From Engagement to Stance Shifting: A Functional Linguistic Account of Power Deconstruction in Workplace-themed Stand-up Comedy

Abstract

This study explores how Chinese workplace-themed stand-up comedians employ linguistic resources to negotiate stance and subtly engage with institutional power through humor. Drawing on a revised Engagement framework within Appraisal Theory, the analysis focuses on dialogic positioning in routines that combine personal narrative, social commentary, and audience interaction. The corpus consists of 21 performance segments from King of Comedy: Stand-up Season, featuring comedians from diverse occupational backgrounds. A tentative contribution is the identification of Institutional Recontextualization as a potential genre-specific engagement resource, which involves the ironic redeployment of authoritative or bureaucratic discourse to create alternative evaluative frames. The findings suggest that performers combine Institutional Recontextualization with conventional engagement strategies to enact stance shifts in workplace-themed stand-up comedy. Four recurrent patterns were observed in the data: Identity Reconstruction, Value Inversion, Responsibility Displacement, and Collective Alignment, which help comedians negotiate speaker roles and engage audiences in implicit critiques of workplace hierarchies. Although based on a limited dataset, the findings suggest that comedians achieve subtle critiques of workplace power by deploying engagement resources to shift stance. It further suggests that moderated humor and reflective stance-taking may enhance student engagement and wellbeing in educational contexts.