway” when they were approached by artist-in-residence and teaching professor Joseph Megel, who asked if they had any ideas for a show.
Megel, who has worked with Richards in the classroom and on the stage for the past two years, described Richards as interested in looking at the power of stand-up as it relates to identity.
“What I like about their work is they explore — you know, they explore humor, but they explore the humor through the lens of both acceptance of self and acceptance of others and identity politics, but through humor as a way of engaging with it,” he said.
