The
Rubberbandits are a comedy duo from Limerick in Ireland
whose particular brand of satirical and musical comedy is based on the
inner-city urban identity of Limerick, a city
with a national reputation for social disadvantage and criminal gangs. While
their comedy is also based on their appropriation and adaptation of artefacts
from other urban communities of practice (cf. Wenger, 1998) – most notably
their localisation of rap and hip hop genres to the context of Limerick city in
their music – the mainstay of the humour invoked is in the simultaneous
lampooning and glorification of the urban culture it is based on.
One of the
fundamental questions in our research is how we can connect the large frame of
sociolinguistic theory with empirical data. In this paper, we explore to what
extent the qualitative and quantitative methodologies associated with
corpus-based discourse analysis can be blended with the larger frame of contemporary
sociolinguistic theory, particularly the work of e.g. Coupland (2007) in
relation to the sociolinguistics of performance, and Agha’s concept of
enregisterment (e.g. 2003). We use a corpus of The Rubberbandits’ Guides to…(McCarthy, 2012), a series of
inserts for the RTÉ programme Republic of
Telly in our analysis, as well using a multimodal approach to identifying
stylisation cues in the performance.