Contribution short abstract:

Stand-up comedy necessitates common sense in order to be intelligible. In Slovenia this entails Yugoslav past, which is actively forgotten, disputed, revised and reclaimed. This paper traces unwriting of this active forgetting of the common past and animosity in comedians’ performances.

Contribution long abstract:

In my ongoing research I chart how comedians have for the past two decades developed stand-up comedy within the existing Slovenian nation state. This widely popular genre's pronounced local characteristics are most notably language use, spatial configurations and peculiar political economy in the sphere of Slovenian cultural production. During my ethnographic fieldwork I observed the necessity of yet another crucial prerequisite for its functioning: common knowledge of participants in the interaction of stand-up comedy. To grasp existing commonalities, I employ Gramsci's notion of senso comune, a complex of historical sedimentation of world outlooks and positionings of the subject. Stand-up performances produce and reproduce its own infrastructural conditions, senso comune included. In Slovenia it is conditioned by and contextualized by Yugoslavia; material and symbolic presencing of the ruptured past. Namely, radical rupture with the previous system and dissolution of the socialist state is accompanied by the active concealment, revisionism or reclamation of the lived past in Yugoslavia. Yet this burdened and conflictual past has a potential to be unwritten in the social suspension of humorous discourse. This paper attempts to show how this is most prominently discernable in material of comedians who cannot avoid the Yugoslav part – migrants, war refugees and descendants of those who migrated to Slovenia from other republics within the previous state. Shared spaces, languages, memories and persisting artefacts from the past are accentuated in performed material not to consolidate ethnic identities and animosities but to unwrite them and leave room for something different to arise.