Soy Bomb - Experimental Comedy

Experimental Comedy

Much of Portnoy’s work is also framed by what he calls Experimental Comedy, or “the injection of the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the choreographic, the theoretical, the improbable, the generative, the post-rhythmic, the turbo-stupid, etc., into the frame of stand-up." This has manifested in the operatic stand-up routine of The K Sound (2006), Taipei Women’s Experimental Comedy Club (2010), and Script Opposition in Late-Model Carrot Jokes (2011), a project that investigated the “carrot joke,” a term used in cognitive linguistics to describe a poem-like joke with a high degree of ambiguity, blunt omissions of information and logical faults and inconsistencies. In carrot jokes “incongruities are rarely resolved and just pile on top of each other…Since the ground or ‘script’ is always shifting, the listener keeps trying to determine whether there is an overall story that could explain what the hell is going on.”