Beyond the Punchline: Mythic Involution as Recursive Futural Orientation among Stand Up Comics in New York City

What happens to a progressive temporal orientation when the future is cancelled out? How might social life be invested with a futural drive but without an end-point to guide anticipatory actions? In this article, I introduce the idea of mythic involution – the internal complication of time – as a way of capturing a form of immediate temporal orientation, which recursively bounces off an end-point on a linear scale in order to open up and reflect on the paradoxes of its own progressive trajectory. The argument will be that, in some instances, the future cancels itself out in order for a temporal orientation of forward moving linear progression to momentarily scaffold a different kind of recursive affective structure. I discuss mythic involution in relation to an ethnographic analysis of the narrative aesthetics of stand-up comedy among comics in New York City. As I will argue, stand-up comedy bits can fruitfully be considered as contemporary myths, which offer a narrative armature for contemplating the contradictions and incongruities of social life. In myths as well as in stand-up comedy, a futural orientation is turned against itself in order to allow for the paradoxes of progressive linearity to play themselves out.