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Laughing behind bars: How stand-up comedy by people with lived experience of incarceration confronts and sustains stigma and marginalization

Abstract Stand-up comedians provide insight into human positionalities, offer poignant social critiques, and can bring sensitive and uncomfortable subjects to the forefront of public discourse, including discussions around mental illness. Historically, however, the industry has relied on the stigmatization and marginalization of Others. Jokes about criminality, arrests, and incarceration are widespread across stand-up and other entertainment mediums, though often narrowly focused on individual behavior; these jokes fail to account for the known correlates of crime, which include economic vulnerability, un- and under-employment, and mental illness. More often than not, this humour fails to account for underlying socio-political, historical, and structural forces linked to carceral inequities, such as heteropatriarchy, Eurocentrism, and the historic and ongoing impacts of colonialism, dispossession, and slavery on health, social and criminal justice inequities, including mental health. In this context, comedians with lived experience of incarceration offer unique perspectives into the prison industrial complex and the impacts of incarceration on mental health and wellbeing. In this paper, we explore the work of comedians with lived experience of incarceration, highlighting the ways that comedy provides opportunities to confront pervasive stereotypes around incarceration and mental illness, while industry norms continue to sustain stigma, homophobia, and neoliberalism, and obscure systemic forces linked to carceral inequities.