On November 13, 2025, Oliver Double (University of Kent) gave a keynote lecture on ‘Lenny Bruce’s Tattoo: The Body in Stand-Up Comedy’. In his talk, Double challenges the notion of stand-up comedy as a primarily verbal form and highlights the materiality of the body within the performance. How do comedians use their bodies as a defining feature of their onstage identity and as a tool for establishing a relationship with the audience? How does this enable them to address physical differences, disabilities, illnesses, and stereotyping, and which physical performance strategies do they employ? The keynote at KWI Essen was chaired by David Roesner (LMU Munich). It was part of the conference ‘Materiality Matters: Figurations of Comic Bodies and Things’, organized by the research network ‘Comic Literacies – Cultural Techniques of Comedy/the Comic’.
