“Then we’re just two dudes driving around”

Abstract

App-mediated ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft represent a relatively new chronotope that shapes participants’ identities and relationships through specific space and time configurations. Ridesharing services such as these blur the boundaries between what is public/private, familiar/unfamiliar, and interactional/transactional, resulting in chronotopically specific scenarios that are often humorously exploited by stand-up comedians in their routines. In this paper, we analyze several short video clips of performances posted by comedians on TikTok comprising narratives about Uber/Lyft experiences from the perspective of the ridesharing passenger. Our findings show that in these comedic performances the ridesharing chronotope is characterized by various forms of relational ambiguity and that this relational ambiguity structures interactional frames for its participants. Through their comedic artistry, comedians animate the diverse voices engaged in these types of encounters, shedding light on variable norms and ideologies underlying ridesharing interactions. This study addresses a novel context and an as-yet unexplored topic: the language used by stand-up comedians who make their performances available to audiences through their social media accounts. Methodologically, the affordances of TikTok facilitate the identification of topically similar comedic content, resulting in a topic-based, rather than a performer-driven, analysis.